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Half full or half empty?
(by Tim Woodcock - August 06, 2008)
The problems of the School District of University City have been gnawing away at the wider community for years, making young families think twice about settling in the city and leaving more established families asking what has happened to the district over the years.
The problems are not as deeply embedded as those within the St. Louis public schools, whose recent attempts at reform seem to have backfired as often as they have succeeded. And although the district’s academic scores have slipped over the years, it has maintained full accreditation, in contrast to neighboring Wellston, which performed so poorly that in 2005 it became the first Missouri district to be taken over by the state.
There are “pockets of excellence” within the 3,200-student school district, but in many regards the district is underperforming, said Superintendent Joylynn Wilson in a recent sit-down interview with the Word. “We have to be honest about where we are,” she said
To that end, the district has organized a six-month series of meetings called Destination U. City Schools. The idea is to engage with the public — not just the families of students — so that the community understands the context for difficult decisions that the school board and administrators will face in the next few years.
The financial picture is bleak: the district is running a $1.53 million deficit this year. That’s tolerable for the moment because the district has money in reserve, but if the pattern was to continue for another two or three years, the district would be “financially strained,” Wilson said. The remedies might include school closures, layoffs or tax increases. “There [are] a lot of options,” she said.
Whatever decisions are taken they should be student-centered and should leave the district on a financially sound footing, Wilson said.
Wilson said that families whose children have attended the schools tend to be more sympathetic toward the school district, but engaging people who have an ingrained negative perception of the district can be a battle. But “this will change if people join with us,” she said.
The fate of the city and its schools are intertwined, she argued. “So goes the school district, so goes the city; so goes the city, so goes the school district,” she said.
The public meetings are a way to work toward a series of recommendations that will have broad support from the community and will guide the district’s Board of Education, said David Harris, co-chair of Destination U. City Schools. Whichever direction the discussion takes, there is a need for “community buy-in,” he said.
Perhaps another way of putting it is that by raising touchy subjects now, it will help diffuse controversy later.
The process
At the first of the Destination U. City Schools meetings, turnout was high — more than 200 people attended the first meeting on July 15, causing an overflow in the corridor outside the main hall of Barbara C. Jordan Elementary — and a further 100 people attended a second meeting on July 19. What’s more, the meeting attendance represented the racial diversity that the community prides itself on.
In her opening remarks, Wilson said that the turnout was encouraging and was a sign that the community wants to help the district turn itself around.
The first meeting consisted of a formal presentation that offered an overview of the school district’s challenges, followed by small-group discussion aimed at forming a consensus about how best to attack some of the district’s problems. This format will be followed in subsequent meetings in which attendees take a closer look at academic achievement, family and community involvement, facilities and financial issues.
The meetings are not open forums or debates, attendees were told at the start of the meeting, but they are “work sessions that allow for the free exchange of ideas.”
Academics
It soon became clear that Wilson was sincere when she said the presentations would not sugarcoat the reality of the situation. Attendees were presented with a barrage of facts about the schools’ performance.
• Enrollment has plunged in the last decade. Currently there are 3,269 students enrolled; in 1998 the figure was 4,416. This pattern of decline is common to inner-ring suburbs such as University City, administrators said, and it will be difficult to reverse.
• There is a marked difference in the academic performance of students who receive free or reduced lunch — a widely used marker of poverty — and those who don’t. This is true at every grade level. About 60 percent of students are enrolled in the free or reduced lunch program, indicating that the school population is much poorer than the community as whole.
• The district has been able to keep class sizes small, but this will become more difficult in future years because of the district’s financial situation.
• The district has been able to make strides in improving elementary schools, but this has been at the expense of the middle and high schools.
• The supplemental programs within the district are more often ones designed to help students catch up rather than ones that allow them to accelerate ahead.
• The graduation rate last year was 76.7 percent, compared to the 85.8 percent statewide.
There are, of course, bright spots: The high school averages about 10 National Merit and National Achievement scholars each year and regularly sends students on to the best universities in the country.
Both the middle school and the high school have an unusually wide choice of courses, with offerings that include Latin and Chinese. And although it is not something that shows up in statistics, the school district has produced a long line of professional artists and jazz musicians.
Asked to characterize the district, Wilson called it “a diamond in the rough.”
Performance indicators
In the alphabet soup of school administration, there are two acronyms that hold the key to understanding how a district is performing: MSIP and APR. These stand for the Missouri School Improvement Program and the Annual Performance Report.
According to the normal five-year review cycle, University City would next undergo a MSIP review in March 2010, but the district, in an effort to better understand where it should be directing its energy, has asked for its review to be bumped up to this November.
Robert Taylor, an area supervisor for the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, said it is “not uncommon” for districts to do this. It’s a sign that the district wants to get help addressing problems when it needs to, rather than waiting until after the fact, he said.
Last year the district met seven out of 14 APR standards, and if the MSIP review was carried out now, the district would receive “provisional accreditation,” joining only nine others in that category. As of July 1, there are 523 public-school districts in Missouri. Nine are provisionally accredited; two are unaccredited; one has interim accreditation; the rest are accredited.
Fortunately for the district, it has one further opportunity to prevent the potential slide into the category of provisionally accredited: the compilation of 2007-08 APR figures that will be available to school districts in October and made public in November.
Although at the threshold of three levels of accreditation, APR and MSIP scores can be a life-and-death issue for a school district, most of the time it’s not, Taylor said. “It’s just feedback,” he said. But it could be crucial feedback that allows the district to get on the right course.
Taylor said one of the frustrations of his job is that districts often identify a problem — say, poor attendance levels — and draw up plans, but then they don’t implement them, or implement them but do not put the tools in place to evaluate them properly.
Taylor said he hopes University City can find a way to use the perspective offered by the state’s analysis to its advantage.
Financial trends
Even if the district can identify where its greatest problems are, finding the resources to solve them is another matter.
School districts have limited leeway in terms of how they use their resources, said Scott Hafertepe, the district’s chief financial officer, during a presentation at the July 15 meeting.
“School districts are people organizations,” and as such their greatest assets are their employees, and their greatest costs are salaries and benefits, Hafertepe said. This accounts for 80 percent of the district’s $40 million annual budget.
One of the biggest challenges over the coming years is going to be attracting and retaining teachers, said Judy Sclair, assistant superintendent of human resources. Teacher salaries in University City are higher than the state average but “significantly below” the average in the metro area, she said. To continue to employ high-quality teachers the district’s pay scale must remain competitive.
Projecting ahead three years, a $1.5 million annual deficit could grow to $3.5 million — beyond what the district’s rainy-day fund could tolerate — and this is assuming that no new positions are created, salary levels rise only at the rate of inflation and enrollment numbers settle at the current level.
Any future plans for the district will have to include a major financial component, Hafertepe said.
The next community work session is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Aug. 13 at Brittany Woods Middle School.
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