OUSD releases list of schools facing interventions
By Katy Murphy
Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 9:56 am in Uncategorized.
As promised, here is the central office report with schools identified as struggling with enrollment – and possible interventions. Attendance boundary shifts, extra support, mergers, new school “incubations” and closures are all on the table.
The schools on the low enrollment list are:
EXCEL, Burckhalter, Martin Luther King Jr., Howard and Lafayette
The schools on the enrollment and academic list are:
BEST, Youth Empowerment School, Sankofa, Explore College Prep, Peralta Creek
The report will be presented to the school board on Wednesday. According to the timeline, central office administrators will have met with each school’s staff and families by mid-week, but I just spoke to one principal who said she hadn’t heard about it.
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October 8th, 2007 at 10:25 am
What makes me sad is that more schools are moving from “top performers” to “lower levels.” If you take a look at last year’s matrix, there were more schools at the blue end. Now more schools have shifted toward the red end of the spectrum.
Thus we are in for a new round of scape goating.
Try as they might, the OUSD is failing our children. You can rant and rave about “Expect Success” all you want, but bottom line the state takeover is looking more and more like an occupation of school district by an incompetent authority.
I wonder how the schools in Bagdad are fairing.
October 9th, 2007 at 9:14 am
Some of these schools are still trying to hang in there! It is because of the staff that these schools are still on top. If they had better principals they would be dynamite! Redwood Heights is a good example of this. The principal has been there for about 5 years now and it has gone down hill. Test scores are down and it is not the fault of the teachers. If things do not change this school will become one of the casualties. I feel it all sits in the lap of the school administrators. They need to be one with their staff and parents. They need to stand firm with them and forget what downtown is telling them. They need to look at what is good for the students in each individual school and not what is going on in the heads of down town administrators. Downtown has lost touch with reality regarding day to day operations of the schools.
October 9th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
To me this shows the inexplicable way schools are assessed. YES seems like a great school to me. Great principal, great staff, enthusiastic parents. Yet it is on both lists. Is this all about demographics rather than education? Is it any more complicated than schools that serve poor children are set up to fail?
October 9th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
I agree that YES has a good principal. However, the staff is almost entirely composed of brand-new teachers, so it’s probably a bit soon to tell if they are “great” teachers.
October 11th, 2007 at 9:55 am
Veteran teacher: Define “brand-new.”
I suspect they are not teaching the standards or cramming the kids for STAR tests because they still have Deweyesque idealism.
October 11th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
Well, brand-new seems pretty clear to me: first-year teachers; beginners. They are most certainly teaching the standards, and doing all the other district-mandated things… believe me…I have reason to know!
November 6th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
[...] is one of the five schools which the school district is monitoring for low enrollment and low test scores. By the end of the calendar year, district staff are supposed to announce whether the high school [...]