And then there were five (at least)

Going into last night's Orange County Board of Education meeting, there was only one plan officially under consideration for the destruction of two of Orange County's elementary schools - Dennis Whitling's disastrous "Big Plan."

Now that the Board has met, there are at least five plans on the table for Board consideration. And, as if they were ordering from a Chinese restaurant menu, Board members encouraged each other to pick and choose elements from each plan to form something entirely unique to them. Presumably, the combinations could be infinite.

To open last night's discussion, the Board was again formally presented with the opinions/recommendations of the Board-appointed CES/HES Merger Task Force. The Board then promptly ignored the Task Force's suggestions.

The Task Force's only unanimous recommendation was for the Board to scrap Dennis Whitling's "Big Plan" for merging CES and HES, but the Board did no such thing.

Even though most members of the Board acknowledged that Whitling's plan had no "buy-in" from the community, it failed to remove the plan from consideration. In fact, a significant amount of time was spent in a defense of the plan by its sponsor - ex-Chair Dennis Whitling - during which he laid blame for its failure on the inability of less "idealistic" parents "to look beyond their narrow interests."

Then, current Chair, Ted Triebel took his turn at recommending a "Big Plan" of his own to address the issue - or, make that THREE plans.

I. Blue Plan

1. HES K-5, Year-round calendar
• All current HES students would have to apply to return with a cap of 20% accepted from each of the six elementary zones. Application would include an optional question about FRL status.
• "Controlled choice" would be a quota system imposed by the District on who could be admitted to HES. This means that if you do not fit the SES or demographic groups the Board designates, you will have no choice. It sure sounds more like "control" than "choice."
  
• If HES enrollment does not reach 350 students, then the cap will be lifted, but the District will still restrict who is allowed to attend based on their SES or demographic quotas.
• Students living within a 1 mile radius of HES will be assigned to the school, but with an option to opt-out to another school.
• Transportation provided for all.
• Free intersession programs for all FRL students.
• Free summer camps for all FRL students.
2. CES K-5, Traditional Calendar
• "Mini-redistrict" for SES composition.
• Limit opt-out option to two schools.
• Guarantee lower student/teacher ratios compared to other schools
• Appropriately staff CES based on proven experience and performance
• Offer "extended year" option with enrichment. Basically, starting the year two weeks earlier and ending two later as an option for families.
• Improve building aesthetics
• Provide child care and transportation to parents who want to participate in PTA activities.

II. Gold Plan

1. "Reconstitute" CES as a "theme" school after closing the school for a full year of preparation. In essence, this is the creation of a magnet school but only after shutting the school down for a year.
• Current CES students would be "distributed" to other elementary schools for a single year with priority given to FRL students who want to attend HES. So, if your child attends CES but is not on FRL, you will have to go where the Board sends you for a year
  
• FRL students would be provided the same incentives as in the Blue Plan.
2. Reopen CES as a "new" school with "controlled choice" and a "mini-redistrict."
3. CES teachers, TAs and classified staff would have guaranteed job security during the year the school is closed.

III. Green Plan

1. Maintain school structuring as is, but increase focus, programs and resources meant to ensure continued improvement of SES balance between CES and HES.
• The Superintendent would be expected to provide initiatives to the Board that would move the SES numbers in both the short and long term.
• Year one SES change goal would be at least 5% decrease at CES and 5% increase at HES.

Added to Ted Triebel's "Rainbow Plan," was yet another attempt by Dennis Whitling to destroy both CES and HES, while also taking a huge chunk of money away from Efland-Cheeks as well - a trifecta of sorts.

In his new vision, Whitling suggested that the Board take $300,000 in federal Title 1 money away from CES and Efland-Cheeks, and use those funds to pay for a Pre-K program at CES. According to Whitling, those funds are currently "wasted" by paying two teachers at each school, funding additional programs for at-risk children, and providing options to parents seeking the best educational opportunity for their children.

By not "wasting" federal money to help the struggling children at the District's lowest performing schools, the District could remove itself from accountability to the federal No Child Left Behind law. Without that accountability, parents at those schools (and most likely New Hope next year) would not have the choice to opt-out of their "failing schools." Of course, that doesn't mean that the students at those schools would be performing any better than in previous years, only that the District wouldn't have any accountability for helping them improve.

I can't help but use a healthcare analogy here. Dennis' new idea is akin to seeing a precancerous lesion on your face that, if treated properly, can be cured, but if ignored will only get progressively worse. Rather than seek that curative treatment, Dennis would have you remove the mirrors from your house so you simply can't see the problem any more.

Without the inconvenience of parental choice in response to Board actions, Dennis' new plan would force families into specific schools based on a pre-set quota system. New students could only attend HES if children of a similar SES or demographic profile also choose to attend CES.

This entire process reminds me of a joke. Question: What is a flamingo?

Answer: A duck created by committee. The situation would be funny if it wasn't so embarrassing.

Why reinvent the wheel?

In a recent column on the recommendations that would come out of the CES/HES Merger Task Force, I wrote:

"Of the three proposals the Task Force will report to the full Board of Education on Monday night, only the creation of a magnet school program at CES can claim to directly address the Free & Reduced Lunch disparity the group was charged with impacting."

Now, there is strong evidence from right next door that the magnet school approach will have exactly the impact the Board claims to seek, and in an amazingly short period of time.

Today's Durham Herald-Sun has an article by Carolyn Rickard about a planned parental vote on requiring school uniforms at Durham County's W.G. Pearson School. While coverage of parents having an actual voice in decisions made by their public school system is always of interest to me, this quote from the article reveals a clear solution to the problem the Orange County Board of Education had hoped to address with Dennis Whitling's disastrous plan to merge CES and HES:

"Until 2006, Pearson was a traditional school drawing students mainly from the poor neighborhoods that surround it. When it became a magnet, though, it suddenly began enrolling students from all over Durham, reducing the percentage of students in the free and reduced-cost lunch programs -- traditional indicators of poverty -- from about 83 percent to 60 percent."

In only one year as a magnet school, W.G. Pearson was able to attract enough diversity from across Durham County to lower its FRL percentage 23 points!

With strong support from the Board's Task Force and local models of magnet programs that have actually improved a school's FRL balance, the Board should immediately repudiate Dennis Whitling's unsupported "Big Plan" and aggressively pursue the creation of a magnet school at CES.

The time has come

"In accordance with this code, each member of the board will commit to the following:
1. Attend all regularly scheduled Board meetings insofar as possible..."
- The Orange County Board of Education Code of Ethics (Policy #2120).

I attended the Orange County Board of Education meeting last Monday evening, primarily to hear the report of recommendations by the CES/HES Merger Task Force.

As the meeting opened, Board Chairman Ted Triebel announced that Debbie Piscitelli and Anne Medenblik would be absent because of family emergencies then went on to say that Liz Brown was absent as well, but without explanation. Not surprisingly, this reminded me of Liz's still unexplained, prolonged absence from Board meetings this past summer.

So, I started looking back at Liz's attendance record, and here is what I found in Board meeting minutes posted to its web page:

• Nov. 19 - Regular Board Meeting - Absent [The minutes are not yet approved, but I was there and she wasn't]
• Nov. 4 - Regular Board Meeting - Present
• Oct. 15 - Regular Board Meeting - "Elizabeth Brown left the meeting at 7:25 p.m."
• Oct. 1 - Regular Board Meeting - "Elizabeth Brown left the meeting at this time" [9:42 pm]
• Sept. 17 - Regular Board Meeting - "Elizabeth Brown left at 10:32 p.m."
• Sept. 13 - HES Community Listening Session - Present
• Sept. 6 - CES Community Listening Session - Absent [I was there, she wasn't]
• Sept.4 - Regular Board Meeting - Present
• Aug. 20 - Regular Board Meeting - "Board member absent: Elizabeth Brown."
• Aug. 6 - Regular Board Meeting - "Board members absent: Elizabeth Brown..."
• July 19 - Regular Board Meeting - "Member absent: Elizabeth Brown."
• July 9 - Regular Board Meeting - "Board member absent: Elizabeth Brown."
• June 18 - Regular Board Meeting - "Elizabeth Brown left the meeting at 9:45 p.m."

So, let's recap: Of the past 13 public Board meetings, Liz Brown has:

• Been entirely absent 6 times
• Left early 4 times, and
• Stayed for an entire meeting only 3 times

Are these the actions of someone granted, what the Board's own policies call, a "high public trust"?

The Orange County Board of Education's Code of Ethics says, "A breach of this Code of Ethics by any Board member may result in disciplinary action. This action may result in sanction(s) as approved by the majority of the Orange County Board of Education consistent with legal standards."

The time has come for the Board to live up to its proclaimed ethics and publicly sanction Liz Brown for the her willful violation of the Code she promised to uphold, and for abandoning the school children of Orange County.

Thoughts and prayers

My thoughts and prayers go out to Debbie Piscitelli and Anne Medenblik as they both deal with "family emergencies."

While I often disagree with the Board, we must all keep things in proper context when reality steps in so harshly.

As a result of both Board Members' absence at last night's meeting, the discussion of what to do with the recommendations of the CES/HES Merger Task Force has been postponed until the Board's next meeting on Tuesday, December 3, 2007.

A tip of the "cap"

I wrote earlier about the recommendations the Merger Task Force plans to present to the Orange County Board of Education at its meeting Monday night.

I attended both Task Force meetings and was very pleased to hear so many ideas with which I could agree.

• Like everyone on the Task Force, I also feel that Dennis Whitling's disastrous "Big Plan" should be immediately killed.
  
• Like many on the Task Force, I believe that the creation of a magnet program at CES is a great idea. In fact, I would like to see the concept expanded to include "magnetic" programs at all our elementary schools.
• Like many on the Task Force, I think increased availability of transportation would reduce SES barriers to attending HES, while at the same time increase opportunities for parents to find the school that best fits their child's needs.
• Like many on the Task Force, I feel that increased programs during HES intersessions would benefit all children, and income-based subsidies of these programs would reduce SES barriers to attending HES.
• Like some on the Task Force, I feel that the parents of Orange County should have universal school choice and be allowed to pick the school that best fits their child regardless of where they live.

However, I also found some things the Task Force appeared to support that I could not, and, in fact, I feel will have an effect opposite of what either the Board or the Task Force intends.

Among the three recommendations the Task Force will present on Monday night is one calling for "reexamining the HES application process." During the Task Force meeting, a number of distinctly different ideas were grouped under this heading.

Among the ideas placed under the umbrella of "reexamining the HES application process" was a proposal supported by a number of Task Force members to close HES and force all currently attending students to reapply for admission to the school. Acceptance would be based entirely on a predetermined cap on the number (or percentage) of students that would allowed to return from each school zone.

By this plan, the disproportionate representation of people from the CES and Efland-Cheeks school zones would be prohibited. The suggestion was made to restrict the percentage of students allowed into HES from any one school zone at no more than 20% - even if it resulted in turning away children while seats at HES sat empty for lack of interest from other school zones.

On the surface, this may sound like a a reasonable approach. That is until you put more thought into what would happen in the real world. Unfortunately, the Task Force was not allowed enough time to discuss or consider any one idea before a list was developed using a "pick 3" approach and the meeting was adjourned "on time."

Consider this situation: For the 2008-09 school year (one Task Force member was adamant that the change occur in the coming year), parents of current HES students would be told they must return to their zoned schools unless they reapply for the seats they already occupy at HES, and are selected by the District for a spot at HES. At the same time parents of students currently attending other schools would be told they may apply to fill one of the newly opened HES spots.

When the day to apply arrives, who do you think will apply?

About 99% of applications will come from those already at HES (except for incoming kindergarteners). Of course, this makes perfect sense.

HES children will almost universally want to return to the only school most of them have ever known, and children at other schools will almost universally want to stay at the only school they know. Parents who find the year-round calendar attractive, would have already enrolled their children at HES, and parents who prefer the traditional calendar, or don't want multiple children on different schedules, would seek to stay in their zoned schools.

So, what will be the result of this application process? The pool for selection will look almost exactly like HES does now. Then comes the really interesting part.

Someone has to develop a plan for how to choose which children are permitted to return to HES and which ones will be forced back to CES and Efland Cheeks. According to the data provided to the Board in February, a 20% cap on enrollment from any one school zone would send over 80 HES families back to Efland-Cheeks or CES. Those of us zoned to any other school would almost automatically return to HES because no other school zone makes up more than 17% (Cameron Park), and my zone (New Hope) only accounts for 5%. (So much for the frequent accusation that I only care about my own child.)

But, wait! You can't force those families back to either CES or Efland-Cheeks.

They are both in Title 1 School Improvement. That means that, under the current situation, those parents can immediately opt-out of their zoned schools and return to HES as their school of choice. Even if the Board were to restrict the choice of schools available to opt-out families, and remove HES from the list, the No Child Left Behind law says that you MUST allow a child to stay at their school of choice through the last grade that school offers. That means that the 29 students who's parents chose to opt-out of their zoned school and endure the difficulty of joining HES six weeks into the school year would be exempted from this new plan.

Even if this assignment plan could be worked out, would it have the desired effect of reducing the socioeconomic imbalance between the two schools? No.

According to the District's expert on these matters, Mary Alice Yarborough, the District does not know which individual children in our schools receive Free & Reduced Lunch. Given this, how would you know, by restricting enrollment from the two school zones with the highest poverty levels, that you are not sending some of HES' lowest income students back to the schools with the highest FRL levels?

On the flip side, you will have, in essence, created an "open door" admissions policy for families zoned to schools with much lower levels of Free & Reduced Lunch. If you assign a 20% cap on any one zone, that means at least 240 HES seats will be available to people who are not zoned to either CES or Efland-Cheeks. As of last February, only 161 HES students came those zones.

Effectively, the Board would be telling people, "If you can afford one of the new houses in Churton Grove, we have a seat waiting for your daughter here at Hillsborough Elementary. But, if you can only afford to live in West Hillsborough, we have no room for your son." How likely is it that the first child will improve the SES disparity and the second would not?

Based simply on the demographic data provided to the Task Force by the OCS staff, it is far less likely that any new children drawn from outside the CES and Efland-Cheeks zones will be on Free & Reduced Lunch. In the end, the SES gap between the two schools will not fall, and will in all likelihood widen under any kind of enrollment cap.

The devil is in the details.

It's unanimous (minus 5)

I attended last night's Merger Task Force meeting, and by the end of the night one thing was made perfectly clear:

The only people who want to see CES and HES merged are sitting on the Orange County Board of Education.

Of course, those of us who attended the "community listening sessions" and have paid attention to the public comment periods at Board meetings over the past 9 months already knew this to be the case.

It is an amazing coincidence that the only 5 people in Orange County who appear to support this disastrous plan just so happened to get themselves elected to the Board of Education.

After their second two hour meeting in two weeks, the only thing everyone on the Merger Task Force could agree upon was that Dennis Whitling's "Big Plan" should be trashed.

Even though, at its first meeting, the group expressed a need for more time to consider possible actions and more information upon which to base its recommendations, it will be making a set of recommendations to the Board at its next public meeting.

According to the Durham Herald Sun, "'Obviously, the top feeling of the group is to move past the merger idea,' said Denise Morton, superintendent of curriculum and instruction." Recommendations the group will make include:

• Removing the current merger proposal from consideration
• Reexamining the HES application process
• Creating a magnet school program at CES

While a vastly larger set of potential recommendations was collected from the group, Task Force members only had 30 minutes to share the ideas brought forth in closed door, small-group break out sessions. As such, there was very little discussion of any individual idea, and many with distinct differences were pooled into larger groups based on vague similarities.

After a secret vote in which members listed their top 3 choices from the long list of ideas, the final recommendations above were the "winners."

The process by which these three recommendations were selected appeared to be driven more by Denise Morton's desire to end the meeting on time, than by any desire to fully consider actions that would directly impact the problem the group was tasked to solve. In fact, when the concept of a fixed ending time for the meeting was questioned, Ms. Morton replied that she felt there needed to be one in order to ensure the meeting resulted in final recommendations.

Of the three proposals the Task Force will report to the full Board of Education on Monday night, only the creation of a magnet school program at CES can claim to directly address the Free & Reduced Lunch disparity the group was charged with impacting.

The other two, while they may be perfectly valid things to consider, will have no effect on the socioeconomic disparity between the two schools, and one has the potential to have the entirely opposite effect. I will write more on that one soon.

As they say, the devil is in the details.

They took a meeting

I am sorry for taking so long to post a report from last week's Merger Task Force meeting. My family went out of town last Thursday to attend a wedding and we did not return until Sunday evening.

As such, I have neither had time to write my impressions, nor edit and post clips from the video I shot of the meeting. I hoped that the article from the lone reporter covering the meeting would suffice.

As someone who has paid a great deal of attention to this process for over 8 months now, the Task Force meeting was a mixed bag of frustration and hope.

My frustration came as some Task Force members asked questions that had been answered for the Board over the past 8 months. It was apparent that many of the Task Force members had not been paying much attention to the merger discussion until named to the Task Force. With many new players in the process, it was clear there was no "institutional memory" of what had come before.

But, on the positive side, this lack of an entrenched agenda or committment to an overwhelmingly unpopular merger plan will allow the group to approach the issue less myopically than the Board had done since February.

I saw a glimmer of hope in the Task Force's first meeting.

For the first time, actual parents (you know, those people supposedly at the top of the Orange County Schools' organizational chart) were officially involved in the discussion. For 8 months, the Orange County Board of Education has seemed to employ every measure possible to mute the voices of parents in this process, or to dismiss what was said as the opinion of a small minority. It was not until they decided to formally start "listening" that they seemed to understand the level of opposition from parents at both schools to the plan they adopted in a vacuum.

With the exception of the Task Force moderator, parents on the Task Force asked most of the questions last Tuesday night. It was genuinely a breath of fresh air.

After one two-hour meeting, the group appeared reach a concensus on a few things:

• They need more information before beginning to understand the "problem" they are being asked to solve. The group made a number of requests for more information they felt was needed before they could start to discussing specific ideas.
• They do not feel they currently have enough "evidence" that any specific action will have the desired effect, or what effect any action they take may have. They seem truly interested in making recommendations based on valid educational research rather than some emotional or "deep inside" moral judgement.
• The District knows very little about why parents choose one school over another, whether it is to move their child to HES or to stay at CES when allowed to opt-out. It was suggested that a survey be conducted to gather this information.
• Unlike the Board of Education, The Task Force quickly acknowledged that the District cannot force any parent to send their child to CES (or Efland-Cheeks, and soon to be New Hope). Through the mechanisms of Title 1 School Improvement, families zoned to CES can automatically send their kids to another school. It was mentioned a number of times that CES is now a "school of choice" - meaning the families who stayed at CES chose to be there when they had other options. Yet, again, the District does not know the reasons behind their choice.
• The Task Force also agreed that it was impossible to expect significant recommendations from them by the Nov. 19th full Board meeting. With the possible exception of Debbie Piscitelli, the group does not believe it can come up with changes in time to impact the coming school year. Some said they believe it could take the group as much as "a year to a year and a half" to come up with its final recommendations.

While it was not the most entertaining two hours of my life, it did have its bright moments, and was generally more productive than any of the Board meetings I've attended in the past 8 months.

If for no other reason, my time was well spent when I heard one of the most insightful comments of this entire fiasco. One of the Task Force's parents stated that no balance among the schools would ever be possible until the District creates a situation at CES and Efland-Cheeks that makes parents "want to send their kids there." Too bad the Board of Education has spent 8 months discussing this issue, and not a single minute creating such an environment at any of its three struggling elementary schools.

The next meeting will be the last one before the Task Force reports its progress back to the Board at its next public meeting.

The Task Force meets again on Tuesday, November 13th at 5:30 pm in the Board of Education meeting room at 200 King Street, Hillsborough. (At least this time, the District posted the meeting information more than a few days in advance.)

All interested parties are free to attend. If that isn't enough to bring you in, they also had cookies at the last meeting.