A kid gets a “C” in English. His parent appeals the grade. The principal sides with the teacher. The parent appeals again. Everyone up to and including Superintendent Ken Hinton side with the teacher. Then the appeal goes to the Peoria Board of Education. The Board votes 5-2 to change the grade to a “B.” To their credit, board members Stowell and Parker voted against the change.

The third-year English teacher, JoAnna Moe, told District 150 School Board members she gave the junior ample opportunity to better the grade, but issued a “C” for the lack of effort the student put into an enriched English project.

According to the district’s policy manual (§6:280):

Every teacher shall maintain an evaluation record for each student in the teacher’s classroom. The final grade assigned by the teacher cannot be changed by a District administrator without notifying the teacher. Reasons for changing a student’s final grade include:

• a miscalculation of test scores;
• a technical error in assigning a particular grade or score;
• the teacher agrees to allow the student to do extra work that may impact the grade;
• an inappropriate grading system used to determine the grade; or
• an inappropriate grade based on an appropriate grading system.

Should a grade change be made, the administrator making the change must sign the changed record.

In this case, the administrators upheld the grade given by the teacher. One wonders what reason or authority the school board had for changing it based on the above criteria. The paper states that the appeal “eventually made its way to the board by school district rules, similar to cases involving suspensions and expulsions.” But after looking at the policy manual, including the section on suspensions and expulsions and the uniform grievance procedure, I could find no written policy on appealing a grade to the school board after it had been upheld by the administration.

The teachers certainly see this as precedent-setting. A petition signed by 70 teachers and staff members backed up the teacher. Scott Schifeling, Peoria Federation of Teachers President, was quoted in the Journal Star as saying, “I’ve never seen it go to this level. … I think it sets a very bad precedent.”

For its part, the school board won’t comment on the matter, hiding behind confidentiality rules and laws. So we can’t find out who the student was to know if this was the child of an influential person in the community, for instance; nor do we know what the school board’s reasoning was for overturning the unanimous decision of their entire staff of administrators and teachers.

What’s really incredible is that this is not changing a grade from failing to passing, or changing a grade from a “B” to and “A” to preserve some sort of perfect grade point average. Instead, it changes the grade from a “C” to a “B” — for reasons we’ll apparently never know.

What we do know is that the entire staff of District 150 is now demoralized, and teachers and parents will be forgiven for questioning the board’s commitment to high academic standards for District 150 students.

This is old news, but I just wanted to give everyone a chance to comment on it: District 150, it was reported last Friday in the paper, is going to spend $94 million in new buildings and renovations. Here’s how it breaks down:

And where will all this money come from? According to the paper, $72 million will come from the Public Building Commission ($28 million from a previous request, $44 million in a new request), and “[t]he nearly $22 million remaining would come from the District 150’s own bonding authority and about $8.2 million in cash balances.” The paper also said that “Board President David Gorenz said the board was intent on working within its means without raising the tax rate while at the same time trying to make the greatest impact.”

Now I have some questions about all this. First of all, the paper reported on Nov. 30, 2006, that the school board would only have access to “up to $60 million” from the Public Building Commission. When and how did that get increased to $72 million? Also, according to information I got from District 150 via FOIA request, the school district can spend a little over $33.9 million in fire prevention and safety funds on these projects. So why aren’t they using all of those funds first before asking the Public Building Commission for more money?

Here’s the problem with trying to keep track of what’s going on with District 150 — the numbers change often and with no explanation. At the time we all thought $60 million was the cap for PBC funding, we were told that the tax rate would stay the same because other bonds would be paid off, so it would be a wash. Now that the number has increased to $72 million, we’re still told the tax rate won’t go up. How can that be?

Also, anyone know what STS Consultants said it would cost to replace Glen Oak School? If you guessed $7.95 million, you’re right! Cost to renovate that building: $8.36 million. Now it’s going to cost $27.9 million to build a new Glen Oak School. Wow.

I was e-mailed some documents that give a little more detail about the Manual High School restructuring plans, and I thought some of my readers might be interested in reading them:

Draft Cover Letter for MHS Final Report
Final Report Draft
MHS Restructuring Plans and Recommendations
MHS Restructuring Recommendations for Special Education

They’re generally adopting the Talent Development High Schools model from Johns Hopkins University. Plans call for lengthening the school day by 45 minutes and school year by five days, requiring parents to commit to one parent activity per month, and reorganizing the school into “academies.” They also want to make Manual a “choice school,” meaning anyone in the district can attend. They would provide bus transportation to all students attending Manual, no matter where in the city they live. That will make for an interesting bus schedule.

Some other things they want to add are a “publicly funded health center and expansion of a child care center in the facility to served [sic] both staff and parents’ children ages birth to five,” “a full time business liaison coordinator to work with members of the business community and school personnel,” and facility improvements “to support small learning communities, culture and climate, and increased security.”

No cost information is included here, but according to the Journal Star’s article:

Additional operational costs of the program, if implemented at the beginning of the 2007-08 school year, were estimated at about $810,000 beyond the current $4.9 million operational expenditures, Treasurer Guy Cahill said Monday. More cost details are expected by the board’s Jan. 22 meeting.

What are your thoughts on plans to restructure Manual High?

WEEK-TV reports:

The District 1–50 school board tonight voted to designate the current Glen Oak Primary School site as the new birth through eighth– grade school building.

Finally. I’m sure there’s a huge sigh of relief from East Bluff activists this evening. If you went to the school forums, you know that this was the site preferred by most people, including neighbors, parents, the City of Peoria, and the Chamber of Commerce. Even the Community Forum Report acknowledged this was the most popular site. The school board made the right decision.

Now comes the big push from the school board to try to get as much money out of the city as possible. The line will be, “Hey, this is where you wanted us to put the school, now you’re obligated to give us whatever money we ask for to make this happen.” Oh, look, it’s started already:

Martha Ross said, “The citizens in that area have said they want us in this site so we’re going to help us figure out how we’re going to pay for a lot of this in addition to the city of Peoria.”

But the last line of WEEK’s report is most troubling to me. It reads, “The price tag for the new school is upwards of $60 million.”

$60 million?

Where on earth did that figure come from? Last I heard, a new school was going to cost around $21 million. How did the cost triple in three months? Surely this is an error. Perhaps WEEK meant the cost of building both new schools (above and below the bluff) plus the cost of property acquisition is “upwards” of $60 million. But just the Glen Oak School replacement building is going to be $60 million? I’ll need to see an itemized accounting of that.

UPDATE: As PeoriaIllinoisan pointed out, the Journal Star reports that the cost of the school is “estimated at $25 million,” which is still higher than the $21 million previously reported, but nowhere near $60 million. Don’t forget, the reason they’re replacing the building is because STS Consultants determined that the cost to replace the building was less than the cost to renovate, but they determined the replacement costs at only $115.36 per square foot. If the replacement cost is now $25 million for a 120,000-square-foot school, that’s $208.33 per square foot. Gee, think they could have renovated for less than that? I bet they could have.

Frequent Chronicle commenter PrairieCelt left a comment on Billy’s site that was so good, he made it its own post. It’s a good summary of all the money squandering that has gone on in District 150. Also check out Clare Jellick’s recent post about the cold reception District 150 has given Mr. Vallas.

Is there no one in the Peoria Board of Education’s first district that will challenge Martha Ross for her seat on the school board? Clare Jellick says there isn’t.

I suppose I needn’t say anything about this, but there is simply no end to the way District 150 baffles me. In their 2005 Master Facilities Plan final report, they said:

Based upon a preliminary, interim report prepared by the Master Facility Planning Committee, the SBI Task Force set $5,000,000 as the savings goal to be had from the consolidation and closure of school facilities. The task force learned that $500,000 could be saved in administrative, support, and operational overhead per closed building.

Okay. So, they “close” Blaine-Sumner, then decide to remodel it and use it as offices. No savings there. They close White School, but then acquire the former Social Security Administration office building on Knoxville and decide to remodel it to the tune of $1.27 million to house their “transition to success academy.” No savings there.

In the meantime, they have two former principals who were made co-deputy superintendents while Ken Hinton got his certification, then made them associate superintendents and gave them raises for that; then when Hinton went on medical leave, they promoted (?) them to… um… co-deputy superintendents… again… and of course gave them another raise for the increased responsibilities.

Despite all of that, the school board passed a balanced budget this year, and expect a surplus of $200,000, according to Guy Cahill in a Sept. 5, 2007 Journal Star report. None of that was attributable to closing schools, of course. Instead, it was made possible by pay freezes and benefit cuts (to employees other than the superintendents, obviously), and by eliminating the district’s purchasing department.

But I thought at least part of the reason for consolidating schools was to save money and pay off the huge deficit the school had a couple years ago. Wasn’t it? So, if the deficit is gone now… does there need to be such a big push toward consolidation?

I’m afraid I’ll never figure them out.

The final school siting forum took place Thursday night at Glen Oak School. Over thirty people spoke, a majority of whom favored building two schools including one at the current Glen Oak School site. In addition, there were official presentations by Roberta Parks of the Chamber of Commerce and Bob Manning of the City of Peoria.

Chamber presentation

[Update: I just received a copy of the Chamber’s official letter to the school board; read a PDF version of it by clicking here.]

Roberta Parks on behalf of the Peoria Area Chamber of Commerce gave a short presentation endorsing the Glen Oak School site. She stated up front, “it’s not the Chamber’s job to tell the district where to locate a school,” but she felt there were some economic issues to consider along with everyone else’s comments. Specifically, the Chamber worked with four real estate developers to evaluate the district’s proposed sites to see which one could best leverage a $20 million infusion of public funds — i.e., which site had the most potential to spur additional development or redevelopment of residential or commercial property.

The Chamber group determined that a new school would have the most impact on residential property, and only an indirect impact on commercial property (over time, a stable neighborhood will create small-scale commercial development, she said). They made the following observations of each site:

• Constitution Gardens, Morton Square, Peoria Stadium — These three sites were dismissed because Morton Square is in an historic district and the other two sites are two far removed from the area they are supposed to serve.
• Von Steuben site — This site is in the most stable neighborhood, with a good percentage of owner-occupied residential property. Thus, the Chamber doesn’t feel that an infusion of public money here is going to improve this already-strong neighborhood very much.
• Glen Oak School site — This neighborhood is “at or near a tipping point” in its balance of owner-occupied versus rental property, so an infusion of public dollars on this site would be put to good use strengthening this area.
• Woodruff/Lincoln site — This area has more rental than owner-occupied property surrounding it, but benefits already from the new Lincoln school, so an additional infusion of money would not be as much of a benefit here as other areas.
• Kingman site — There is significant rental in this area already, so it’s unclear whether investment will turn this neighborhood around.

It should be noted that the Chamber was approaching this from the standpoint of picking one site for the Woodruff attendance area, not two. It would have interesting to hear what their choices would have been if they picked on site on the bluff and one in the valley. They also looked at which neighborhood they thought would be damaged the most by losing a school, and determined that the Glen Oak School neighborhood would take the biggest hit. So, they strongly recommend building on the Glen Oak School site.

City presentation

Bob Manning, third district councilman for the City of Peoria, began by saying the school district nor the city can succeed by themselves; we’re all interdependent and need to work together to achieve common goals. He then strongly endorsed the Glen Oak School site for the construction of a new school. He pointed out numerous configurations that are available to assemble a six- to nine-acre site in the East Bluff around Glen Oak School.

He said the council has tentatively budgeted $344,000 to create a park-like setting in the East Bluff, and he’s working with staff to identify more funds, possibly from the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG). There’s also $100,000 tentatively budgeted for improving the Wisconsin business corridor. He highlighted the city’s efforts to combat crime, and pointed to statistics showing crime is trending down the last two years in the area around the school. The has also made efforts to make certain neighborhoods enterprise zones to encourage reinvestment in older neighborhoods.

Manning addressed funding issues from the school district’s perspective as well. He pointed out that since the Heartland Clinic opened in the East Bluff, there would be no need for the new school to duplicate that service, so there is room for cost savings there. He also pointed out that the district has $32 million in Health Life Safety bonds available, almost $900,000 in properties they could sell on Prospect Avenue, other property such as White School that could be sold, and Public Building Commission funds available.

The councilman concluded by saying, here in the East Bluff, the city, Heartland Clinic, the Boys and Girls Clubs, churches, and others “are all here to be your [the school district’s] strategic partners.”

Neighbors and students

Over two dozen other people spoke. Pastor Martin Johnson, who has a church in the area, stated that “children deserve to be proud of their neighborhood and their school.” He recommended the Glen Oak School site.

Darryl Ward gave a well-researched and passionate presentation in favor of the Lincoln/Woodruff site. Three Glen Oak School students also read papers they had written as a class assignment. All three favored the Lincoln/Woodruff site as well.

Steve Katlack, who had spoken at the previous three forums, spoke at this final one as well. He stated that he lives on the East Bluff and just last week he had his window shot out. “But I’m staying,” he said to thunderous applause. Taking Glen Oak School away would “tear the heart out of the neighborhood,” he said. He said he understands that getting a new school would not be a panacea, but it would give his neighborhood a fighting chance. “That’s all we’re asking. Give us a fighting chance, please,” he concluded.