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A chance for change: Duquesne's schools finally getting help on longtime financial and academic distress First of a two part series Sunday, February 18, 2001 By Eleanor Chute, Post-Gazette Education Writer
Children in the Duquesne City School District have hopes and dreams just as children anywhere do.
Their papers, proudly displayed outside a fourth-grade classroom, show they want to be astronauts, teachers and football players.
As fourth-grade teacher Melissa Flanigan recently remarked to a child headed to lunch: "You have a lot of potential."
But much of that potential hasn't been tapped for the approximately 940 students in kindergarten through 12th grade.
Their results on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests in math and reading are among the worst in the state. As many as 90 percent of Duquesne students scored in the bottom quarter of the state's math and reading tests, depending on grade level and subject.
The state, using the new Education Empowerment Act, has threatened to take over Duquesne City schools in three years if the district doesn't improve.
In addition, the district was declared financially distressed after the state had to bail it out to the tune of about $1.4 million on two bond payments. And in October, a board of control was appointed by the state to run the district instead of the elected school board.
On Wednesday, state Auditor General Robert P. Casey Jr. released two highly critical reports -- a 44-page audit and a 35-page investigation that blasted school officials for using a district credit card to pay for hotel drinks and movies at a San Francisco conference, and for incomplete and botched record-keeping. The investigation was requested by the state Department of Education because of complaints by residents.
Now Duquesne has embarked on a mission of improvement. It's not that it hasn't tried before. It's not that Duquesne families haven't cared about their children before, and it's not that the children haven't tried. But the district has never before operated under such state scrutiny and with such urgency.
While some say Duquesne was a top-flight district decades ago, it has been troubled for many years.
This is a district that opened a new secondary school computer lab but didn't offer any computer classes for two years and didn't hire a computer teacher.
It's a district where teachers just this school year began trying to match state standards to what they teach, a task many districts began three years ago.
It's a district where buildings were so dilapidated that the district borrowed $19.3 million to improve one building to serve all children -- and still there are problems, such as rotting floors and water leaking into the elementary cafeteria.
It's a district where about 88 percent of its students last year had family incomes low enough to receive free or reduced-price lunches, according to state statistics, and has the lowest property tax base among Allegheny County school districts.
The problems have prompted the state Department of Education to force the district to create an empowerment team to draw up a school-improvement plan. The state rejected the plan this month and gave the team until March 4 to revise it. If the plan is approved, Duquesne will receive an extra $519,075 from the state to help make the improvements.
Turnover at the top
The district's latest round of attempts to improve can be marked by the hiring of Superintendent JoAnne Wells, a McKeesport Area School District administrator, in October 1999.
A major problem that has thwarted past efforts is the high turnover of leadership in the district. Currently, the superintendent, business manager and secondary and elementary school principals have been at the helm for 17 months or less.
What does it take to fix a troubled school district? Can any school overcome the multiple problems of failing students, poor families, questionable management and sparse funding?
Currently, a dozen Pennsylvania school districts have been identified as poor-performing districts under the state Education Empowerment Act. Duquesne City School District also has been taken over by a state control board, making it the only Western Pennsylvania district in serious trouble both academically and financially. And a state audit last week blasted the district for "deficient management" in spending and record-keeping.
Using Duquesne's struggle as an example, this two-part series examines the complex issues faced by failing schools and whether efforts to improve can ever succeed.
Ranking Duquesne district against others in county, state
Rebuilding a school district means changing the 'Duquesne way'
Duquesne district's superintendent wants to get students 'up from under'
Wells was hired after Ronald Mento, who was superintendent for seven years, left to become superintendent of the Neshannock School District in Lawrence County.
There's been so much turnover that elementary Principal Jean McAteer said the children take bets on whether she'll stay.
"People kept coming in and out and not staying long enough to make anything consistent," said McAteer, who taught at Duquesne Catholic for six years before coming to the public school in August 1999. She initially taught middle school reading, became dean of students in January 2000 and was named principal in April.
"It takes awhile to convince everybody you're going to stay. It's a trust issue."
Secondary school Principal Dan Stephens is in his first year at Duquesne, although he has 32 years of experience, including several principal posts in Ohio.
Fifteen of about 73 teachers in the district were new this fall. Duquesne had the third least-experienced teaching staff of 43 school districts in Allegheny County, according to the most recent statistics.
The newest leaders in the district are the three members of the state-appointed board of control. Nick Staresinic, 75, a retired superintendent from the Highlands School District, arrived in October to lead the board, which has total power over the district's money.
Experts say consistent leadership is critical for an effective school.
"You can't promote education in a community of learning when there's nobody tying the pieces together," said Kathie Shoop, a research associate at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, one of the groups working with Duquesne.
School board member Mark Nemerovsky blames the teachers' lower salaries, in part, for the turnover. "They come to Duquesne and get their training and then they go. We have a hard time recruiting teachers and administrators also. The market is tight."
Finding substitute teachers also is difficult for the district. Often, regular teachers must take over other classes during their planning periods. Of one classroom that went for a couple of months in the fall without a regular teacher, Stephens said, "There's no continuity to it. ... It was not a very good learning situation for the kids."
The children move around, too. By the end of last school year, there were 950 students, although there had been 1,222 enrolled at some point -- some for days, some for the whole year.
No one expects improvement overnight. But Shoop said expectations are rising. Administrators are making expectations clearer and offering more support to help teachers meet them.
"In the past, it was like, do it on your own," Shoop said.
Curriculum and buildings
The scrutiny of district operations includes looking at what's being taught.
When Wells arrived, she couldn't even find the school's curriculum. She finally got a copy from the Tri-State Study Council at the University of Pittsburgh, which had helped to develop it in the mid-1990s.
It was written after the district had gone for years with a "seriously outdated curriculum," said Charles Gorman, executive director of the study council, which has been working with Duquesne for about a decade.
Wells said not all teachers are using the council's curriculum. But before progress can be made, the district is waiting for the delayed state empowerment money to pay for an assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction who will concentrate only on those areas.
The district also needs the extra state money to offer more teacher training, to pay for national standardized achievement tests and to hire someone to analyze data.
Other problems have diverted attention from academics over the years -- primarily the district's crumbling facilities.
For years, the school board debated whether to renovate a 1913 school building or construct a new school. Renovations and additions were finally approved, but the project ended up taking longer than expected.
As a result, during the 1997-98 school year, students attended schools at five sites, including Versailles and McKeesport, making coordination in the district even more complicated.
"I would say that year was an academic disaster for our kids," said Nemerovsky.
The students are back on school grounds, but the building ended up being too small. Sixth-graders are in some of the four trailers next to the school.
With the renovated building open, Gorman said, "There's been progress. It obviously hasn't been as fast as it needs to be."
One change has been cracking down on tardiness. Almost every high school student has been tardy at least 10 times this school year, Stephens estimated. Beginning last month, students arriving late had to be accompanied by a parent. The number of tardies has dropped.
Attendance, while still below the state average of 93 percent, has been improving. Average attendance in Duquesne was 83.3 percent in 1998-99. District figures show it grew to 88.3 percent for the first semester this school year.
Efforts to improve student achievement include a new elementary reading series this school year at a cost of $84,000 for books, other materials and teacher training.
Last year, elementary schoolteacher Jackie Stump worked without a teacher's manual for reading and had about 15 books for 25 children. With multiple editions, she couldn't even tell her class to turn to the same page number. Now she has enough books, workbooks and materials for everyone.
The district had gone years without an elementary reading specialist until last year, when teacher Dorothea Kelly took on the job. Stump, who was a regular classroom teacher, became an elementary reading specialist this year, working at the public school two days a week and at Duquesne Catholic three days a week.
For 90 minutes a day, elementary schoolchildren meet in grade-level groups based on their reading skills so teachers can work with them at their own levels.
"I think it's wonderful. This is the most improvement there's been with the grouping," said Kelly, a teacher in the district for 12 years.
Also within the past year, the district added several instructional approaches aimed at improving comprehension, vocabulary and skills for mastering all of the sounds in a word. Pitt's LRDC has been hired to help to train and mentor teachers in these techniques.
There are also efforts to improve math achievement. The district this school year added a math specialist, Michelle Kimell. She visits kindergarten through fifth-grade classrooms -- 550 children -- at least 30 minutes a week and offers suggestions to teachers.
One of her goals is to improve the children's ability to solve story problems. "Our scores on open-ended questions are really low," Kimell said.
She's teaching the children how to explain their answers, and showing them there can be more than one way to solve a problem. The district is hoping such efforts may help improve scores on PSSA tests given in grades five, eight and 11.
Higher expectations
Expectations are being raised for secondary school students as well.
Stephens said the school needed a more "contemporary curriculum" to prepare students for college and jobs -- the list of courses has been stagnant for years.
So Stephens engineered a midyear switch to expand the course offerings for middle and high school students.
Logistically, the change was difficult. Schedules were to be ready for the start of the semester Jan. 18, but computer problems delayed the new classes until Jan. 26 in the middle school and until Jan. 29 in the high school.
For the seventh and eighth grades, core courses have been moved to the morning, and lunch time has been shortened to provide more academic time. Reading is being emphasized across the curriculum.
Afternoon electives include some new offerings, such as consumer science and foreign language exploration. Students can rotate classes such as dance, choir, drama and computers.
Students are being grouped by performance in the middle and high schools. While there had been just one level of many high school classes, there now are two, such as academic biology and biology.
The new schedule also ensures a computer class for all juniors and seniors and computer lab time for seventh- and eighth-graders. In the fall semester, a multimedia art class taken by 13 students was the only computer course at the secondary school lab.
Still, more improvements are needed to bring the high school even close to par with other local high schools. While many high schools offer calculus and advanced placement courses in a variety of subjects, trigonometry is still the highest math offered in Duquesne schools, and there are no AP courses.
The effects of an inadequate high school curriculum are tangible -- such as the dropout rate. Last school year, 35 students graduated from Duquesne, although state figures show there were 54 in ninth grade in 1996-97 who should have been seniors by last year.
Faith Brown, a 1977 graduate of the school and the parent of two graduates, said she had to study twice as hard in college because she didn't have the proper preparation in high school. She said she had to find outside resources, such as museum and university programs, to supplement her children's education. Her youngest child graduated in 1997.
"When you're riding through Duquesne and you see students who even graduated and went to college, but couldn't make the first nine weeks and are back here standing on the corner, what happened? It was not always financial reasons. Did they have the foundation to move forward?" said Brown, a member of the district empowerment team and a project director of the Urban League of Pittsburgh Duquesne Family Support Center.
A matter of discipline
While Stephens views curriculum changes as critical, he said, "There's no doubt discipline is the biggest obstacle to learning."
Stephens said he'd worked in other schools that had discipline problems, but the problems at Duquesne were different because bad behavior has gone on for so many years. "It's been such a long period of time that measures haven't worked."
It's not unheard of for up to 30 students during one class period to be sent to the secondary school office after being ejected from a class.
But Stephens said those numbers are starting to drop. In the fall, the school began a demerit system. Too many demerits can lead to expulsion.
Earlier this month, the secondary school began an alternative school for disruptive students, using a state grant to get started. The school operates from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m. daily.
There are plans to expand after-school detention to help students learn how to behave rather than just put in time. There's also a plan for a Saturday school for discipline and academics, once the state empowerment money is available.
More money also is needed to expand tutoring to all grade levels. It now is offered three days a week to about 30 elementary school-children.
In the elementary school, a time-out room was started last month. Up to eight children are in there, typically, for all or part of the day, doing schoolwork and learning about proper behavior.
In addition, Wells is working to make parents feel more welcome. McAteer said an open house in the fall attracted more than 100 parents, more than usual. Paid PTA membership has grown from 37 last school year to 110.
But those who have been trying to effect change for years know how difficult it is.
"We haven't produced that many things I would be pleased with," Gorman said.
While his Tri-State Study Council has worked on various projects in Duquesne for nearly a decade, Gorman said, it has been hard to keep a sustained focus because so many factors are out of the council's control.
"There's a lot of work to be done," Brown said. "Here in Duquesne, we have to start somewhere. ... I don't think there are any overnight answers to any of this, but I think the school district is moving in the right direction."
Tomorrow: Some of the nation's leading education experts discuss what it takes to reverse the fortunes of a troubled school district.
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