Division I regional track finals
Fenwick graduation 2012
Ponitz graduation 2012
Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2007 > July
July 2007
Six vie for open school board seat
Six people have applied for the vacant Dayton school board seat that opened up when Ronald Jackson resigned. Three are familiar names and three are newcomers. Here they are:
—Jeffrey Mims. Recently retired from the district, Mims lobbied for Dayton Public Schools in Columbus since 1994 as the school board’s legislative liason. He formerly was president of the Dayton teachers’ union from 1983 to 1988 and was a teacher in the district before that. He has a masters degree in education from Wright State University.
—Nancy Nerny. Nerny is a retired teacher who impressed the board when she interviewed for an open seat last year. Nerny retired in 1997 after 32 years teaching in the district. She holds a bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Dayton and a masters in education from Wright State. She volunteers at Loos Elementary School among several other volunteer activities.
—Drew Fuller. A young Dayton attorney, Fuller is a graduate of the district and also previously impressed the board when he applied for the seat Jackson won last year. Fuller’s work is in government contracts and litigation for Sebaly Shillito & Dyer. He was the 1999 valedictorian at Colonel White High School and holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Dayton and a law degree from the University of Cincinnati.
—Kristen Bodiker. Bodiker is a second grade teacher who lives in Dayton and works at John F. Kennedy Elementary School in Kettering. She has taught in Kettering since 1995 and previously taught three years in California. She earned a master’s degree in education from the University of Dayton in 2003.
—Ronald Lee. Lee retired from Delco in 1999. Lee is an active volunteer who serves on the Downtown Priority Board, the city’s board of zoning appeals and on the board of the Inner West Community Development Corporation.
(CORRECTION: Lee had a recommendation from Len Roberts, the clerk of the City Commission, not City Commissioner and former school board member Joey Williams. Williams wrote a recommendation for Jeff Mims.)
—Douglas Moss. Moss is an accountant for the MonDay Community Correctional Institution on Gettysburg Avenue. He is a graduate of Patterson High School and has two children who attend Dayton Public Schools. Board member Joe Lacey wrote one of his recommendation letters.
For Drew and Nerny’s statements last November about why they wanted to join the school board go here.
Note: I ‘ve updated this post with more information about the candidates.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
School to move after chemical spill
(Students and staff at Van Cleve at McGuffey Elementary School during a 2006 backpack giveaway.)
Dayton Superintendent Percy Mack announced Monday that Van Cleve at McGuffey School, at 1032 Webster St., will close and the students and staff will relocate to the former Allen Elementary School building at 132 Alaska St. to protect against air vapors from a nearby chemical spill.
The move will mean school will start a week later for Van Cleve students, who will begin classes on Aug. 13.
Since last October, the Environmental Protection Agency has been testing in the area of the school and monitoring the movement of a plume of trichloroethylene, a product used for dry cleaning and metal cleaning. The source of the spill is believed to be the former DailmerChrysler plant now owned by Behr Dayton Thermodynamics Products, 1600 Webster St.
July testing showed elevated levels of the vapors from the spill in the school. When the district was advised to install a venting system to expel the vapors from the school, Mack said he decided instead to move. The EPA will install the seven-fan venting system anyway and Rafael Gonzalez, community involvement coordinator for the agency’s Chicago office, said the building would be safe for public use.
“We are very sensitive to the perception of building safety,” said Mack, noting that the tests did not show any immediate danger to people in the school but that the long term effects of exposure are not known.
“We want to give parents, and ourselves, peace of mind,” Mack said. “The safety of our students is of the utmost importance to us.”
Exposure to high levels of trichloroethylene over a long period can cause nerve, kidney and liver damage.
Allen Elementary School was closed in June as part of a cost-cutting plan in the wake of the district’s failed school levy and the building was scheduled to sit vacant this school year.
The is the second time in five years that Van Cleve school has been forced to move because of environmental concerns. During Thanksgiving break in 2001, Van Cleve moved from its Helen Street location to the former McGuffey Elementary School site after serious roof leaks caused mold to spread.
Van Cleve is not planned for reconstruction as part of the district’s school construction program. Its students eventually will attend Kiser, E.J. Brown and Ruskin elementary schools.
(Image credit: Jan Underwood, DDN)
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Obama light on policy in speech to students
(Obama with student in South Carolina)
As part of my effort to track Barack Obama’s education policies, I noticed he was the first presidential candidate to speak last week at the national convention of the College Democrats, oddly held in conservative South Carolina. (Video of the speech can be found here. He was followed later in the week by other Democratic presidential hopefuls, including Hillary Clinton and John Edwards.
Media reports indicate Obama was a big hit with the young crowd. He mostly sought to inspire the young Democrats to action and public service, and it seemed the speech was fairly light on education policies that might benefit college students.
Obama did tout universal health care, saying he’d like to see all young people given the option to stay on their parents’ health plans until age 25. He also decried the cost of college, noting that he and his wife, Michelle, paid student loans that were more than the cost of their mortgage for the first eight years of their marriage. But none of the media reports included any concrete proposals from Obama’s speech to contain college costs or student loans.
Find coverage of his speech at The State newspaper of Columbia, S.C., at The Chicago Sun-Times, the Spartansburg, S.C., Herald-Journal and from the Savannah, Ga., Morning News.
His success at the convention also inspired a long Chicago Tribune story on Obama’s strong appeal to young voters.
(Note: This post also appears at the Education Writers Association’s election blog, Education Election.)
(Image credit: The State)
Permalink | Comments (8) | Categories: Tracking Barack Obama
Goff facing criminal charge
Roseda Goff
By Scott Elliott
Staff Writer
Roseda Goff, the fired former superintendent of City Day Community School, has been charged with attempted obstruction of official business for discouraging a teacher from reporting a case of child abuse involving a student at the school.
Goff, 60, of Jefferson Twp., will be arraigned before Judge Tony Capizzi in Montgomery County Juvenile Court on Aug. 1 on a first degree misdemeanor charge. If convicted she could receive a sentence of up to 180 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.
Julie Bruns, chief of the juvenile division of the Montgomery County prosecutor’s office, said the incident began with a child at the school who told a teacher they had been struck by their mother and displayed injuries.
The teacher, Bruns said, went to Goff for instruction.
“It is our belief that on that occasion, and on prior occasions, she has told teachers not to report suspected abuse even though she and all the teachers are mandated to report,” Bruns said. “Those teachers, having a conscience, reported it anyway. She attempted to persuade them not to report it.”
Ohio law requires teachers to report incidents of suspected child abuse to authorities. As a result of a teacher’s report to police, the child’s mother now faces a child abuse charge, Bruns said.
Goff is at the center of an Ohio Department of Education investigation into allegations that students at City Day practiced for state achievement tests by drilling on questions that later appeared on the actual exams. The Dayton Daily News in February reported that 44 questions on City Day’s practice tests were identical or substantially the same as questions that appeared on the actual achievement tests.
A consultant who prepared the practice test said Goff gave her those questions, which she presumed were from practice materials. Goff has denied providing actual test questions for the practice exam.
Earlier this month, City Day’s sponsor — Cincinnati-based Education Resource Consultant of Ohio — fired Goff and dismissed its five-member governing board for refusing to fire her. A new board and superintendent were installed.
Officials from ERCO and the new governing board declined comment. Goff could not be reached for comment.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: City Day Investigation
Barack Obama, education and me
(Barack Obama with his then 6-year-old daughter Malia after his election to the Senate in 2004)
I am pleased to announce that I will be part of a group project launched by the Education Writers Association to track the education positions of the candidates for president over the next 18 months. EWA, an organization of hundreds of journalists across the country who report on education that I’ve been active in for about 10 years, is seeking to raise the profile of education issues in the campaign. The group is hoping to get the candidates to submit to interviews with education reporters to discuss their education views.
I have volunteered to contribute to a group blog, in which a handful of education reporters from around the country will each be following the education statements and views of a presidential candidate.
I have been assigned to keep tabs on Barack Obama, the Democratic Illinois senator. I would be grateful for any help GOTB readers could provide. If you see news anywhere about Obama and his education positions, please alert me via e-mail at selliott@daytondailynews.com.
I’m getting started by reading Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope, but I also noticed a little dust up last week, thanks to education blogger Alexander Russo, which had people asking is Barack Obama really in favor of sex education for kindergarteners?
It looks like the answer is yes, and no, depending on your definition of sex education.
Apparently, Obama supported a bill in the Illinois legislature that called for “age appropriate” sex education to be taught, even to kids as young as kindergarten. But what, exactly, is Obama advocating?
Not much, Obama says. He told a newspaper in 2004 that what he really intended was that kids be given accurate information. In his example, you don’t tell a kid who asks “where do babies come from” that they are delivered by a stork. What exactly do you tell the kid who asks that question? That, he said, should be decided case-by-case at the local school board level.
Still it seems Obama has staked out a position that tilts toward “comprehensive” sex education and away from “abstinence only” programs favored by the Bush administration, which emphasize the virtue of abstaining entirely from sex until marriage.
(Image credit: AP)
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Tracking Barack Obama
Try your hand at the state test online
I have long complained that the Ohio Department of Education’s Web site is very hard to use, but I have to give the folks up there credit. They have created a great tool that can help Ohio parents better understand the state achievement exams, see the questions and learn what those questions are intended to test.
For Ohio kids, they can even try their hand at recently released test questions and take practice tests all online.
I stumbled across this new testing page at ODE’s Web site the other day and spent hours exploring the different state tests and trying out the questions. I even put my soon-to-be-third grader in front of the computer and let her try out a bunch of questions.
If you have children who will be taking state tests, this is a very valuable practice tool that can give them lots of feedback.
For years, Ohio has been very progressive about releasing the questions from its state tests every July. Now they not only put those questions out there, but have made them interactive in a very helpful way. Take a look. You’ll learn a lot about the tests.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Categories: Testing
Busing: Consolidate the city and suburbs?
Today’s DDN editorial hails the recent cooperative deal to funding high school busing in Dayton and says more money could be saved if school districts would consolidate busing service. The editorial also gives more details about how the funds were raised for the deal. Take a look and let us know what you think of the editorial board’s argument.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, Schools and Politics
Ronald Jackson stepping down
Ronald Jackson
I just learned Dayton school board member Ron Jackson, who was appointed late last year to fill the unexpired term of Clayton Luckie, is resigning from the board. A press release from the school district says his wife is expanding her medical practice, increasing his family obligations.
This is a sudden turnabout for Jackson, a bright, promising new board member, who told me just a couple months ago that he was ready to fight for his seat in this fall’s election. The board now must choose a replacement who will serve just until the end of the year and will face an election campaign in November to stay on after that.
Here is the district’s press release. The paper will have a story in Sunday’s edition:
July 21, 2007
Contact: Jill Moberley, Public Information Officer
For Immediate Release
Search begins for applicants to fill unexpired board term
The Dayton Board of Education, to comply with state law concerning the appointment of a new member to fill Clayton Luckie’s unexpired term, is accepting applications through July 31, 2007, from community members interested in serving. The candidate selected must run and win in the November 2007 election to remain on the board, serving a four-year term that begins January 2008.
Dayton businessman Ronald Jackson, citing family reasons, is stepping down after eight months of service to the board. Appointed to fill Luckie’s unexpired term last December, Jackson’s resignation is effective July 23. Jackson will be assuming more family duties as his wife, a local physician, expands her medical practice. The Jacksons have two daughters who attend Dayton Public Schools.
Luckie, who served the Dayton Board of Education since 1996, was elected last November to the Ohio House of Representatives from the 39th District.
Those wishing to be considered for appointment to the school board must submit an application, a letter of interest, personal resume and three letters of recommendation. In addition, applicants must provide a brief written statement that describes why they want to be considered for this position, their related experience and qualifications for this position, and their opinion of the most important issues facing Dayton Public Schools.
To be eligible, an applicant also must be a registered voter and reside in the Dayton Public School District.
Application packets are available at the Dayton Public Schools Administration Building, 115 S. Ludlow St., and may be picked up between 7:30 a.m. and 6 p.m., Monday through Friday, at the front desk.
Applications should be mailed to:
Dayton Board of Education
Attention: Ms. Cherisse Kidd
115 S. Ludlow St.
Dayton, OH 45402-1812
or faxed to: 937-542-3152.
Applicants may be asked to participate in an interview with the board. The members reserve the right to interview only those candidates deemed qualified based on their resume, related experience and written statement. The board anticipates conducting interviews beginning Aug. 1, 2007.
The application deadline is 4:30 p.m., July 31, 2007.
The Dayton Board of Education is required by the Ohio Revised Code to make an appointment to fill the vacant board position no later than Aug. 22, 2007.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
DPS gets busing at no extra cost
A partnership between the city, county, school district, business leaders and the RTA today restored high school bus service in Dayton for the upcoming school year.
This was cutting it pretty close, with school scheduled to open in Dayton on Aug. 6, but just a week ago it looked like there was little chance of a happy resolution to this problem.
The deal that was struck looks to me like a big win for the school district, which got most of its old bus service from RTA at a dramatically reduced cost (practically for free, it looks like), and for the kids, who will not be placed in the uneasy position of transferring by the thousands through downtown.
The district last month had canceled a $2.8 million contract with RTA to bus kids to high schools, mostly on special routes that were created as part of the deal.
For the new agreement, the contract cost is reduced to $1.8 million as RTA will route about 2,000 kids through its regular system and restore some of the direct routes to schools.
The school board, which has consistently said it simply did not have the money for high school busing following the levy defeat in May, essentially kicks in no money to the deal. The district’s $1.1 million share of the busing costs will come from a state subsidy that it otherwise would not have received had bus service been totally cut and from dollars replaced by new free services through a county agency, according to my colleague Lynn Hulsey’s story.
Here are the funders who came to the table to make the deal work, according to the story:
RTA: $200,000 reduction in cost of bus passes.
Montgomery County Department of Job and Family Services: $500,000 for district social services, freeing school district dollars to be used for transportation.
Montgomery County: $350,000 subsidy
City of Dayton: $350,000 subsidy
Dayton Public Schools: $600,000 from a state subsidy the district would not receive if bus service was cut.
Permalink | Comments (16) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
DPS bus fix to be announced
It appears there is some sort of solution in the works to solve Dayton’s lack of high school busing for the upcoming school year.
And it sounds like just the sort of community partnership, involving the major stakeholders, that was needed. The big unanswered question is how limited (or not) will the new busing plan be and who is paying for it?
But some sort of busing plan would seem like a good substitute for no high school busing at all. Details will be announced Friday. Here’s the press release I just go this afternoon:
New Transportation Plan in Place
for Dayton Public Schools’ High School Students
WHAT: A news conference has been scheduled to share the details of a community collaboration that addresses the immediate transportation needs of high school students attending Dayton Public Schools and local charter schools.
WHO: Community partners include Dayton Public Schools, the Greater Dayton RTA, the City of Dayton, Montgomery County, and the Downtown Dayton Partnership.
WHEN: TOMORROW - Friday, July 20, 2007
11:00 a.m.
WHERE: Jackson Center, 329 Abbey Avenue
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Summer in the city: That’s where break began
Summer. In one popular view, the typical 12-week sumer break in the U.S. is a scourge on education — an unfortunate relic of our agrarian past that now impedes student learning by letting them backslide between grades. It would be better, they say, to eliminate summer, keeping kids in class all year with shorter breaks between quarters.
But would it surprise you to learn that summer break did NOT rise from the need for our farming forefathers to have their children in the fields during their peak season?
The online magazine Slate claims summer break, in fact, was an urban idea and that rural schools only adopted it in an effort to standardize with their counterparts in the cities.
In fact, the Slate story said cutting back the school year by eliminating the summer quarter was both a cost saving move for the school and a reaction to the reality that many kids in the era before compulsory attendance only came to class for half the school year anyway since that was all their families could afford. (I found this via Alexander Russo’s This Week in Education blog).
In my own experience growing up, I learned a lot on summer break. In fact, it was the lessons during time spent with my family, on trips, pleasure reading, playing sports and hanging out with close friends that I remember the most — more than anything I learned in school during some of my growing up years.
But that was my middle class reality. For other kids, summer is not only less enriching, it can be downright dangerous to their academic growth and even their personal safety.
In a perfect world, perhaps we could find a way for those kids to have some of the same summer opportunities I had. But it probably would be easier just to keep them off the streets and out of their sometimes troubled homes by keeping them in school.
Still, the same 100-year-old issue faces us today — cost. To operate school districts during a longer school year would cost a lot more money. And taxpayers already are balking at the cost of schools.
What do you think of the idea of year-round school vs. the traditional 12-week summer break?
(Image credit: Meine Klein blog)
Permalink | Comments (13) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Survivor: Real life edition
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m on vacation this week at the beach in South Carolina. I spent some of my Sunday searching in vain for a paper copy of the New York Times, a favorite weekend indulgence.
But that’s OK. I’ve been thinking some about a piece from last Sunday’s Times magazine and its implications for what we need to teach our kids. The story was not about education at all. It was about a unique genetic defect called Williams Syndrome and how a few missing bits of genetic code can have an extreme impact on personality. Scientists are learning a ton about the nature of genetics as it relates to personality by studying the disorder.
And in the course of the story, it discusses how Williams kids are highly social but lack the brain connections that let the rest of us recognize deception in social situations. This, it turns out, is a key factor in human interaction — judging others and their underlying motivations.
As one scientist in the story points out, in life we are all judging each other for two basic traits — competence and trustworthiness.
This left me wondering, how well are we teaching kids the things they’ll need to pass these tests when they interact with others in life?
Life, as the story discusses, is a group activity in which we depend on others while competing with them at the same time.
Perhaps this is why Survivor is such a hit. It’s what we do every day — evaluate those around us at work, in our families and in our social groups to decide who is contributing to the group, who we are allied to and who might be a threat to us.
Educationally, it seems, the first thing we need to do is give kids the tools they’ll need to contribute. At the most basic level, we all need to be competent communicators and problem solvers. That’s why we need to be solid at reading, writing and math.
But we also need to develop our special skills that help us stand out, to become a true asset to our groups. Every group needs leaders. We need skilled tradesmen. We need warriors. We also need other skills that hold us together in tough times, like humor and music.
And then there is the issue of trust. Think about this and you know it’s true. In whatever groups we are in we constantly gauge how much we can trust one another. And based on what we know we form or avoid alliances and partnerships with others.
How well do you think schools do of preparing kids for these situations? Do they emphasize the need to be a trustworthy player in various roles? Do they really get kids to see the critical importance of having the competence to contribute something to a group? Give us your take.
(Image credit: Survivor: Jungle Fever)
Permalink | Comments (12) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Teaching and Learning
Seeking diversity and academic succcess
(A Winston-Salem student’s rendering of an elementary school there.)
I’m at the beach in Charleston, S.C., this week and as I drove through North Carolina, I thought a lot about that state and its approach to education.
I briefly lived in Chapel Hill, N.C., in grammar school when my college professor father was on sabbatical and I had a great experience there attending a high quality public school. Overall, the state has a strong reputation for public education and for its school integration efforts.
North Carolina probably owes some of today’s successes in those areas to its history. Its reconstruction-era constitution places a high value on public schools for all and its checkered racial history as the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and a Jim Crow state likely drove some latter day efforts to level the educational playing field.
A few years ago, I had the good fortune to visit Winston-Salem, the diverse home of Wake Forest University and a community with a lot of thoughtful folks who care about education.
At the time, the countywide school system there was very purposeful in the way it was going about a school construction plan, locating schools between black and white neighborhoods in an effort to draw naturally diverse enrollments.
Today, it strikes me that for Dayton, diversity was less than a low priority for its $627 million school construction program — it was a non-priority.
A recent New York Times story about the difficulty of promoting diversity by focusing on family income also, in my mind, raised the issue of whether racial and socio-economic integration in schools couldn’t have been achieved more naturally by placing schools purposefully. Is Dayton missing a golden opportunity as it is now building essentially a new school district for the next century or so?
In the school district’s defense, what I am suggesting is something of a tall order here. Dayton, as we well know, is a very divided city when it comes to race. Locating schools that could draw students from white and black neighborhoods wouldn’t be easy. And for the most part, Dayton rebuilt schools on the same sites where they stood before. This made planning easier and reduced the costs of acquiring new land.
But that doesn’t excuse the fact that literally no consideration was given to this question of diversity during the planning of the school construction program. What I remember of Winston-Salem was that there was a huge community conversation about school placements. In fact, debates were raging during my visit about whether the school board’s site choices were effective enough.
No such conversation occurred in Dayton at all. Were diversifying school enrollment a priority, it seems the city and other interest groups could have come together to make the path to achieving integration more smooth.
It’s been a few years since I looked at racial breakdowns at the city schools. At the time, some schools already were showing marked turns toward resegregation after the 2002 court decision lifting an order requiring the district to maintain diverse schools. Mostly white schools were growing more white. And many other schools were becoming virtually all black. It’s likely this situation has only worsened.
What do you think? Did Dayton miss an opportunity to address integration through school construction?
(Image credit: Winston-Salem Schools)
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Urban School Issues
Teachers file complaint over DECA
By Scott Elliott
Staff Writer
The Dayton teacher’s union has filed a labor complaint against the city school board for its decision to convert the Dayton Early College Academy into a charter school.
DECA is a four-year-old experimental high school with about 400 students on the campus of the University of Dayton run jointly by the college and the district. Following the district’s May levy defeat, nearly half of the school’s teachers were listed among 208 teachers and others to be laid off under union rules.
School officials instead canceled their contract with UD to run the school and allowed it to convert to a charter school, which they believed freed it from the labor contract and other rules. School board members said at the time that it was the only way to protect “critical components” that were essential to the school’s success.
In its complaint, the Dayton Education Association said the move was a violation of the memorandum of understanding between the board and the union when the school was founded that made the school’s teachers union members and subjected the school to DEA’s contract rules.
“The only reason for the creation of this charter school is to avoid language in the contract concerning reductions in force,” union President Pat Lynch said in a statement.
Lynch argued that the teachers at DECA have been denied the contract rights, such as the right to due process when disciplined and to district-offered health insurance coverage.
The complaint, filed with the State Employee Relations Board, is similar to a criminal complaint. SERB will investigate, which could take up to five months, according to its general counsel, Russ Keith. Investigators then report to the board, which determines if there is probably cause that an unfair labor practice has occurred.
That can lead to a full hearing that is much like a trial, with witnesses and testimony before an administrative law judge who ultimately issues an order in the case. A final appeal can be made to the board. The entire process can take a full year to complete, Keith said.
Permalink | Comments (17) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Big donation helps save Stivers adjuncts
(Stivers students who are members of the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra)
By Scott Elliott
Staff Writer
An unidentified donor who contributed $100,000 in support of Stivers School for the Arts has helped a fund-raising group take a huge step toward restoring adjunct arts faculty who were laid off due to budget cuts.
Bill Pflaum, who heads fund-raising for the Seedling Foundation, would only say the donor has broad interest in Dayton schools and was supportive of arts education. About half the money will go toward an effort to save adjuncts. The rest will be spent on other needs at the school.
“We’re committed to raising $125,000 to $145,000 to support the adjuncts,” he said. “But this can’t all go to it. Thee are a lot of other needs.”
With the gift, Seedling has now raised about $70,000 to save adjuncts, who are paid about $18 an hour on average to provide specialized arts instruction. Stivers is rated one of the region’s top-scoring high school on state exams.
Pflaum said Seedling’s campaign is aiming at foundations and big donors but also seeks a wide spectrum of individual donors to contribute $18 each to cover one hour of adjunct instruction.
Following the defeat of Dayton’s school levy in May, the district laid off 75 percent of the school’s adjunct staff.
“It’s just not an arts school if you don’t have the adjuncts,” Pflaum said.
Seedling was founded to raise funds in support of Stivers. In the past, it has funded purchases to create a piano lab, buy supplies to start painting instruction, buy paper and tools needed to teach fine arts print making and rebuild a grand piano.
The generosity of Seedling donors is inspiring, Pflaum said. For example, he said his cell phone rang during a recent meeting with Superintendent Percy Mack.
“It was a retired teacher from Kettering who wanted the address to send money,” he said. “A few days later, we got a $2,000 donation in the mail.”
Stivers does lots of fund-raising, he said.
“It’s not just Seedling,” Pflaum said. “Students and adjunct teachers raise a lot of money on their own. Often we match what they raise. At Stivers, kids really learn that the arts don’t come for free.”
To donate to the Seedling Foundation, mail a check to P.O. Box 1858, Dayton, Ohio, 45401-1858. E-mail Pflaum at wdpflaum@ix.netcom.com with questions or call the school at 542-7380.
(Image credit: Ty Greenlees, DDN)
Permalink | Comments (27) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
No high school busing: What happens downtown?
Downtown is really in a pickle thanks to the defeat of Dayton’s school levy.
Here’s the problem. As part of the district’s $30 million budget cut it canceled a $2.8 million contract with the Greater Dayton RTA to provide transportation for high school students.
That deal had provided 39 extra buses on the road when school was in session and set up several direct routes that picked kids up from their homes and took them right to school, keeping them out of the rest of the RTA hub-and-spoke system that requires most riders to transfer at Third and Main streets downtown. The contract also provided free RTA bus passes for those kids.
But high school busing is not a state requirement and the district says it now has to focus on academics and required services at the exclusion of almost everything else or its budget will not balance at year’s end.
RTA leaders are concerned. Without the district’s contract, kids will have to buy their own passes and ride the system through downtown to get to school. They fear up to 3,000 kids on city buses will create overcrowding.
It’s obvious this problem affects multiple stakeholders. The city, the county, the police, the schools and RTA all have an interest in not creating a bad situation at Third and Main. RTA would like to try to find a joint solution. The problem is the one thing all those stakeholders have in common is they have tight budgets.
Even a limited busing contract, say half the $2.8 million cost, could help. But who has $1.4 million to make that happen?
The story in today’s paper was cut because of space constraints. For the full story, click the “continued” link:
By Scott Elliott and Joanne Huist Smith
Staff Writers
City high school students must find their own way to school starting Aug. 6, and a potential flood of teen-agers downtown has officials scrambling for alternatives.
Following the defeat of Dayton’s school levy and a $30 million budget cut, the district cancelled a $2.8 million contract for extra public bus routes and free passes for students.
Mark Donaghy, executive director for the Greater Dayton Regional Transit Authority said he still hoped a more limited deal could be forged. Losing the school contract will cut RTA’s budget by 12 percent, likely forcing layoffs and fewer buses.
“We’ve modified the contract as best we could to get the cost down. The bottom line is, the school district still needs a way to fund it,” Donaghy said.
School Superintendent Percy Mack said the district has no money to pay for RTA service. With a budget cut 16 percent, the district has must focus on academics and only fund the services that the state requires.
“You have to do the things that you’ve got to do,” he said.
Donaghy has been meeting with representatives from the city, Montgomery County, the Downtown Dayton Partnership and the business community in search of financing.
“I have told my folks to proceed as if there were a modified contract,” Donaghy said. “We’ll be prepared to implement it and we’ll be prepared not to implement it.”
Donaghy said he’s worried about overcrowding on buses and at bus stops. About 3,000 high school students rode RTA buses to school last year. Donaghy said that even if all bought RTA’s most expensive pass, only 12 of the 39 buses that took kids to school last year could go back in service.
“Our existing service doesn’t have the capacity to move these kids to where they need to go,” Donaghy said. “Students will be competing for seats with adults.”
Mack said his concerns are truancy, absenteeism and concentrating kids in downtown, a key RTA transfer point. Last year’s deal raised the contract cost but put more kids on direct routes that avoided transfers.
“We go the results we wanted,” Mack said. “When we had the availability to fund it, we did and a lot of issues went away.”
(Image credit: Jim Noelker, DDN)
Permalink | Comments (10) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
City Day fires Goff, installs new leaders
Roseda Goff
By Scott Elliott
Staff Writer
City Day Community School Wednesday fired Superintendent Roseda Goff and installed a new governing board as its new leaders promised to start with a clean slate after months of turmoil.
In a sweeping action, the new board members fired Goff, replaced her with principal Shonice Carr, created a dean of students position and named Bryan Richardson, a former rental car manager, to fill that job.
“We have to promote an integrity-based school operation,” Carr said. “A lot of things have occurred and been alleged. Whether true or not, the perception is very real.”
The Ohio Department of Education continues to investigate two incidents of mishandling of state achievement tests at the charter school.
In February, the Dayton Daily News reported that City Day students practiced on 44 questions were identical or nearly the same as questions that later appeared on the actual state exam in the days leading up to the March 2006 administration of the Ohio Achievement Tests. Then in May, test monitors caught a City Day employee taking notes while reviewing an Ohio Achievement Test that students were to take later in the week.
The school’s sponsor, Cincinnati-based Education Resource Consultants of Ohio, then blamed Goff, the last of the City Day’s four founding teachers still running the school, for a “lack of institutional control” that resulted in testing investigations and other management problems.
In its first order of business, the board terminated Goff’s employment and “any association she has with City Day school” effective immediately and barred her from school grounds.
New governing board president Richard Rucker pledged better leadership for the school.
“We’re here to support City Day to the best of our ability, to make sure it is financially stable and the management and leadership of City Day is effective to make sure the children of City Day get the best possible education,” he said.
Leonard Harding, ERCO’s executive director, praised the new board.
“We feel at ERCO we put together the strongest possible board in the Dayton area,” he said.
Rebecca Moore, one of several teachers who attended, hailed the board’s actions.
“We’re really excited to have a new beginning,” she said.
Permalink | | Categories: City Day Investigation
No Dayton school levy until 2008
The Dayton Board of Education will pass on November, holding off on another levy until 2008.
Instead, the district will consider more cuts if business leaders agree to fund an outside consultant’s study of its operations, school officials said Tuesday.
“The community spoke very clearly that they want us to go back and make sure we’ve captured every dollar we can,” board President Yvonne Isaacs said. “First we are going to look at opportunities for savings.”
By waiting until 2008, the school district guarantees a second school year of dramatically reduced services. Under Ohio law, collection for tax levies passed in one year does not begin until the following year.
So the November election is the district’s last chance to pass a levy that would bring new money in 2008. Any levy passed next year would not begin bringing in new tax money until Jan. 1, 2009.
Some of the reasons are practical. The campaign levy for the defeated May levy raised more than $300,000 from local businesses, organizations and individuals. Asking for another round of big money in 2007 was a tall order for those who have backed the district’s campaigns, Isaacs said.
Also, a countywide human services levy is planned for November. Isaacs said many of the same funders who back the district will be asked to support the human services levy. The district faced the possibility of competing with the human services levy for dollars and, possibly, for votes, Isaacs said.
Finally, board members simply believed another levy this year would fail, she said. “We really do not believe we could pass in November,” Isaacs said. “We want to be sure to capture all the cost savings we can so if we go back next time we can increase our chances of passing.”
Permalink | Comments (25) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Local contractor out of Dayton’s project
In today’s paper, I wrote about changes in Dayton’s school construction program that apparently have forced the one local company involved in managing the project — Danis Construction — to drop out.
The real killer, if the district ends up with a management team that doesn’t have a local company, could be to its ability to attract local and minority contractors to school construction jobs.
This was one of the school board’s biggest promises about the $627 million construction program when it campaigned for the $245 million local share bond issue in 2002 — that as much of the money as possible would go to local companies and minority-owned companies.
For the first phase of construction, which included five schools, the board barely met its 25 percent target for local companies participating and missed its 35 percent goal for minority-run companies by a long shot. (School construction chief John Carr didn’t have up-to-date numbers for the second phase so far, but he said they are improved over the first phase.)
One of the best ways to get that local and minority involvement is networking. And that’s where it helps to have a locally-based player as part of the management team — a company with connections to subcontractors in the area.
But from the state’s perspective, there is one overarching concern — saving taxpayers money. The Ohio School Facilities Commission uses a bidding process to try to get the schools built at the lowest possible price. Where the companies that do the work come from is a much lower priority for the state.
What do you make of this development? Is there any way for the school board to better navigate this natural tension between lowest price and local participation?
Permalink | Comments (8) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, School Construction
New bids sought for school projects
By Scott Elliott
Staff Writer
John Danis wants his company to finish the job of managing the city’s 10-year, $627 million school construction program.
But Danis, chief executive officer of Dayton-based Danis Construction, said a partnership that includes his company soon will be off the project. The state is taking bids for new management for the remaining two-thirds of the program to rebuild all of Dayton’s schools.
“I’d love to continue to be part of this project,” Danis said. “Right now I can’t figure out how to be a part of it.”
Danis, in partnership with two other companies, has managed school construction in the city since the program began in 2002. But negotiations with the state to keep that team together for the next building phase broke down over money.
State officials say Dayton’s program is now smaller after seven schools were dropped from the plan last year because declining enrollment. Danis said a corresponding 25 percent reduction in the management fee made sticking with the project a bad business move for his company. The overall management fee on the roughly $100 million first phase of the program was $8.9 million.
State officials say a smaller job means a lower fee.
“The scope of the project and the number of facilities has decreased,” said Cheryl Lyman, spokeswoman for the Ohio School Facilities Commission. “Based on that new reality, that was what led to changes in the construction manager structure.”
The question now is who will manage the project going forward? The state should have an answer in September. Dayton school construction chief John Carr said if the management team ends up with no Dayton-area firms, it could be even harder for the district to meet its promise to spend as many of its construction dollars as possible on local companies.
“We made a promise to the community to use local people,” Carr said. “The only way to go and get that now is to start the process over.”
For Dayton Public Schools, changing construction managers for the next phase of its school building project could further complicate efforts to include more local and minority-owned companies on its jobs.
Since the program began in 2002, school have largely been built on schedule and on budget. The one big area where the district has missed its targets has been on including minority-owned companies.
The program, which will build 27 new or completely rehabilitated schools by 2012, is a partnership between the state and the city school district. Because Dayton is a high poverty district, the state is funding about two-third the cost of the total building program. Dayton’s share is paid for by a $245 million voter-approved 2002 bond issue.
By law those funds are separate from the district’s operating money and can only be used for school construction. That’s why work on new schools continues even after the district laid off more than 400 people in June. Three schools are scheduled to open in 2007— the rebuilt Stivers School for the Arts on Fifth Street, a new school called Rosa Parks Elementary School on Kings Highway and Thurgood Marshall High School on Hoover Avenue, which replaces Colonel White High School.
The school board has set these goals for construction — 25 percent of the dollars spent should go to local companies and 35 percent to minority-owned businesses.
For the five-school first phase, it met the local participation target with 26 percent. But for minority companies, participation was only 11 percent. But board president Yvonne Isaacs said these remain high priorities.
“We have pushed for local and minority involvement from day one,” she said.
The second phase, which officially began on Jan. 1, already is doing better, said John Carr, the district’s school construction chief. But recruiting companies to the jobs can be tough. The state has lots of rules that sometimes discourage potential bidders.
Consider the case of Miles-McClellan, a minority-owned Columbus-based company that was part of Dayton’s original construction management team. Two years ago, Miles-McClellan dropped out of Dayton’s project because it wanted to bid for general trades work on other school construction projects.
State rules prevent companies that are managing one construction project from working on other projects. Ultimately, Miles-McClellan felt it could make more money bidding for trades work than managing in Dayton.
“For us it was strictly a business decision,” said Lonnie Miles, the company’s chief executive officer. “We were a 13 percent partner in Dayton and we couldn’t do construction work anywhere. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to take the best contractors in the state out of the work because of that rule.”
The state is now taking bids for a new construction management team. The remaining managers — Danis Construction of Dayton, Columbus-based Ruscilli Construction and Quandel Construction of Pennsylvania — could not come to agreement with the state on a new fee for the next phase.
Because enrollment has declined dramatically in the city schools since the construction program began in 2002, the Ohio School Facilities Commission last year ordered eight schools scratched from the district’s plan for 34 buildings.
Now, state officials say a smaller project should pay a lower management fee.
In fact, the three companies have been managing the project since Jan. 1 for no pay as negotiations with the state went on.
Michael Shoemaker, OSFC’s executive director, said its not unusual for management teams to change on big projects over time. In this case, “we needed to move on and let these guys move on to other project,” he said.
Shoemaker said its up to local companies who want to participate to compete for the work.
“The bottom line is the local guys have got to put pencil to paper and make a bid,” he said.
Danis’ chief executive officer, John Danis, said his company couldn’t manage the project for the price the state wants to pay.
“For these types of projects, if you look at who’s been hired, its always been a joint venture,” he said. “They’re big jobs and they take lots of resources for these big urban districts. That’s why they’ve gone to joint ventures between national or statewide firms and local firms. I think that’s how the state likes it. Will that be achievable here? I don’t know.”
Isaacs said the board is optimistic.
“We are hoping someone local will be able to step up and present a viable bid so we can come out of this with more local involvement,” she said.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: School Construction
Duking it out over teacher pension
The DDN’s editorial board weighed in Saturday on the war of words between the Fordham Institute (the research arm of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation) and the State Teachers Retirement System over the health of the state’s teacher pension program.
Fordham, a frequent critic of the public education status quo, fired the first shot last month in a report that sounded alarms, saying the pension program was in serious danger.
What was unusual was the tough talk in reply from the state agency. STRS ripped Fordham’s study and the researchers methods, aruging that the pension program is solid.
And in fact, the key issue here is the same issue plaguing schools everywhere and employers in all sorts of professions — health care.
By far the fastest rising costs for school districts are the costs of health care. Schools, which spend a huge percentage of their money on personnel, have seen 15 percent plus increases in health care premiums in recent years. In fact, if these costs were going up at a rate more in line with inflation, its likely many of the levies we’ve seen in recent years never would have made the ballot.
STRS has a similar problem. In addition to the money it saves and invests for teachers to use as pension income in retirement, the program has also offered heatlh insurance to retired teachers. The pension side of the house is fine. It’s the health care side where skyroocketing costs simply cannot be contained if they continue at their current rate.
The editorial asks an interesting question — what should the teacher pension program look like in the future? It’s true that many companies are dropping pensions. (BTW, the DDN is not one of them. The company still offers a pension.) Should the state continue to offer a pension? Should the system be reworked? How?
(Image credit: cvadult.org)
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Schools and Politics
Dayton: Most divorced U.S. city
Last Sunday, I came across an interesting story in the Style section of the New York Times called “The shelf life of bliss” that mostly was about new research that suggests three years, not seven, is often the breaking point for marriages and other live-in relationships. That’s the point where the “honeymoon” period ends and couples start wondering if they can really live with this person for their rest of their lives.
Accompanying the story, though, was a list of statistics showing the top 10 cities with the most people never married (Gainesville, Fla., and College Station, Texas), the most married people (Weston, Fla.; Surprise, Ariz.; and O’Fallon, Mo.) and the most divorced people (Clearwater, Fla.; Lauderhill, Fla. and … Dayton, Ohio???).
That’s right. According to the Times, 18 percent of Daytonians are divorced, tied for the highest percentage in the nation (follow the link to the Times story and click on the graphic on the left side of the page to see the complete rankings). Naturally, I thought about what this might mean educationally.
A sky high divorce rate, it seems, is just one more signal that kids in this city had unique challenges that teachers must overcome. We already know Dayton has high poverty. So teachers in the city must help kids cope both with their lack of resources and the emotional baggage and additional stresses of living with divorced parents.
I was a little surprised that Dayton topped this list. It’s not something I would have guessed. My first thought was that this was a statistical quirk. Maybe, for instance, cities with falling population were more likely to make the list? That one didn’t add up.
In fact, there wasn’t much common to the most divorced cities. Here’s the list and the divorce percentage:
Clearwater, Fla. 18
Lauderhill, Fla. 18
Dayton, Ohio 18
Santa Fe, N.M. 17
Evansville, Ind. 17
Independence, Mo. 16
Deerfield Beach, Fla. 16
Pompano Beach, Fla. 16
Chattanoga, Tenn. 16
Tacoma, Wash. 16
The only cities on the list that even strike me as similar to Dayton at all are Evansville and Chattanoga.
What’s your theory on Dayton’s high divorce rate?
(Image credit: Joe-Ks.com
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Ryan: Seniority killing school change
Terry Ryan
On the editorial page in today’s DDN, Fordham Foundation Vice Presient Terry Ryan sees a parallel between auto industry upheaval and public school change.
Mostly, Ryan’s piece is an argument against seniority in labor contracts. And he’s right that looser seniority rules would give schools more flexibility to assign teachers where administrators believe they are most needed, and to hold together teaching staffs that are working, such as at the Dayton Early College Academy. In fact, Ryan notes, DECA had to convert to a charter school to protect its effective program from being devastated by seniority rules.
But if seniority were to go away, would it really make a wide impact on educational quality? Unions don’t think so. And without seniority, is there any fair, objective way to decide who stays and who goes in a time of layoff, such as the one Dayton Public Schools has just been through?
Not everyone is convinced.
A key purpose of seniority is to take subjectivity out of make-or-break decisions about people’s livelihoods. In most employment situations, most of the workers are competent and reliable. A few are very stellar and a few underperform. Many employers do a poor job of dealing with the low performers. They tend to ignore them rather than try to help them improve or “counsel them out” of the profession. This especialy is true of school distircts.
So at a time of layoff, even for a company that does not have to follow seniority rules, the hard decisions about who to let go and keep often come down to a choice between two similarly good employees. Seniority rules make the choice easy, if not less painful, by simply asking who has been working here longer? That simple question is not the least bit subjective. And therefore, unions argue, there is an inherent fairness in the logic of seniority.
Any other method is going to require subjective tests and, therfore, be driven by people’s opinions. The big problem that arises is the resulting unevenness of the results. Why did they fire a well-liked 25-year employee with a family and keep a recent college graduate hire that hardly anybody knows and has no workplace track record yet? Those sorts of questions torture people.
Even “work quality” —which some argue should be the only basis on which workers are judged — can be hard to define. Union leaders have lots of stories about employees who recieved stellar reviews for years only to receive a dreadful review under a new boss. So what reviews to you believe in such a case? A decade of good reviews or just the most recent report from a boss that is, perhaps, showing off to someone above them or maybe just dislikes the employee on a personal level?
Seniority is such a basic labor tenent that its hard to imagine unions giving in on this. In fact, I should note that even the auto industry unions, which Ryan notes have made huge concessions in the face of bitter economic realities in that industry, have not given in on seniority.
Level headed union leaders will admit that seniority has its problems. But they argue it is still the most fair system. If you don’t like seniority rules, propose a new system here that is similary objective but, you believe, better in a time of layoff.
Permalink | Comments (18) | Categories: Schools and Politics
Where have the kids gone?
In June, 2005, I returned to Dayton from a year away for study at the University of Michigan through the Knight Wallace fellowships in journalism.
Immediately, I began to notice something odd. Dayton seemed, well, more empty.
Could it be that in a year’s time the population had noticeably declined? The more I conisdered this, the more I believed it to be true.
And according to a story in the DDN last week, it appears I may have been right.
Now, in 2005 I was moving back from Ann Arbor, Mich., a bustling, and growing, city. So at first I thought it was just the contrast with Dayton’s comparatively empty streets that was a bit jarring.
But I had lived in Dayton for 18 years before those 12 months away. After a month or so back I was convinced — there seemed to be less traffic than before I left. Fewer people seemed to be walking the streets.
Around that time I was looking at enrollment data for the city. A change caught my eye. While Dayton Public Schools’ enrollment had been falling for years the actual enrollment of all schools in the city combined had stayed relatively constant at about 33,000. But that year the number was down about 2,000 kids. Where had they gone?
I talked to a couple of school district sources. They had also noticed a change but were stumped as to what was behind it.
This fed my hypothsis about a population change. I was convinced that there were just fewer people. I even tried to persuade a couple editors that it could be a story. We knew the region had lost more than 20,000 manufacturing jobs — much of it auto industry related — this decade. Could it be that people were just moving out out of the area entirely?
There wasn’t much census data at the time. I suggested strategies like looking to see if homes were staying on the market longer, or if home utility consumption was down. But the idea went nowhere. The bottom line, I think, was that nobody else really believed things could had changed all that much that fast.
Then last week, there was a front page story in the DDN that told this shocking story —
only five cities in America has lost more population than Dayton
this decade. And that list was not good company. No. 1 was hurricane devastated New Orleans. Also in was catastrophically depressed Detroit.
So now I’m back to believing I was right. What have you observed? Does it seem like your part of down has thinned out?
(Image credit: Wright State University)
ERCO names new City Day board
By Scott Elliott
Staff Writer
City Day Community School, plagued by testing irregularities and management problems, has a new governing board.
The charter school’s sponsor, Education Resource Consultants of Ohio, fired its governing board on June 1 after board members failed to comply with its demand to fire Superintendent Roseda Goff. ERCO took control of the school’s operations and placed Goff on paid administrative leave.
The new board will meet for the first time on July 11 at 6 p.m. at the school, said Phyllis Brown, ERCO’s legal counsel. One of the first orders of business for the new board members will be to decide Goff’s fate, she said.
The five new board members were selected by ERCO from a pool of applicants. They are:
—Eddie Charles Jeter, a career development specialist with the Dayton Jobs Corps.
—Sheila Ballard, a branch manager with Fast Payday Loans of Ohio.
—Darlene Ellissa Jones, a local minister.
—Rachael Hutchison, director of social services for Englewood Manor nursing home.
—Richard Rucker, school director for RETS Tech Center of Centerville.
In February, a Dayton Daily News examination found City Day students practiced on 44 questions were identical or nearly the same as questions that later appeared on the actual state exam in the days leading up to the March 2006 administration of the Ohio Achievement Tests. In May, ERCO monitors caught a City Day employee taking notes while reviewing an Ohio Achievement Test that students were to take later in the week.
ERCO then blamed Goff for a “lack of institutional control” that resulted in mishandling of state exams and other management problems. A state investigation into the testing incidents is still underway.
Permalink | | Categories: City Day Investigation
Lacey sues Dayton school board
Joe Lacey
Dayton Board of Education member Joe Lacey Friday filed suit against the board claiming it violated the state’s open meetings law by deliberating and deciding the fate of Roosevelt High School outside of a public meeting.
In a conversation with me today, Lacey cited this blog, Get on the Bus, and comments by board member Mario Gallin, who explained the process for how the decision to raze Roosevelt was made in this blog post from December.
This much is on the record for certain — the board announced the plan to demolish Roosevelt last May and then-president of the board Gail Littlejohn made it clear a decision had been made prior to any board vote on the matter. The vote came after the decision was made.
Lacey argues this violates Ohio’s laws that require deliberations and decisions of a public board to be made in open public meetings. Lacey points to Gaillin’s recollection that board members had been consulted and their positions regarding Roosevelt were known prior to the announcement. But that is not the same as a vote.
Even so, the board ultimately did hold a public vote on its plan for the Roosevelt site, which includes tearing the old school down and building a combined school and city recreation center in its place.
This comes up now, a year later, because bids will soon be awarded to begin demolition work on Roosevelt. The first contract is for asbestos removal and should be considered by the board any time now as the bidding process has been underway for at least a month.
At best, Lacey’s suit could probably force the board to hold a new public meeting and vote again on Roosevelt. That is was Lacey is what he said he wants — a new meeting at which the issues surrounding the demolition plan are openly discussed and voted on. But there isn’t much hope of stopping the demolition plan.
What do you think of Lacey’s lawsuit? Does the board need a lesson in openness under Ohio law?
Permalink | Comments (24) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
