The Delaware Department of Education today selected six underperforming schools to undergo major reforms as part of the Partnership Zone process financed through the $119 million federal Reach to the Top education grant received last year.
The schools — three in the Red Clay Consolidated School District, two in the Christina School District and Dover High School in the Capital School District — were chosen because of their persistent low achievement on standardized reading and math tests and the Department of Education’s assessment of which of those low-achieving schools offered the best potential for a turnaround in the next two years, Secretary of Education Lillian Lowery said.
“I don’t know that they were surprised,” Lowery said of the district superintendents whose schools were chosen. “Every superintendent in the state has a good idea of where their schools rest in the continuum of performance.”
The Partnership Zone is a multi-year initiative designed to produce dramatic improvement in Delaware’s lowest-achieving schools. In so doing, the state aims to turn around at least 10 failing schools (approximately five percent of all public schools in Delaware) so that each of these schools achieves adequate yearly progress (AYP) by 2014. Designated schools must choose one of four models — closure, restart, transformation or turnaround — to implement for significantly improving student performance. Partnership Zone schools are eligible for up to $2.2 million in additional funding for their makeovers in the next four years.
The schools designated today have until late December to submit reform plans for Lowery’s approval. Plans would be implemented during the 2012-13 school year, and sooner if the schools choose to do so.
Unlike last year, when uncertainty and trepidation greeted the announcement of the first four Partnership Zone schools, superintendents in the districts involved see this round of selections as an opportunity to accelerate implementation of reforms they proposed earlier this year in their applications for Race to the Top funds.
“We understand that these schools are not where we want them to be, where they need to be, where we know they can be,” said Christina Superintendent Marcia V. Lyles, whose Bancroft Elementary School and Bayard Middle School were named to the Partnership Zone. “We had already targeted these schools for additional supports and interventions in our Race to the Top plan.”
Christina’s Glasgow High School and Stubbs Elementary, along with Howard High School of Technology and the Positive Outcomes Charter School in Camden, were in the first group of Partnership Zone schools named last year. Those four schools have just begun full-scale implementation of their reform plans.
Capital Superintendent Mike Thomas said the Partnership Zone is a way of supporting “some of the significant changes Dover High School has made over the past year or two, and certainly [to] infuse new initiatives beyond that.”
The current system of state and local school funding does not provide sufficient resources for school districts to meet the needs of schools with large proportions of high-need students, said Mervin Daugherty, the Red Clay superintendent. Lewis and Marbrook elementary schools and Stanton Middle School in his district were designated for Partnership Zone status.
All three schools, he said, have above-average levels of low-income students, transient student populations and, especially at Lewis, students whose first language is not English.
“We are encouraged in one sense that we can add programs during the day and after school,” he said. “We can provide additional assistance to meet students’ needs.”
Red Clay had already begun to make changes, including installing new principals at the Lewis and Stanton schools, Daugherty said. “We worked during the summer to identify weaknesses at all three schools and determine what we need to do better. We weren’t waiting for the Partnership Zone.”
Daugherty would not equate underperformance at his district’s Partnership Zone schools with underperformance by their staffs. Rather, he characterized them as buildings where there is “extra assistance needed,” in significant part because of outside circumstances.
He did say that, from his preliminary discussion with the staffs at the three schools that they recognize the need for change.
“If the staff is on board with change, the change is a lot easier to make,” he said. “This is an issue that we will resolve together, that we will fix together.”
Lowery said she believes development of Partnership Zone plans should be easier for schools chosen this year than with the original group because of the work all public schools did last year in preparing requests for Race to the Top funding. “We’re at different places now because we know more and we’ve experienced more,” she said.
Because of first-year experiences, she is not expecting a recurrence of disputes like the one that erupted between the state and the Christina School District over reassignment of teachers at Glasgow High School in its restructuring process.
“We want this whole effort to succeed,” said Pam Nichols, director of communications for the Delaware State Education Association. “We’ve learned to make sure that everyone is communicating better … so everyone involved understands their part in what’s going on. To be successful, that’s the whole point in this.”
