Improvement Plans

By Sherman Lee Campbell

Addressing administrative burnout, remediating learning disabilities, endless procrastination, optimum school size.

1) It is an important problem because superintendent and principals are part of the thin line allowing the community and parents through the board to influence the education of their students. If education is to be improved or changed, they have to be in place doing their job.

2) Even in the present configuration, the district could and should be doing more to prevent burn out: Emphasizing providing more support to principals, not allowing transfers to the district office, and getting waivers so the requirement of going to every evening event doesn't fall on one or two people.

3) Moving in the direction of smaller schools would also help solve the problem since longevity is less of a problem in smaller schools. There is time to focus on academics and teacher performance, unlike larger schools where all the time is taken up on political, facility, and discipline issues; committees and evening events. One should realize it's hard to justify working for a salary not too much higher than a teacher, yet having to deal with all the problems, and giving up family life. Who would want to be a principal of a 1500 student school?

Second, having had a child with severe learning disabilities, I have sorted through many programs that sounded good but didn't work, and learned tht there are a few proven ways (Auditory Discrimination in Depth, Visualizing and Verbalizing, Vision therapy, and JC Movement Lab) of remediating (curing many, lessening some) learning disabilities. The good news for kids & parents is that it's a solvable problem, and for districts, is that effectively addressing the problem could actually save RSP money and help raise test scores. Furthermore, the problem is common enough (20-30% of students) that it's not realistic to think one can raise student tests scores greatly without addressing them.

State wide there is a tendency to avoid identifying students and providing needed services since the costs are under funded by the state and federal government, and the balance of the cost of RSP services comes out of the general education budget, which the unions protect for normal education teacher's raises. This whole area tends to be ignored and avoided, doing great disservice to the kids.

Unfortunately, our district's present programs emphasize ordinary education techniques, but with smaller class size and more time, and therefore do not remediate learning disabilities. The result is kids end up staying in RSP to "help them get through classes" for their entire school career, and many drop out, become behavior problems, commit suicide, etc. Furthermore, law suits by parents of RSP students not receiving an appropriate education can severely impact general education funds. Finally, I am under the impression that the latest district administrator of the RSP programs, like the many principals, recently quit.

If elected, I would provide some knowledgeable focus on RSP teacher traing and getting ordinary teachers trained in recognizing learning disabilities enough to refer students to RSP and to integrate RSP students into a class room when required by individual education plans (IEP's).

Third, I do not want to leave the impression I am opposed to raising standards and think that the present board is totally wrong in wanting to do that.

I do have major problems with present plans that, in my opinion, are only geared for one group of college bound students (who can cope fairly well) and essentially condemning other students who can't to the scrap heap (don't promote, don't graduate). What is being left out in discussions about the success of programs similar to "project achieve" in Europe, is that to a much greater degree than in America, students are eliminated. Ones who don't make the grade don't don't get an opportunity to stay in a track where college is possible.

Our district presently does not pay enough attention to drop outs to know what the problems are, how to solve them, or whether they are increasing or decreasing. We also don't have the vocational tracks and apprenticeships that amount to a safety net, common in Europe.

The approach recommended by the state and which we used at Piner Olivet starting in 1994 emphasized attempting to improve the education and test scores of all groups, the "four quadrants." That means trying to improve the education of all, and I emphaize all. This includes the "ordinary" students as well as gifted students, learning disabled students, English as a second language learners, and emotionally and economically challenged students. We have succeeded in raising test scores 15-20 points, are analyzing the results by groups, and pin pointing what each needs to improve their education.

In comparison, SRCHSD has taken at least 6 years longer to respond to parent pressure to improve education, only started Project Achieve in 1998, 4 years later than P-O, is still working on setting some "standards," and has not yet raised test scores significantly.

I hope you spend a moment, or better, more time, and think about why the delay and what could be done to improve it.

Of course one of my answers is that the sluggish response time is related to district size and the difficulty for the few parents interested enough to try to effect education to actually accomplish change where so many groups and problems are competing for the attention of the board.

Fourth and finally, at some point in the game, shouldn't the district look at what size of district and school is optimum for student learning? As hopefully, I have pointed out, in the absence of this, the district and schools continue growing every year. To the degree big is less than optimum, students education suffers.

Yes, I have a personal opinion about optimum school size, which incidentally coincides with a US Department of Education committee's and the Piner-Olivet facillities master plan committee's recommendations, but I fully understand that one board member can not effect a total sudden change. In practice, any board member's opinion is tempered by other board members' opinions. Especially in district size, all one could hope to accomplish is a change in direction, while gathering support for some some sort of change to happen later. Change takes time.