SAVING SCHOOLS: Residents make effort to build better relationships with School Board
By Andy Hall
Months after a divisive budget battle that nearly led to the closing of three neighborhood schools, some residents of the Madison School District today are unveiling a first-of-its-kind effort to build better ties to the School Board and tackle big issues.
And the grass-roots campaign to connect residents to schools is about to spread from the north and east sides of the district to throughout Madison and other parts of Dane County.
The top issues surfacing so far: Fix the way Wisconsin pays for public schools, preserve neighborhood schools, do a better job of supporting the most fragile students and give the public an earlier, more meaningful role in shaping major school decisions to avoid what one parent, Lisa Wiese, described as "the annual spring sucker punch."
"We're at a crisis point in the (Madison) district," said Rebecca Kemble, co-chair of Madison's East Attendance Area Parent Teacher Organization Coalition. "And crisis means opportunity."
The public is invited to a one-hour forum today -- scheduled for the Green Bay Packers ' bye week to encourage attendance -- to hear findings from a series of community meetings. Six of the district's seven School Board members are scheduled to attend to hear the report and offer reactions.
"We really want some common ground here between the community and the School Board," said Wiese, co-chairwoman of the Northside Planning Council, which is heading the campaign with the East Attendance Area PTO Coalition.
In addition, Dane County United, a coalition of religious organizations, neighborhood and child-care centers and other nonprofit groups, is launching a series of meetings focusing on the Madison district.
"We'll bring a lot of West Siders to the table as well," said lead organizer Matt Moreland-Gross, who estimated that 200 to 300 people would be involved by the end of November and perhaps 2,000 by the end of 2008.
While many residents are motivated to get involved because of the fights over neighborhood schools, "the challenge is to see if you can capture it and make it more sustainable," he said.
The goal, Moreland-Gross said, is to expand from the Madison School District to other Dane County school systems.
Leading up to today's session, residents on the north and east parts of the district hosted 20 "house meetings" -- gatherings of about five people at a time -- to focus on what residents want from schools and what they want to change. They also held a larger forum a couple of weeks ago.
Residents in the north and east areas were the most heavily affected by the emotional debates, attended by hundreds of people, last spring over proposals that nearly led the School Board to close Lindbergh and Marquette elementary schools and Blackhawk Middle School as part of $7.9 million in cuts needed to help balance the district's budget.
Budget cuts were required under the state's revenue caps, which limit how much money school districts can raise from local property taxpayers.
Superintendent Art Rainwater recommended closing Lindbergh and Blackhawk. The board balked at those plans but did vote to close Marquette, only to reverse itself two weeks later in a final vote to keep all schools open.
Sue Abplanalp, an assistant superintendent overseeing Madison 's elementary schools, said residents at the budget hearings last spring "were very passionate about keeping their neighborhood schools. They were very passionate about keeping them open, regardless of the cost to the district."
The closings would have been the first since 1979 and 1980, when the district closed Shabazz City High School, and several elementary and middle schools, including Hawthorne, Lapham, Spring Harbor, Hoyt, Lincoln, Longfellow and Sherman elementary and middle schools. Several of those buildings later were reopened as neighborhood schools or were converted to other district uses.
Rainwater said he understands the emotions flowing around neighborhood schools. It would be possible to give residents a one-year warning before closing a school, as some residents have suggested, Rainwater said.
However, if the shutdown is a budget-cutting measure, he said, it normally would be determined during the budget debate, which takes place in the spring, for the fiscal year that begins on July 1.
"For those people being affected," he said, "there is no process that makes it better."
Rainwater and School Board President Arlene Silveira said they welcome the growing moves by the public to become more involved in shaping the district's decisions.
"That type of dialogue is really important to us as a board," Silveira said. "They've done a lot of work."
Although she'd prefer not to close any schools, Silveira said she's not ready to make a promise to keep all buildings open.
"In terms of severe finances such as the district is in, I still believe we have to weigh all options," Silveira said.
The district faces a projected budget shortfall of at least $4 million in the 2008-09 school year. However, a one-time $5.4 million windfall from the shutdown of two of the city's special taxing districts is expected to stave off the school district's financial pinch for at least a year.
In closing a neighborhood school, the district would save roughly $360,000 a year by eliminating positions for a principal, librarian, secretary and custodian, and by reducing the costs of operating the building, said Rainwater and Howard Sampson, the district's interim assistant superintendent for business services.
The exact amount of savings would depend on additional factors, such as whether the influx of students to another school would require the hiring of an assistant principal, and whether students who used to walk to school might need to be bused.
Beyond the financial impact of closing a neighborhood school, there are important social effects, too, said Eric Camburn, an assistant professor of education at UW-Madison and an expert in school reform.
Research by the late University of Chicago sociologist James Coleman showed that "social capital" -- such as parents having strong relationships with other parents, and parents having ties to teachers -- supports students and teachers alike.
"Those sorts of relationships are more likely, I think, in a neighborhood school where parents are more likely to know each other if they live in the same neighborhood and they hang out around the same section of the city," Camburn said.
But do small, neighborhood schools really lead to higher achievement levels for students?
"I don't think there 's any hard-core answer to that," said Allan Odden, a UW-Madison education professor and nationally recognized expert in education policy and reform.
Research so far, Odden said, fails to show a clear link between achievement and school size, particularly within the range of sizes in Madison.
The district's smallest elementary school is Nuestro Mundo, with 181 students, and largest is Leopold, with 718.
Odden does offer an opinion, though, of Madison's turmoil over neighborhood schools.
"What I would say is the city has too many schools in some neighborhoods and it costs too much to keep some of them open," Odden said. "The issue to me here is not effectiveness (of small schools compared to larger schools). The issue to me is budget and politics."
The other trade-off, in some neighborhood schools, is that students may be packed into classrooms or have inferior bathrooms or gyms, compared to their peers in larger, newer buildings.
When those issues were raised at Lindbergh, parents responded they were willing to make the trade-offs, in exchange for keeping their small school, which has 230 students.
About 80 percent of the students walk to it, and some parents complained that with Rainwater's plan to move the students more than a mile away to Gompers Elementary, too many students would have trouble getting to school.
Others disagreed, yet the School Board voted to keep the lights on at Lindbergh, which has among the district's highest concentrations of low-income students and students with limited English proficiency. Board members bowed to parents' and teachers' calls to preserve the connections that have been forged between the staff, students and community. "I think every kid pretty much knows every teacher," said Amy Edge, who teaches second- and third-graders.
So which was Lindbergh: a place with inferior facilities, or a place where things were clicking?
"It is fact that both realities exist," said Lindbergh Principal Pamela Wilson, who is in her fourth year at the school.
"We understood the board had a tough decision to make. "
If you go: The forum with Madison School Board members will be held from 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM today at Tripp Commons at Memorial Union, 800 Langdon St., at UW-Madison.
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