Missouri’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has made certain that students who live in the unaccredited Normandy School District can finish this school year wherever they currently attend school. Yet what awaits the district after this academic year is far from certain.
The other apparent trend in Jefferson City is the increasing likelihood of the survival of the school transfer program, in which more than 2,000 students from the unaccredited districts of Normandy and Riverview Gardens attend schools in accredited districts.
With the Missouri Board of Education following DESE’s recommendation to take control of Normandy’s troubled finances, the district’s impending bankruptcy will not force students to change schools. They will stay put whether they attend Normandy schools or chose to transfer to schools in other districts. DESE is appointing a “transition task force” to devise options by July for what should be done with Normandy if it becomes, as expected, insolvent.
The state has four basic options, which include ceding the entire Normandy School District to a neighboring district, dividing up the district and giving parts of it to various adjacent districts, or appointing a special board to run the district with its current boundaries. “The fourth option, which is new, is that the board can do something ‘other.’ The plan we presented defines what that something ‘other’ might look like,” says state Education Commissioner Chris Nicastro.
The specifics of the fourth option are somewhat vague, Nicastro says, but could include a university or some other entity operating a school or schools within the lapsed district, or neighboring or nearby districts could take over schools within the district.
Currently, the Normandy, Riverview Gardens, and Kansas City school districts are the only unaccredited districts in the state. Riverview Gardens, which has about 1,000 students who transferred to other districts, is expected to run into financial trouble next year. Kansas City students will be able to transfer beginning with the new school year. Jennings and the city of St. Louis' school districts are among the state's 11 provisionally accredited districts.
DESE’s plan to address troubled districts divides the state’s school districts into five tiers. The top two tiers are for districts with full accreditation, which constitute 97 percent of the state’s districts. Tier III is for provisionally accredited districts, Tier IV is for unaccredited districts, and Tier V is for “lapsed” districts, which means unaccredited districts that have not shown signs of improvement and are in the hands of the state.
The DESE plan emphasizes early and frequent intervention in districts that are provisionally accredited, so they don’t lose accreditation. Even accredited districts might receive attention if certain schools within those districts show signs of trouble.
"The plan is focused very heavily on prevention,” Nicastro says. “The best way to address failing schools is to keep them from failing in the first place. That does not alter the situation with the three districts that are unaccredited, and we will address those in the coming months. In the future, we hope to prevent others from joining their ranks.”
In Missouri, there are more than 62,000 students in provisionally accredited or unaccredited school districts. In unaccredited districts, less than 30 percent of students scored proficiently in English language arts, math, science, or social studies on the standardized state test. Nicastro says that needs to be fixed. “It is not OK to continue to support failure,” she says.
In presenting the DESE plan, emphasis was made that it “maintains the integrity of classification system.” While DESE stressed that all school-improvement plans submitted were considered, it was clear that the department had no interest in plans that would rename the classification categories from “unaccredited” to “academically stressed” to avoid enforcement of the transfer law.
Mike Jones, vice president of the Missouri Board of Education and a St. Louis resident, was an early skeptic of the transfer program, but he now supports it. He was not a fan of the plans that tried to reclassify districts out of trouble. “While all of these plans had interesting specifics that may have had some merit, the fundamental takeaway was really to redefine the transfer problem away,” says Jones. “They all created another category where you could move a failing district into something other than ‘unaccredited,’ and at that point if it’s not labeled unaccredited, the transfer law doesn’t impact it... A polite critic could accuse them of being disingenuous at a certain level."
A plan supported by the area’s former Cooperating School Districts, recently renamed EducationPlus, stressed the need to stop the “forced consolidation of school districts” and to stem the “influx” of students to public schools who had not previously attended public schools. EducationPlus, which is headed by Dr. Don Senti, a former superintendent of Clayton and Parkway school districts, also warned that the transferring of low-test scoring students to accredited districts could adversely affect the recipient districts. (Questions about the plan that EducationPlus supports were submitted to the organization’s spokesperson, who declined to comment.)
Nicastro realizes that if students from Normandy are eventually going to be ceded to one or all of the surrounding districts—Ritenour, Jennings, University City, Ferguson-Florissant, and St. Louis city public schools—it has to be planned. “No one would want to send an excessive number of children to a district that did not have the capacity to address their needs," she says, "nor would you want to send children to a district where there was open hostility to having them enroll there."
Jones compared the desire of some to isolate low-scoring students in troubled districts to Hawaii in the 1800s, when lepers were kept on Molokai Island. “It’s the educational equivalent of a leper colony,” Jones said of the idea that these students be kept apart. “We had no cure for leprosy back then, so just take them all to the end of town, build a wall, and throw some bread over the wall. As long as they don’t affect the rest of us, we’ll live with it like that.”
With the transfer option from unaccredited districts, about 25 percent of students in Normandy and Riverview Gardens opt out of attending school in their home district. Jones agrees that the 75 percent who stay need to have their needs addressed, but he also thinks the transfer program should continue. “My thinking has evolved,” he says. “I’ve come to the conclusion over the last four or five weeks. The harder I thought about it, I had this dilemma: I did not have a morally acceptable answer to the parents who no longer wanted to trust their child to this school district. I just don’t have an answer for that. I said at a board meeting, 'If someone can think of one, please tell me because I can’t think of one.'”
“I wrestled with that,” Jones adds. “Any solution to this has to have that transfer option in it. Solutions that work to minimize the transfer option are ethically challenged.”
Nicastro is careful to state that DESE’s opinion is that the “current transfer law, as constructed, is unsustainable.” She believes that other unaccredited districts will follow Normandy into insolvency. She also was careful to include this disclaimer: “The transfer law is in statute, and it’s been upheld twice by the Supreme Court, so neither DESE nor the state Board of Education has the authority to change the law."
Rep. Rick Stream, (R-Kirkwood) has sponsored a bill that would provide a more uniform way to calculate what recipient districts receive for incoming students. The transfer program’s chance of survival may have increased because it seems to be proceeding without incident and with some benefit to both the transferring student, who is in a new educational environment, and the receiving district, which is financially aided by the money that follows the student.
DESE’s plan to aid troubled districts was submitted to the state Board of Education on Tuesday. The board may wait until the legislature adjourns in late May before deciding how much of the plan to accept. But with Kansas City's school district unaccredited and St. Louis city's public schools provisionally accredited, the stakes are too high to abstain from action.
Jones believes there are possible compromises, such as a way for districts to accept low-scoring students with an interim period in which their scores are not included in the district’s statistics. “You can’t ‘not count’ them forever, because at some point they’re going to be your kids, but you can negotiate how they are phased in,” Jones says. “When you have adults with a certain level of political skill and maturity, you usually can solve problems like that, because they do have an answer. There’s a number there that works. You can find it.”
