Neighborhood Schools - An Ongoing Case Study

Thank you for the opportunity to speak at last week’s feedback session. I spoke then about plan 3B being an experiment with our children where we know ahead of time the experiment will not be successful. I also heard more about redistricting there and have given the topic much more thought.

First, I looked up your “infamous” letter in the Star News. Unlike many parents at the meeting, I thought you made some excellent points. I agree with your statement that if you form schools with 80+% of students with free or reduced lunch, that school is likely to fail. I think the data is clear supporting that. The flip side is that putting those exact same students on school buses for an additional twenty minutes in the morning and twenty in the afternoon is not going to improve their performance unless you believe that there is also a significant difference in facilities or teaching staff at other schools. Do you believe that (honest question)? If so, we need to address those issues.

These schools might be significantly more challenging to work in due to lack of parental support or other challenges that children from poorer households bring to school with them. Do these schools have issues with teacher retention? When I was in the military, the service offered significant incentives to encourage people to move to jobs where there was a significant need. I would support a program (meaning I would pay more taxes) that offered to very qualified teachers (nationally certified, top job ratings, etc) bonuses to move to specifically designated positions in schools requiring extra help. If thirty such positions were created in the middle school system where each teacher received a $5K salary kicker plus a $20K bonus if they stayed five years in position, the cost would be around $300K/yr. That’s not cheap, I realize, but it’s an attempt to address a potential root cause of poor performance. Another idea would be to have paid after school care at designated middle schools. If you allowed designated schools to stay open until 5:30 or 6:00 with academic tutoring and athletics available, you could offer significant extra help to students who might otherwise have very few safe or healthy options after school hours. If you designated one hour of that time to supervised homework time, students could receive extra instruction at the same time. Those schools could become open enrollment so that any parent in the system could take advantage of the service. Assuming you would need 15 staffers at $50/person/day bonus pay plus some added for other expenses, you are looking at $180K/yr for each designated school. Once again, not cheap but focused on addressing a root cause.

Even in this “tea party” environment, people have repeatedly voted to raise their own taxes to support education. The plans I outlined above would cost less than $50 per household to those in our county. The plan to bus children to achieve a better balance in the schools might cost less, but it puts each child at more of a disadvantage, takes more time away from other activities and does not address a single fundamental cause of poor school performance. I believe that you will drive the average performance of the schools together while bringing the aggregate down, hardly the result any of us want to see. If some of these programs are sufficiently innovative, maybe there is federal money to offset the cost.

That said, I would like to compliment you on your willingness to look at data, change your mind and make bold stands based on your research. Many of the parents around me feel you ran on a “neighborhood schools” platform and you have betrayed them. I feel the purpose of a representative form of government is to elect people who can then become knowledgeable on the issues and vote intelligently. I feel you have done that although I disagree with your approach. Keep up the good work.

On the other hand, University of North Carolina Wilmington education professor Robert Smith told the board that low-income students have been shown to perform worse on end-of-course exams when in schools with high percentages of other low-income students. Smith urged the board to dismiss the first two maps as “unacceptable.”

“An affluent white student is going to be a strong student almost no matter what,” she said. “The black students, however, really benefit from attending those schools that have a more affluent population that have greater resources.”