By Antonio D. French
Filed Thursday, November 10 at 8:33 AM
by Peter Downs
November 9, 2005 -- The regular monthly meeting of the St. Louis Board of Education, originally scheduled for Wednesday, was moved to Tuesday on a day's notice. Here are the highlights:
>> In-School Suspension: St. Louis Public Schools' Superintendent Creg Williams announced that the long awaited In-School Suspension Program began this week, on Monday, November 7, at eight high schools, all the middle schools, and 19 elementary schools. Teachers may refer a student for in-school suspension, but principals make the decision.
The in-school suspension monitors are mostly teaching assistants, who got a couple of days training and a raise in salary to $21,000 a year.
>> Is it greater than or less than? In the continuing saga of the school district's financial crisis, Chief Financial Officer Harry Rich reported that the school district is getting less money from the state than his office had projected, because enrollment is less than the district had projected. Williams. however, has been telling everyone who will listen that the reason the school district did not have text books for every student in the first month of school was because 1,500 more students enrolled this year than the district had projected. School board member Veronica O'Brien caught the contradiction and asked Rich if he meant to say there were fewer students enrolled in the district this year than last year. No, he explained, there were fewer students enrolled than the district had projected. It looks like Williams and Rich cannot agree on the answer to a simple greater than or less than problem. Maybe Williams should send out an emergency request for sixth grade math teachers to go down to 801 and check papers.
>> O'Brien asked the board to support a proposal that would be made to the city's tax increment financing (TIF) commission to change the guidelines for TIF agreements with developers to require that half of the residential property taxes go to the schools, instead of letting developers keep it all. The board did not take any action on it this month.
>> What's old is new: Williams announced a "new" plan to raise ACT scores in the district and regain some points on the annual performance review. The district will urge students to take the test in their junior year as well as their senior year, it will integrate test-taking skills into the curriculum, and teachers and counselors will be trained to identify students with the potential to score at or above the national average. As anyone familiar with the school district knows, that is not a new plan. Charlene Jones' office oversaw the same plan, and more, when Cleveland Hammonds was superintendent, and he only left in June 2003.
ACT scores have become a big issue because the percent of students scoring at or above the national average has fallen more than 30% since Hammonds left, even though the total number of students taking the test also dropped. That cost St. Louis schools points on the state's annual performance review. The district's score on the annual performance review has plummeted from 64 to 39 in only two years. If the school district were up for accreditation it would be unaccredited.
School board member Bill Purdy stressed how serious the situation is, and pointed out that the district has to work on more than just ACT scores to gain accreditation when it is up for review in 2008.
>> The most contentious issue at the meeting was the election of a new school board representative on the school district's pension board. School board president Darnetta Clinkscale wanted to reappoint Paulette McKinney. Purdy wanted to nominate Veronica O'Brien. Darnetta insisted that the board vote McKinney's nomination up or down instead of having an election between the two. McKinney's nomination got only 3 "yes" votes out of six votes, however, since school board member Flint Fowler abstained. Purdy pointed out that under Roberts Rules of Order the motion to appoint McKinney failed, because it needed a majority of the board members present. Clinkscale ruled that McKinney was elected anyway.
>> We're trying to save you: In the public comment period at the start of the meeting, Mary Armstrong, president of the St. Louis Teachers and School-Related Personnel Union, explained to Williams that no one wanted him to fail, because failure would be too damaging to the 35,000 children in the school district, but they aren't going to stand aside and let him fail, either. They criticize or oppose certain plans that they know are wrong in order to prevent those failures.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home