Plan to Close 11 Schools Reconsidered
Posted on: Tuesday, 13 May 2008, 06:00 CDT
By Kathleen McGrory, The Miami Herald
May 13--Miami-Dade public schools officials' first attempt at closing underenrolled schools earlier this year angered hundreds of parents, leading Superintendent Rudy Crew to shelve the proposal.
Now, with the district's financial outlook worsening, the controversial issue will come before the School Board again at a workshop Tuesday -- but with a new format: Crew will recommend choosing the criteria for "repurposing" first and choose the schools later.
School Board member Martin Karp said having concrete criteria for selecting schools to be closed could take some of the emotion out of the conversation -- and lead to more community support.
"For a parent or an educator, hearing that your school will be repurposed could be devastating," he said. "But, if there's a rationale, people can buy into it a little more. They can recognize that it wasn't an arbitrary decision, but something that was well thought out and received a lot of attention."
Said Board Chairman Agustin Barrera: "It's a great opportunity for us to rethink how we use our underutilized schools, especially when we're not funded the way we were in the past."
But School Board member Marta Perez said she is not likely to support the repurposing of any school, criteria or not.
"Certainly, there are other things I'd cut out first before I start thinking about closing schools, like the marketing department and the [School Improvement] Zone," she said.
Repurposing is the district's term for suspending classes at schools and using the buildings for other academic, professional and community functions. The board is currently considering repurposing 11 schools for a savings of $11 million.
Last month, Crew put forth a procedure for selecting schools. It was never discussed publicly, as the board elected to hold a separate workshop on repurposing.
Should the School Board approve the guidelines, schools would be chosen based on enrollment figures. Underenrolled schools would be prime candidates, particularly if the surrounding schools could easily absorb its students.
The district would also take into account academic performance, building condition, housing trends in the area and parent involvement, according to Crew's preliminary plan.
Crew declined to be interviewed for this story.
The guidelines were born out of lessons the School Board learned in recent months.
When repurposing was first proposed in December, Crew announced a tentative list of 10 schools that would be targeted for closure for the 2008-09 school year for a savings of $9.2 million. The schools were in neighborhoods where the population was not growing, district officials said at the time.
LOW GRADES
Most of the schools were at less than 65 percent capacity, according to internal district documents. All had received C, D or F grades from the state -- except Emerson Elementary near Westchester, an A-rated school.
Within days, Emerson became the center of an emotional debate about repurposing. The proposal met strong resistance from parents, who staged multiple protests in December and January.
The list of proposed schools also came under intense scrutiny by board members, some of whom said the schools had not been chosen fairly.
Crew and his staff "were hand-picking schools to punish board members and to punish communities," board member Ana Rivas Logan said later. "There were other schools like Pinecrest Elementary that were more underenrolled. Those schools never even came up."
Logan also criticized the nature of the proposal, calling it a failure of staff to build schools in the neighborhoods that needed them most.
"Staff built schools where they were not needed," she said. "We were building schools in areas that had declining enrollment, and we didn't spot it quick enough."
Board members never got to vote on the unpopular proposal.
Crew announced in February that district administrators had found the $9.2 million needed to keep the schools open. But he cautioned that repurposing could come up again should the district's financial crisis grow more dire.
It did.
Some School Board members now say the earlier approach to repurposing was flawed.
"We never had a chance to have the discussion," Barrera told The Miami Herald. "Unfortunately, when we were developing a criteria, the superintendent already had an idea of which schools were going to be selected. So at the meeting, when we talked about it, board members were already asking about what schools would be impacted."
REACTION TO PLANS
Some board members have already formed opinions about the new guidelines.
Barrera, who believes any discussions on the matter should involve the community, thinks there should be a limit on how many schools can be repurposed each year. Board member Renier Diaz de la Portilla believes A, B and C-rated schools should be exempt from repurposing.
"I would even be reluctant to repurpose a D school that's shown some improvement," he said.
Crew has recommended that the board repurpose 11 schools before the upcoming school year, a plan Barrera called "aggressive."
"It's going to be difficult, because we may not have time to have the level of community involvement we want," Barrera said.
Board member Evelyn Greer believes the new approach is a better way to address the sensitive matter of school closures.
"There are immense savings in repurposing schools," she said. "But we can't close A [rated] schools. We need to have intelligent criteria."
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Source: The Miami Herald
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