Tangipahoa Alternative Schools Focus of Debate

By DEBRA LEMOINE

Tangipahoa alternative schools focus of debate

HAMMOND – A Hammond-based nonprofit agency has applied to the state Department of Education to run the city’s alternative public middle school, a move that Tangipahoa Parish School System officials promise to fight.

The state Department of Education sought applications in December through a newspaper advertisement for nonprofits to run two Tangipahoa Parish alternative education schools based at the Crystal Street campus: Crystal Academy and the Tangipahoa Parish PM School. No agencies applied to the state to run the evening-based high school, but Quad Area Community Action Agency applied to run Crystal Academy, said Meg Casper, state education department spokeswoman.

Both public schools face being removed from the parish’s control because their standardized test scores have not met state goals for the past four years, and they are eligible for a takeover under the state’s accountability program.

Neither school should be held to the same standards as traditional schools because they were created to assist students already behind their peers, said Superintendent Louis Joseph and School Board member Al Link.

“Crystal Street School should not be held to the guidelines of a regular school,” Link said. “By its very nature, it’s not a school that’s going to excel.”

Crystal Academy was created 10 years ago as an alternative school for students ages 12 to 16 in the Hammond school system who were a year or more behind their peers or had been incarcerated. The goal of the program was to be a last resort for students in seventh through ninth grades who might drop out. The idea is to have the students either graduate from Crystal Academy or catch up enough to return to either Hammond Junior High School or Hammond High School, Joseph said.

The school was formed at a time when the state encouraged school systems to create such alternative programs, Joseph said.

“We thought we were doing what the state wanted us to do,” he said.

When the accountability movement started, the school scored low on standardized tests. For the past four years, the school’s scores have increased but they have not met the growth benchmarks set by the state, Joseph said. Crystal’s School Performance Score was 20.8 in 2001 and 32.4 in 2005. The School Performance Score is an index created by using the results of two standardized tests taken by students annually.

The school has had the help of state experts for the past four years, such as a state distinguished educator who coached its teachers. Joseph said teachers at Crystal are paid $3,000 more annually to work there, and the school has managed to fill all its faculty positions with certified teachers. Vocational programs have been reduced to give more time to math and reading.

Nevertheless, it hasn’t been enough to raise the students’ test scores, and state officials said the school system should have expected this move when it received the results of last spring’s testing.

Ad upsets superintendent

Joseph said he was upset when he saw the advertisement seeking agencies to take over his two schools because no one from the state talked to him and none would respond to his inquiries about it. Polly Broussard, a member of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, toured the school in February at Joseph’s request.

When BESE meets in April, it will decide whether to turn the school over to Quad Area Community Action Agency. Joseph and Link said they will be there to plead to the board to allow the school district to keep control of the school.

Quad Area also faces a review of its application by state education department officials, Casper said.

Quad Area’s executive director said she doesn’t believe her agency will run Crystal Academy because BESE will most likely allow the parish school system to keep it.

“We put in an application for it,” said Winnie Sibley, executive director of the Quad Area Community Action Network. “I really think the parish is going to keep it. We weren’t in any way trying to take it away from them.”

Sibley said she has no intention in fighting the school system for control of the school because her agency wants to keep a good working relationship with the school system.

The Quad Area Community Action Agency receives millions in state and federal grants to run antipoverty programs in seven parishes. It runs adult education programs for the school systems in East Feliciana and St. Helena parishes and runs a Head Start preschool in Clinton, Sibley said.

The agency also runs after-school tutoring, pregnant teen schooling and foster grandparents programs in several parishes.

The idea to apply for Crystal came after Sibley’s daughter attended a workshop in Alaska where she learned about a program that increased students’ test scores by nearly 80 percentage points in five years. Sibley said she wanted to try that program with the students at Crystal.

“We’re not in a contest to take anything away from Mr. Joseph,” she said. “I just assumed since it was in the paper, he had given it up.”

When asked to respond, Joseph replied, “We have not given up on Crystal Academy.”

Plans for Option III

He is working on plans to present to the state for making Crystal Academy an Option III program, where students are placed in a program to earn the GED equivalency certificate or take a vocational track to receive a certificate of completion rather than an academic- based diploma. The advantage for the school system is that students completing the program are counted as high-school graduates, Joseph said.

In the end, Joseph said, giving students in alternative schools job training rather than math drills is best. He said the students in alternative schools typically are ones who can “take down a car engine” rather than those who want to learn the mathematical theory behind how an engine works.

If the Options III program doesn’t satisfy state officials and control of the school is transferred to another entity, Joseph said, he will still fight to keep the students in the parish system. As a last resort, he said, he is considering keeping the students in his schools in another alternative program rather than refer them to a Crystal Academy that is not run by the school district.

Joseph said he would even consider asking Hammond voters to rededicate the 10-year property tax that funds Crystal Academy.

“I’ll have to work it out with the citizens of Hammond, and let the voters know why we did what we did. We’ll still try to help these kids. The people in the Hammond School District have been very, very kind to us.”