So, what do we make of Monday’s school board meeting?

The long and the short of it is that the school board is really not interested in working out a compromise with the city. This moratorium on property acquisition and meetings with Ray LaHood and the city has all been a farce and a waste of everyone’s time. They either want to locate next to an existing park or force the city to create a new park adjacent to an existing school site. Of course, they know very well the city isn’t going to pay over $5 million to give land to the school district even if they had it to spend. So, that means, thanks to their inflexibility on the arbitrary acreage standards, the new school will be built right where they wanted it all along: in Glen Oak Park.

In essense, they want to create a suburban school environment (one-level building in a sea of green space) in the heart of the city. And they believe, without any solid evidence, that this will improve the educational environment and give our children “the best” instead of “good enough.”

As for specific rebuttals to board members’ concerns:

• There was a lot of rhetoric about “denying opportunities” to the children and “compromising educational objectives” if they received any less than 15 acres. However, at the very beginning of the meeting, Alicia Butler announced the times and locations of the next two “planning sessions” (i.e., community forums) that would help “determine the programming and space needs” for the new “birth through eighth” schools that will be built. If the programming and space needs haven’t been determined yet, how do they know they need 15 acres?
• Hinton mentioned he wanted a baseball field and a soccer field… that adds up to about 5 acres. What are the other 10 for?
• Do these children not have access to a park when school is not in session? To hear the school board members talk, you’d think these kids were prisoners in detention camps, never allowed outside except to attend school. Also, how dense do they think the East Bluff is? It’s not like these kids don’t have any yards at all. I lived on the East Bluff for 11 years and, while it is denser than suburbia, there’s a healthy bit of green space there, thank you very much.
• I’ve already dealt extensively with the question of ISBE recommendations in a previous post.
• As for accessibility, did they ever consider putting the children with special needs on the first floor, and the able-bodied children on the upper floor(s)? A sprawling, single-level school will look incongruous in the East Bluff.
• From Gorenz and Allen, I’d like to know when school improvement and community revitalization became mutually exclusive activities. This is a false dichotomy, and further evidence that the school board isn’t interested in any real dialogue or compromise. The sad truth is, if the school board and city are working against each other, they will both lose.
• Ken Hinton talked about the psychological effects green space has on children — that it “lifts a child’s spirit” and makes them want to learn! If so, how does he explain the dismal performance of Sterling school, which sits on 26 acres of spirit-lifting green space? Or that students in acreage-deprived Whittier are the fifth best in the district on standardized tests? Anomalies?

The most insulting part of this whole discussion is the clear implication that city leaders, parents, neighbors, and other concerned citizens are a bunch of malevolent obstructionists who get their jollies out of subjecting their own and others’ children to dilapidated educational facilities to satisfy their own selfish desires, and that the only kind-hearted, child-loving saints in the city are the seven members of the school board.

Yet their facilities “solution” is not based on any objective, evidence-based educational practices, but rather arbitrary standards and anecdotal evidence. I would recommend to the school board that they read a publication from the U. S. Department of Education called “Identifying and Implementing Educational Practices Supported by Rigorous Evidence: A User Friendly Guide.” (PDF File)

I would especially like to draw their attention to page iii, which states:

As illustrative examples of the potential impact of evidence-based interventions on educational outcomes, the following have been found to be effective in randomized controlled trials – research’s “gold standard” for establishing what works:

• One-on-one tutoring by qualified tutors for at-risk readers in grades 1-3 (the average tutored student reads more proficiently than approximately 75% of the untutored students in the control group).
• Life-Skills Training for junior high students (low-cost, replicable program reduces smoking by 20% and serious levels of substance abuse by about 30% by the end of high school, compared to the control group).
• Reducing class size in grades K-3 (the average student in small classes scores higher on the Stanford Achievement Test in reading/math than about 60% of students in regular-sized classes).
• Instruction for early readers in phonemic awareness and phonics (the average student in these interventions reads more proficiently than approximately 70% of students in the control group).

It’s interesting to note that “provide students with 15 acres of spirit-lifting green space” isn’t listed. That’s not to say they aren’t focusing on the things that are listed, as I’m sure they are, but the difference between these items and the 15-acre minimum is that the listed items have been proven effective.

To establish a 15-acre standard that has proven ineffective in the district’s own experience, produce no rigorous evidence indicating it will be effective in the future, and then tell the public they are somehow denying their children a quality education if they don’t give them said 15 acres, is nothing more than a hollow emotional plea — a straw man set up for no other purpose than to “guilt” people into agreement.

Frankly, to say I’m disappointed with the school district would be an understatement. I’ll continue to send my children to private school. And if I didn’t love Peoria so much despite the school district, I’d move out just to deny them my tax money.

District 150 school board members made it very clear at Monday’s board meeting that they are not willing to accept less than 15 acres for a new school site. “15 acres is the minimum in terms of the school site for our children,” Superintendent Ken Hinton said at the meeting. All the other board members agreed.

Furthermore, they want the city to pay for the acquisition of all the land needed to create those 15 acres around the Glen Oak School site (estimated to be over $5 million) or they will pursue the Glen Oak Park site for the new school. Regardless of the final site chosen, the school board wants to continue acquiring property on the park site because “it’s not fair to keep them in limbo,” Superintendent Hinton said.

I’d like to credit board president Alicia Butler for at least asking the question I wanted asked. Here’s a transcription of her question and Hinton’s answer:

BUTLER: Mr. Hinton, can you delineate why you are coming up with the 15 acres?

HINTON: Sure I can. The 15 acres, in terms of the — and again, this is the vision on my part — in terms of as we go forward as a school district, we have an image and our children, I mean our, you know, our district has an image that I want to work on, and one of the things that is very important is that I want our families and our children to have the very best in the sense that they have a playground that has ball — baseball fields on it, the possibility that they want to go outside and do outdoor exploration, if we need to have soccer there, soccer’s available. Many of our children don’t have that particular environment. That is why the park site was such a choice site — is such a choice site, I should say — in terms of the opportunities it affords our students and our families and our staff.

The other part of that is that it is a minimal recommendation in terms of Illinois State Board of Education, and if you were to take that recommendation completely, it would actually be more than 15 acres. So the 15 acres is a minimum in terms of building the types of schools that we’re talking about doing as we go forward in terms of providing our children with state-of-the-art facilities to promote learning and see to it that we have optimal success with our children.

Mary Spangler added that based on national information, “we’re right there nationally” — which I assume means that we’re within the national average. (Yet, based on 2003 information from CEFPI, 22 states don’t have any minimum acreage requirements; one would think that would bring down the average.) She also said we need room to expand parking in the future, and the school building needs to be all one level to make it accessible to kids with special needs who shouldn’t be going up and down in elevators “in case of emergencies; it’s a safety issue.”

Martha Ross was concerned that switching sites would have a significant impact on the district’s construction timeline, and she later expressed her support for the park site.

David Gorenz believes that the best decision is to go with the park site based on its suitability for the educational programs the district wants, affordability, transportation issues, safety concerns, and community revitalization. He made a big point that community revitalization was last on the list and that the district should not compromise educational programs for the sake of community revitalization.

Matheson prefers the park site and will only consider the Glen Oak School site if the city provides complete financing of a 15 acre site.

Garrie Allen, unable to resist the urge to play the race card, said that “children of former slaves are being denied their 15 acres and a mule.” He later added, “it’s not our job as a school district to clean up blighted areas . . . Our job is to make things better for children.”

Stephen Morris and Butler both back the park site as well, although Butler was more evenhanded in her comments.

That’s my report.  In my next post, I’ll analyze the meeting.