Community-based charter applicants criticize BESE
5th March 2012 · 0 Comments
By Zoe Sullivan
Contributing Writer
While GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum has captured headlines for disparaging the aspiration of sending all American children to college, that is the goal that leading education officials in Louisiana say they are aiming for. The introduction to the Recovery School District’s 2012 Equity Report poses the question of how to achieve this. Yet criticisms at a public hearing for the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) on Wednesday revealed that there is considerable concern among community members that the Recovery School District is not working towards this goal in a transparent and equitable manner.
People filled half of the auditorium, and a substantial portion of the audience in the front section wore bright orange t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Hands Off Carver.” At the end of the evening, Betty Washington addressed the board on behalf of the community coalition working to start a charter at George Washington Carver Senior High School, the school that received national attention as the site of the “Field of Dreams.”
“Before any applications were submitted…we met with John White,” Washington said. “John White told us that we were not going to get a charter…And, in addition, he told us to go meet with Collegiate Academy, which runs Sci Academy, and Future Is Now, and try to work out some type of partnership, and so in essence, what that told us was that we weren’t getting a charter, but in fact they were going to get a charter.”
One current Carver student at the hearing, Quiane Collins, a statuesque junior wearing one of the orange t-shirts, told The Louisiana Weekly that her teachers had all recently received pink slips and that she didn’t appreciate the way Carver was being discussed. “For them to sit up there and say the teachers failed me, they just called me a failure,” Collins said. “But on my transcript, I’ve got As, Bs and Cs.”
Dr. Norman Whitley, a member of the Coalition for Community Leadership in Education, delivered a statement to the board highlighting concerns with the process for approving charter applications from community-based groups. Whitley has been involved with efforts to develop a charter school in New Orleans East at Sarah T. Reed Senior High School, which, he said, were prompted by an invitation to do so by former Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas.
In an interview with The Louisiana Weekly, Dr. Whitley acknowledged that while his group had not always submitted perfect proposals, the criticisms of the proposals “were inconsistent from year to year.”
“In 2011, they didn’t like our board,” Whitley told The Louisiana Weekly. “They said our board lacked capacity. Never had been an issue before. So that’s the sort of thing that makes me think there’s not enough training among the review teams.” Whitley said that the standards had not been changed between the 2010 and 2011 application years, something that he noted could have justified the new objection had a change been made.
In addition to the criticisms levied at the board regarding inconsistencies with community-based charter applications, Kelly Fischer testified that the Recovery School District is not handling children with disabilities fairly. Fischer has a 10-year-old son who is blind. She told the board that he was rejected from an RSD school two years ago when she tried to enroll him because the school didn’t have the capacity to serve him because of his special needs. Recently, another parent of a special-needs child told Fischer that they had experienced the same thing.
scher told The Louisiana Weekly that she is part of a lawsuit against the Louisiana Department of Education (LDE) that was filed two years ago. One of the co-plaintiffs in the case, the Southern Poverty Law Center, states on its website that the “lawsuit details LDE’s systemic failure to ensure that students with disabilities have equal access to educational services and are protected from discrimination.”
RSD Superintendent John Dobard spoke with The Louisiana Weekly at the conclusion of the hearing about the issues the public raised. “I take them as constructive criticisms,” he said, noting that he had had multiple discussions with two of the community groups that represented the bulk of the audience about how to approach the chartering process. Additionally, Dobard pointed out, the task force was created “to really look at the process.”
“At the end of the day, we’re always looking for the highest quality individuals, groups to have the privilege of educating our children,” Dobard told The Louisiana Weekly. “We appreciate the passion, but we also want to make sure that our process is as strong as it can be…We hope that those we have invited from the groups will continue to…really work sincerely towards solutions and offering things that they feel are otherwise not allowing the process to be good.”
During the testimony, Karran Harper Royal told the board that the RSD’s Equity Report should just be “torn up.” She stated that the terminology used to describe special-education students was confusing. Additionally, Harper Royal noted that the report doesn’t include the 13 categories under IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities in Education Improvement Act) that the school district must report to the federal government related to special education.
“Let’s find some information about suspensions and expulsions of regular ed versus special ed. Let’s look at retention on a month-by-month basis of same students Year-by-year there’s too much trickery that can be done there,” Harper Royal told the board.
Speaking with The Louisiana Weekly, Dobard responded to concerns about the loss of students from the school system between eight and ninth grade. “In our direct-run schools, I’m not pleased about where we are in terms of the progress…So we’re actually looking at what some charters do that we may not be doing to allow the transition to be done smoothly.” He also stated that the RSD is “looking at expulsion policy right now….Through our central enrollment system, we’ll be able to identify more easily students that are allegedly being pushed out.”
“At the same time, when we are talking about expulsions, …we do encourage charters and the direct-runs to really look for alternative means for keeping students in school and educating them,” Dobard added. He said that one of his goals is to make the RSD the “expulsion-hearing clearinghouse” so that there is oversight of this process.
This article was originally published in the March 5, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper
