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October 2003
School librarian cutback argued
Posted Monday, October 27, 2003
BY GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- The city's three largest high schools -- Central, Hope and Mount Pleasant -- can operate with one librarian apiece instead of the two required by the state, according to Schools Supt. Melody A. Johnson.
Johnson is expected to ask the School Board tonight to endorse her request for a variance from a 20-year-old provision of the state's Basic Education Plan that requires two librarians in high schools with more than 1,000 students. Hope, Central, and Mount Pleasant each have about 1,500 students.
As part of its overall fiscal retrenchment, the school district cut the number of librarians in each of the three high schools from two to one at the start of the school year.
The three librarians whose jobs were eliminated moved into other positions elsewhere in the school district, according to Paul Vorro, executive director of the Providence Teachers Union.
But two have them have filed grievances protesting the elimination of their high-school jobs, saying the reductions violate the state's basic education plan, according to Vorro.
Vorro said he understands that another district has requested the same kind of variance and has been denied.
An approval now for Providence would raise questions about the equitable application of state regulations, Vorro said.
And he noted that the school district cut the librarians' positions before it applied to the commissioner for permission.
Schools Supt. Melody A. Johnson acknowledged that she did not know about the 1983 requirement of the state Basic Education Plan when she and other school officials combed through the budget last spring to cut spending.
She said the Commissioner of Education, Peter McWalters, has given the district permission to operate for 60 school days with one librarian at each of the three high schools until a decision is made on the request for a variance.
Johnson's proposal asserts that students have the same access to the library as in previous school years.
Vorro disagreed. He said that the libraries are closed during the school day when the lone librarians have lunch and during their contractually-required free periods.
But Johnson explained that the advent of technology and the elimination of study halls over the years have changed how students use school libraries.
During the school day, students go to the libraries with their classes and their teachers, she said. The classroom teachers assist students in looking for materials, with an on-line search as the starting point, Johnson said.
Hope's library was criticized for a lack of up-to-date technology and materials in the most recent high-school accreditation report from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges earlier this year.
But Johnson said in her request for a variance that all the libraries have Internet service and by December will have up-to-date software that automates a great deal of search work that has historically been done manually.
If a librarian is out of the library when a class uses it, Johnson explained, the classroom teacher can still get assistance from a clerk.
Johnson placed the budget cut in the three libraries in the broader context of the overall fiscal constraints placed on the school district this year, a context that McWalters is expected to consider in his decision, according to a spokeswoman for the commissioner.
"There are a lot of things I'm concerned about," Johnson said, and libraries are the center for learning, but the library is not one of the places where there's been a great deal of (budgetary) impact.
When a teacher and a class of 26 students visit a library staffed by one librarian, who is also a certified teacher, "that's a 13-to-1 teacher-student ratio," she said.
She said she is not trying to "devalue" librarians but must consider what is fair in light of the $10 million the district was forced to cut from an already bare-bones spending plan this fiscal year.
With that large a budget problem, Johnson said, "you can cut back entirely" in one area or "cut back a little in various areas."
The district chose the latter approach, she said, spending "months agonizing about where to do it and how to do it with the least harm."
"We need more technology, and more people with technical savvy to help our students," Johnson said.
"We are at the [state] average in per-pupil funding, but we don't have the average needs," Johnson said.
"School systems in Rhode Island are being compromised on a much different scale in terms of spending and unfunded mandates," she said.
Vorro, meanwhile, agreed that the budgetary cuts are the underlying problem in the reduction of librarians as well as other job cuts that have compromised instruction in art, music, and technology, as well as social services to needy children.
But he said the teachers' union could not, in good conscience, support a cut that it believes affected the quality of children's education.
A spokeswoman for Commissioner McWalters explained that a school district seeking a variance from a state regulation must show alternative ways of providing children the same level of service.
Tonight's School Board meeting, which will entertain public comments on the variance proposal, is part of the formal application process, according to Jennifer Wood, chief legal counsel for the Department of Education.
The district's alternate plan for serving children, along with the public comment and the minutes of the School Board meeting, will be forwarded to the Commissioner for consideration, Wood said.
She said McWalters will not decide the issue until he has met with Johnson and other school officials to discuss the variance request in the context of the district's entire budgetary situation.
At least one of the three high school principals involved, Debra DeCarlo of Central, said Friday that she planned to speak at tonight's board meeting in support of the variance request.
Vorro said several librarians are expected to speak against the proposal, saying that the teachers' union does not accept that technology can make up for the cut in staff.
'Learning walk' proves educational for adminstrators
Posted Friday, October 24, 2003
School officials tours classrooms to search for evidence that teachers are using newly instituted methods and that students are improving because of them.
BY GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- Short stories, Gregory Person announced with confidence, always have to have a "hook" so that people will keep reading.
Gregory, in the eighth grade at the Esek Hopkins Middle School, had been reviewing his own short story yesterday when a visitor drew him into a conversation about key elements that kind of writing needs to be effective.
The visitor, Julie Motta, spoke in literary language, using terms like "characters," "setting," "conflict," and "resolution."
Initially, Gregory said that "conflict" means the main idea of the story. But as he and Motta got deeper into the conversation, he came up with the word "hook."
If he hadn't defined "conflict" in precise terms, he certainly understood its purpose in a short story.
Such scenes, in which several adults walk into classrooms and circulate among the students, have become so routine in the city schools in the last four and a half years that the students barely look up from their work.
The purpose of the visitors -- to come away with a composite "snapshot" of the quality of work both adults and students put forth -- and the work of the teachers appears to blend together almost seamlessly.
Yesterday, about nine visitors, mostly central administrators, split into two groups and popped into classrooms on all three floors of Esek Hopkins on Charles Street.
They were looking for evidence that teachers were following curriculum guides that link academic standards, classroom materials, and classroom activities.
In one eighth-grade English class, for example, students were finishing persuasive essays on the relative advantages of motivation and intelligence.
The topic had come from a reading assignment called "Flowers for Algernon," a story about a mentally retarded adult who undergoes an operation that makes him vastly more intelligent.
But his intelligence, which he eventually loses, does not bring him happiness.
Hopkins' principal, Carl Stephen Lauro, pulled up a chair to a group of students sitting around a table.
"If I tell you that all my life I've been lazy and then I turned into a type A personality, what would you think?" Lauro asked the students.
"That you got motivated," one girl replied.
"Do you need intelligence to be motivated?" Lauro asked. "Is one related to the other?"
No, came the initial response, reflecting the traditional belief that intelligence is more or less fixed.
But then another student suggested that effort makes a more intelligent person, and motivation has something to do with the effort.
The idea that greater effort yields greater intelligence stands at the core of the district's philosophical approach to schools as places where both adults and students are considered lifelong learners.
Yesterday's visitors to Hopkins have all been schooled in that philosophy, which was introduced by the Institute for Learning at the University of Pittsburgh four years ago.
But the idea that effort makes people smart was just the foundation in what has become layer upon layer of detail in the way teachers are expected to do their jobs.
For example, today's students are supposed to have a list of criteria that tell them clearly what's expected out of each project.
The students who had written persuasive essays showed their criteria charts to Motta and other visitors.
And because Motta already knew that students were expected to support their conclusions with examples and details, she asked them why they believed motivation was more important than intelligence, or vice versa.
In eighth-grade science, the students of teacher Michael Baccari were very familiar with the criteria for writing papers and lab reports, because they had helped draft them.
Baccari assigned a paper on the impact the development of the microscope has had on mankind. "Don't give me fluff," he warned.
And he gave them an example of "fluff," reading from a paper someone had turned in that described the sizes and shapes of microscopes.
"This is not about microscopes but the insight scientists gained from them about cell structure and how they have benefited mankind," Baccari said.
After nearly two hours of classroom tours, the visitors met around a conference table in the principal's office to share their impressions.
"What a nice, pleasant walk to be on," said Frances Gallo, the director of middle-level education.
Everyone noticed that the halls were empty during class time -- a sign that the focus was inside the classroom.
The students appeared very engaged in their topics, all agreed.
But Claire Pollard, the district's mathematics director, pointed out that being engaged means more than listening to the teacher.
It means students who are using lists of criteria for the projects they were involved in.
Denise Bilodeau, the director of instructional technology, said the fact that students worked well together in groups also showed that they were involved in what they were studying.
"We didn't see enough of that," Gallo noted.
Motta said she noticed there was "lots of evidence" that the teachers had been trained in new methods that emphasized reading and writing skills in all subjects, not just English.
"There was lots of writing," said Motta, a secondary resource teacher for English as a Second Language and bilingual education.
The visitors to Hopkins took care to avoid using teachers' names in describing the highs and lows of their impressions, in keeping with Gallo's insistence that the tour, or "learning walk," was not an exercise in individual teacher evaluation.
But for anyone who had been to Baccari's science class, it was clear that he set an example in the way he involved his students in drawing up criteria, and illustrated what he didn't want with a concrete example.
Gallo was wreathed in smiles.
"We could be building a mountain of absolutely wonderful stuff," Gallo said, alluding to nuances and details in a teacher's approach that sometimes make all the difference for students.
The visitors noted that there were still a few teachers who did not yet know how to use lists of criteria, and a few who were "still stuck behind desks" in a traditional lecture format.
"But I'm still glad there are only a few," Gallo said.
Out of about a dozen classrooms, the visitors observed only two where teachers were not using curriculum guides for their subjects and grade levels.
Pollard noted that there are plenty of teachers in the building who can serve as mentors to those who are out of step.
In the lastest classification of Rhode Island's public schools, Hopkins, like other middle schools in Providence, ranked in the low-performing category, or "in need of improvement," the new terminology of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
At the same time, Hopkins did three times as well this year as last year, according to NCLB rules.
Where Hopkins would have met 5 out of 21 targets last year had the NCLB rules been in place, this year it hit 15 targets, according to a data analysis performed by the school district.
Lauro, the principal, explained some of the factors that have helped students and teachers focus more intensely on academics.
Teachers meet before or after school for two kinds of professional development and coordination every week, he said.
One session focuses on common themes across different disciplines, grouping together teams of teachers who share the same students.
The other meeting is organized around academic content and how to get it across in the classroom.
The social-studies department is particularly aggressive in its professional development, Lauro said.
"You can pick up the teachers' enthusiasm," Gallo said.
Plans for additional high school under way
Posted Friday, October 17, 2003
The Steere Worcested Mill in the city's North End is named as one possible site.
BY GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- As early as the fourth week of the school year, school officials were glad they had arranged to open the Harrison Street School for an overflow of ninth and tenth graders.
The former parochial school leased from St. Paul Church is now at capacity -- about 480 students, according to John Short, the school district's director of operations.
Short analyzed enrollment in mid-September, he said yesterday, and at first glance, the numbers didn't seem that startling.
There were 26,881 students enrolled on Sept. 19, only 122 more than the number on the rolls on a comparable date in September last year.
But a closer look showed that in a year's time, the number of high school students had grown by 484, the exact number of seats at the Harrison Street School.
The prediction made last January that the school system would need an additional high school for about 500 students turned out to be right on target, Short said.
The full house on Harrison Street also sends school officials a message that they must keep a close eye on space for the duration of the school year and look ahead toward construction of another high school that would be ready to open next fall.
One site under consideration is the burned-out 19th century Steere Worcested Mill, off Branch Avenue in the North End, which was last used as a luggage warehouse by American Tourister in the 1980s.
In the last month, the overall enrollment has climbed by 144 to 27,025, Short said, citing figures from last Friday. He did not have the latest high school enrollment readily available.
Because of a high degree of transcience among inner-city families with children, the enrollment fluctuates daily, typically reaching its peak at the start of the second semester in February.
So far this school year, no youngsters have been kept waiting for seats in schools, Short said, a fact the state Department of Education has noted in a complimentary letter.
During the last school year, newly enrolled high school students waiting for school assignments spent time in the school administration building, in a computer-assisted program supervised by Denise Bilodeau, director of instructional technology.
Short said he said he believes that a close watch on enrollment figures and a little advance planning may help school officials keep ahead of any space shortages as the current school year progresses.
"Right now we're tight in the seventh grade," he said.
And because students can no longer go to the Harrison Street School, school officials must keep close tabs on available seats in high schools throughout the district, he said.
He said he does not know how extensively the mill site off Branch Avenue has been discussed within the school department.
Alan R. Sepe, the city's acting director of public property, has said that any site would have to pass a state environmental inspection before construction could begin.
The Steere Mill, on Wild Street, had been vacant from 1991 to 2000 when it was destroyed by two fires within seven months.
Grants to finance student science center
Posted Thursday, October 16, 2003
Save the Bay plans to complete construction of administrative offices and an education center by July.
BY GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- A former dump at Fields Point, already recycled once as a drive-in theater, will come to life again as the site of administrative offices and a new education center for Save the Bay.
The organization has received a $700,000 loan from the Rhode Island Economic Development Corp. to remove environmental hazards from the Fields Point site, according to Curt Spaulding, Save the Bay's executive director.
Thirty percent of the Save The Bay loan will be discounted, which means that $210,000 of the total will, in effect, be a grant, according to a statement issued by the nonprofit organization.
Meanwhile, the educational programming for the new headquarters will get $103,000 in funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The grant, awarded to the Providence School Department, will pay to train teachers to deliver a hands-on curriculum based on scientific inquiry and experimentation to middle-school students. It will also supply materials for these students to engage in research at the education center.
The new administrative offices and education center are expected to open next July.
"What a miracle that in less than a year, [the site] will be a bright new gateway for schoolchildren as well as adults to access the Bay and all it has to teach us," Spaulding told dignitaries who toured the site earlier this week.
"Our new home will be something very special because of its spectacular view and the fact that it is land that has been reclaimed after decades of misuse and abuse," Spaulding said in a statement.
The 6-acre site slated to be Save the Bay's new home is "the final resting place of years of construction debris and other materials; in short a dump," Spaulding said.
Ironically, the parcel was actually an island off Fields Point a century ago. Called Sunshine Island, it gave residents of South Providence access to the Bay.
City teachers criticize voluminous report card
Posted Tuesday, October 7, 2003
School administrators say they are willing to work with the teachers' union to address concerns about the workload the new report card creates.
By GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- Teachers already burdened by extra work resulting from staff reductions may be overwhelmed in filling out a voluminous new elementary report card and explain it to parents, says the president of the teachers' union.
But Steve Smith, Providence Teachers Union president, also said the union "can work cooperatively with the administration to address the problems."
Mike Sorum, the school district's director of assessment, said Smith raises legitimate questions, adding that the administration of Schools Supt. Melody A. Johnson also wants to work with the teachers' union in introducing the new elementary report card, which does away with letter grades.
The new report card, which is to be unveiled to parents with first-quarter marks at parent-teacher conferences next month, contains a checklist of about 70 indicators of academic performance, 15 criteria describing attitudes toward learning, and space to indicate attendance and tardiness.
The skills and behavior measured in the report card are linked to standards of performance -- what children should know and be able to do at any given grade level.
Smith said that aligning report cards to measure the skills and knowledge tested by the state seems to be a good idea.
"But it just seems to me a huge undertaking," Smith said, coming at a time when elementary classroom teachers have full schedules.
Not only must they focus on the latest refinements in the district's ongoing push to improve children's literacy and math skills, he said, but they must also find ways to fill the void left by the elimination of electives -- technology, art, and science classes cut to save money in the budget.
Smith said earlier this week that he was alerted to the detailed information required by the new marking system when a librarian asked whether she would be required to fill out reports on the library skills of all 800 children in her building.
The situation was of particular concern to the librarian, he said, because layoffs of technology, art, and science teachers this school year means more children are using the library as an elective and placing additional demands on her time.
Despite the elimination of the electives, Smith said, the report card still asks teachers to indicate each child's skills in technology and science.
Some classroom teachers say they do not feel qualified to judge computer skills, Smith said.
And classroom teachers may not be able to cover all the standards in science reflected on the report card, he said.
A prototype of the new report card was tried out last spring in nine buildings, more than a third of the 25 elementary schools in the district.
Only 5 percent of teachers who used the new form responded to a survey soliciting their opinions on the changes, according to Sorum, the assessment director, although the reaction was overwhelmingly positive among those who did reply.
Smith said a 5-percent sample is not representative of teachers' opinions. The sparse response should have prompted the school administration to seek additional teacher comments, he said.
Another issue, Smith said, is whether parents will be able to understand the huge volume of information on the new report card in one conversation with a teacher.
Parents are to receive first-quarter marks at conferences with teachers Nov. 18 to 20, but not all parents attend those meetings.
"What about the parents who don't go?" Smith said.
Gary Moroch, director of elementary education, said yesterday that at the elementary level, about 70 percent of parents attend parent-teacher conferences, which schools often couple with other events, such as school suppers.
Sorum said Smith's remarks "sounded like legitimate healthy questions that need to be bandied about."
The initial version of the report card was simplified after last spring's trial run, and Sorum said he regards the one going out next month as a second draft rather than a final version.
In fact, questions from librarians about the necessity to evaluate all the students in their respective buildings have already resulted in a reduction in the number of criteria they will have to assess, Sorum said.
"We don't want to put inequitable expectations on anyone," he said. Sorum said Moroch and other school officials have developed briefings for both teachers and parents that attempt to anticipate questions about the new format.
In addition to the report cards, parents will receive surveys that ask their opinion of the changes, he said.
"We would want everyone to have something to say," Sorum said.
Meanwhile, Joseph A. Almagno, the union's outgoing executive director, noted last week that the administration is not required by the teachers' contract to consult with the union on report cards and other forms of assessment.
But Sorum said Johnson did share information about the prototype for the new report card with Almagno and former union president Phil DeCecco at a union-management retreat last spring.
And Johnson would welcome another conversation about the new marking system when the administration and the union have another retreat later this fall, Sorum said.
Perry's ranking requires new plan
Posted Friday, October 3, 2003
The middle school must take corrective action because it's the only one in the state with an extra year of low-scoring reports.
BY GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE -- Of the 27 low-performing schools in the state that have been sanctioned by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, only one -- the Oliver Hazard Perry Middle School -- is required to take "corrective action."
No Child Left Behind provides a menu of possible corrective actions, including replacing school staff, introducing a new curriculum, bringing in outside experts, reorganizing the school, extending instructional time, or reducing administrative authority in the building.
But don't ask anyone just yet to explain exactly what the corrective action is for Perry.
It is no secret that the middle schools in Providence are low performing.
Because they have failed to improve for two to three years and cannot offer students a transfer to a better school, the middle schools must provide tutoring to the children of parents who sign them up.
In Perry's case, however, the federal government has ruled it must provide tutoring and take corrective action because it has failed to improve for four-consecutive years, a year longer than the others.
That distinction emerged in 2002, with the federal government saying it was based on an internal document of the state Department of Education which described Perry as a failing school a year before the state began keeping track of performance on standards-based exams.
Protests from Providence school officials have failed to change the federal ruling.
Although the 27 public schools that face sanctions this academic year were notified in August, a spokesman for the state Department of Education said yesterday that the classification will not become official until next week, when the categories of all Rhode Island public schools are made public next week.
After that, said Elliot Krieger, staff from the state education department will meet with key school officials in Providence and other communities facing sanctions.
During those talks, the appropriate corrective action for Perry will take shape, Krieger said.
Meanwhile, Michael Sorum, director of assessment for the school district, said Perry has put its proposals for improvement into its annual strategic plan, which is now under review by the director of middle-level education, Frances Gallo.
He said Gallo will make sure Perry's plan addresses gaps in performance on the most recent statewide tests.
"We'll give it an internal review and turn it over to the state," he said. All Rhode Island public schools are required to update annual strategic plans and submit them to the state by Nov. 1 of each year.
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