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Summer assignment
(by Rebecca S. Rivas & Tim Woodcock - June 04, 2008)
Richard Gaines, one of the three people appointed last year to oversee St. Louis Public Schools, has quite a bit of summer homework.
He and his two colleagues, Rick Sullivan and Melanie Adams, must find a superintendent for the district, balance a budget with a projected $30 million deficit and solidify a strategic plan that will lead the district to success.
And those are just summer projects.
Once the 2008-2009 school year starts, the three members of the Special Administrative Board have to make sure their plans work toward regaining the 12 out of 14 accreditation points that the district lacks, points that aren’t easy to earn.
“We have some of the hardest state standards in the country,” Gaines said, referring to the Missouri School Improvement Program’s standards, “and I don’t think many people understand that.”
Another interim
The most important thing the SAB members will do in their next three years of service is select the superintendent, said William Danforth, former Washington University chancellor and co-chair of the special advisory committee for the district. In a 2006 report, Danforth’s committee recommended that the state form a special administrative board as an emergency measure. It argued that the elected school board could not make the necessary improvements in the district because of its constant public disputes. The elected board continues to exist, although with no real control over the day-to-day running of the schools.
On May 15, Superintendent Diana Bourisaw, who has been serving as an interim for about two years, submitted her resignation letter to the appointed board. The board told her in March that they had decided to search for a superintendent who could lead the district for a minimum of three years. Gaines said Bourisaw was welcome to apply for the position along with other candidates, but she declined.
John Wright, a veteran educator well known locally who was most recently the interim superintendent in the Normandy School District, will take Bourisaw’s place until the SAB members complete the selection process, said Sullivan, chief executive officer of the board.
“Contracting with a new interim at this time ensures that there will be no interruption in that office during the very critical back-to-school planning efforts,” Sullivan said.
Crunching the numbers
The second major task for the three SAB members is to address the district’s growing financial distress.
In 2003-04, when William Roberti of the corporate turn-around firm Alvarez & Marsal was in charge of the district, 16 schools were closed for financial reasons. This action was necessary because of the large number of schools that were operating below capacity, having stayed open over the years as the neighborhoods that they served lost population. Last year, under the SAB, the district decided that four more schools will have to close, but Gaines said the figure could easily have been 15, and the moderate approach taken this year means there will certainly be more closures in the years to come.
Gaines said Roberti did “an excellent job” in that “he did exactly what the board told him to do,” although the Alvarez & Marsal approach showed insensitivity when it launched community forums only after the plan to close specific schools was announced.
Gaines said he will not shy away from making similarly tough decisions, but he is aware of the heartbreak a school closure can bring. As a high school student at Vashon — situated where Harris-Stowe State University is now — he was told the school would be shut down. “I cried and boo-hooed like crazy,” and he resented the power of those making the decision, he said. But then as a member of the elected school board in the 1980s, he found himself voting to close Cleveland as a regular high school (it later opened as an ROTC school), and now as a member of the special administrative board he is wrestling with the same issues again.Despite the historical value and community attachment to school buildings, the district cannot afford to keep under-capacity schools open, he said. In 1980, the district had 104 buildings operating for 70,000 students. This year, there are 93 buildings for 28,000 students.
The average cost of keeping a school building open is $400,000, regardless of how fully it is used.
The challenge the district faces, Gaines said, is that it never knows how many students will enroll each year. It is a problem that every school district faces, but one that is made worse because of the city’s unusually transient population.
The student population has been on a continual decline for the past decade. The board is trying to balance the need to cut back by selling excess properties with the need to keep some buildings in “mothballs” and ready to be reopened if necessary.
The increasing number of students who are enrolling in charter schools also makes projections difficult. Gaines said the district takes into account the number of empty seats in the charter schools to figure how many students could possibly leave the district next year. The recent collapse of the northside charter school Can! Academy illustrates how the district sometimes has to absorb new students with little warning.
The district has lost about 8,000 students to charter schools, taking with them $15 million in annual funds. In other districts throughout the country, charter schools are part of the main public school district, which makes financial planning easier for these districts, Gaines said.
The board is looking at a variety of ideas to cut costs, such as eliminating ineffective programs and cutting staff. The board members are also looking at ways to generate money, such as reinstating an in-house food service, which generated between $3 million and $4 million a year in the past, Gaines said.
The board has a July 1 deadline to turn in a budget to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. But, Gaines doesn’t think that the board will meet that date.
“Because we were asked to intervene, I say that we tell the state that we aren’t prepared to generate a budget by July 1 because we are still formulating a plan,” he said. The board will most likely ask for an extension of three to four months, he said.
Strategic plan
When the SAB board members were appointed in June last year, after the state deemed the district unaccredited — rather than provisionally accredited, its previous status — Bourisaw presented the members with a comprehensive plan for improving the district. A California firm designed the one-year plan at a cost of $250,000, Gaines said.
Although the elected school board supported the plan, the SAB voted not to implement it. Gaines said the goals were too modest, and it wouldn’t challenge the staff or students sufficiently. It was the first time that all three SAB members agreed on an issue, Gaines said.
The SAB wanted a strategic plan that involved the community and prioritized the improvements that the entire district felt were important, he said. The board held two public summits in April, where the 1,500 attendees and volunteers addressed 30 of the district’s toughest issues. The topics that drew the most concern from attendees were teacher training and hiring, use of facilities and security.
This summer the board will hire a consulting firm to look at the responses from both community surveys and the summit to design a plan for the next five to 10 years that will prioritize the implementations, Gaines said. With a stronger sense of direction, he said, the board could create a budget more efficiently.
The board will also focus on “inviting the community back into the district in a positive way.”
Gaines knew the SAB position would be hard work, he said, and he was hesitant to take it at first. “We meddle more than a regular board,” he said. “As an administrative board, that’s our function.”
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