Dual Enrollment Proposal Presented to BVSD Board

During the BVSD School Board meeting last night (November 13, 2007), the dual-enrollment proposal was presented to the board for study by Dr. King. The following notes were gathered by Brad Stauf.

This email is about Chris King's Dual Enrollment zone for the so-called "North Louisville" area (I just live in regular old Louisville as far as I can tell).

The regularly scheduled 11/13 BVSD Board of Education meeting tonight ran from 6:30 until after 10:00 pm. Board attendees were:

Helayne Jones (President)

Angelika Schroder (outgoing Vice President)

Teresa Steele (outgoing Treasurer)

Jean Paxton, Ken Roberge, Lesley Smith, Patti Smith (members)

Chris King (Superintendent of Schools)

Ellen Miller-Brown (Deputy Superintendent for Educational Programs)

Robert Hammond (COO)

Various support staff

I will only write about the parts of the meeting related to the dual enrollment (DE) proposal; the board covered other normal operating business as well but graciously moved agenda items around as much as possible to accommodate community participation on this issue.

If you haven't read the Stratification Task Force report, you should do that if at all possible. The full report and executive summary are both available here

http://bvsd.org/Search.aspx?k=stratification%20task%20force&s=All%20sources&rs=District

The full report is only about 30 pages and has some very interesting statistics about open enrollment, and explains a lot about where Chris King is coming from on this dual enrollment proposal.

The meeting opened with just under an hour of public commentary on DE; each speaker was given 2 minutes. I'll sum up the points, and apologies to anyone who feels that I missed one of their points:

1 - The DE proposal is divisive to Louisville (strong sense of community and happiness with neighborhood schools was a recurring theme).

2 - Transportation logistics didn't make sense (spend money on fixing Angevine and Centaurus, not on busing a very few kids from Louisville over to those schools)

3 - The DE proposal was poorly communicated and is obviously being fast-tracked (no mailings to elementary school parents for example)

4 - Louisville students are being used to fix what is seen as a Lafayette problem (Lafayette families open-enrolling their kids to other schools because they don't like their Lafayette options)

4a - Slight variation on #4, new development areas/neighborhoods should be the ones who are put in a DE zone (and potentially later moved to the Angevine/Centaurus zone), not well-established parts of Louisville who have been in the Louisville district for many years.

At about 9:00, Chris was asked to present his DE proposal to the board and to take questions. Chris' main stated reasons for the proposal were:

1 - Bring in a different mix of students to Angevine and Centaurus to help achieve destratification (neither Chris nor any board members explicitly stated "in order to raise CSAP scores"; again you should read the Stratification report)

2 - Allow Lafayette schools to "market" (send mailings to) Louisville families (more on this later)

3 - Addressing feeder school imbalance (three middle schools feed Monarch vs one feeding Centaurus)

He said a couple of times that shifting population away from Monarch or LMS due to over-population was NOT a goal of the project. Editor's note: Is this a contradiction with #3 above? I'm still trying to figure that out...

A Q&A session followed (board members only, not the public), I didn't take notes at the time so I'm just putting things down according to who said them rather than directly quoting all the back & forth.

Teresa began with what I consider to be some unfortunate remarks about Louisville parents. Her perception was that we were claiming our kids were "too good" to be in school with "Lafayette kids", and she brought up the issue of race discrimination more than once. She is the proud parent of kids at Centaurus and clearly had a personal and emotional involvement in this issue. I did not recall hearing anyone making a statement like this, although several people made comments along the lines of "if the problem is in Lafayette schools, fix it in Lafayette" and "spend money improving Lafayette schools, not busing in Louisville kids". Teresa expressed disappointment that the Louisville parents "didn't get that this is optional, not mandatory". Editor's note: while the DE plan as proposed was optional, Chris' overall remarks left me with the impression that it could become a boundary change and therefore mandatory if needed in the future.

Patti advised Teresa not to blame the parents, that if there was this much push-back then it was because the Board had lost the trust of the Louisville parents which was probably because the DE plan had been poorly communicated.

Helayne put the Angevine/Centaurus problem in marketing terms - you can't force people to like a product, you have to make the product likeable. She strongly emphasized the need to make Lafayette schools desirable. Helayne used a few key phrases when describing the DE proposal such as "we didn't use out best heads" and "I would have liked to see a proposal that was more in line with the community." In public sector terms (I consulted for public sector organizations for many years including Arvada Public Schools, Aurora Public Schools, Denver Public Schools, Laramie County School District, Douglas County Schools and Chicago Public Schools) this was a fairly severe scolding in front of the public. Helayne counseled Chris to table the proposal until next year instead of trying to rush it through.

Jean - The board took 2 years to study replacement of valedictorian awards and school ranking with a "Cum Laud" program and valedictorian was never even a bvsd policy. By comparison, they were only taking 2 weeks to review this initiative. Jean expressed concern about the haste and about community input.

Jean also pointed out that if all of the 990+ kids living in Angevine school district attended (vs the ~560 who do attend), they wouldn't need more kids from Louisville. Chris' response was that the problem is not just getting more kids, it's getting "a different mix of kids" (presumably higher socioeconomic, from better educated or more stable families but to be fair, Chris was taking direction from the Strat report, he didn't invent these concepts or social inequities).

One of the board members commented that it might have been better to include all of Louisville in DE instead of segmenting it which makes it more divisive. Chris' response was that the choice of boundary (north of SB Road, West of 42) was primarily geographical.

One of the board members asked why the DE was not reciprocal (Lafayette can't have LMS/Monarch as home schools). Chris' response was that reciprocal enrollment would have the opposite of the desired effect i.e. it would increase the flow of kids from Lafayette to Louisville.

One of the board members asked about removing the open enrollment option from Lafayette so that the (presumably higher-achieving) kids who are OE-ing out of the area now would have to attend Angevine/Centaurus but the general response was that it would not be legal.

Helayne & Patti both brought up the idea that there are better ways to address mailing & marketing than a DE plan, just change district policy to allow Lafayette schools to mail to Louisville families.

Chris' response here was interesting; he said that state law mandates that whatever you do for neighborhood schools, you have to do for charter schools...pause..."so there are some issues to be considered" (my personal interpretation of this is that the DE plan would allow Lafayette schools to market themselves to the apparently desirable Louisville families, without allowing charter schools to do the same thereby creating a competitive differentiator for Angevine/Centaurus)

Helayne finished the session by stating that the board will review DE proposal again at a December 11th meeting. Based on text on the bvsd.org page, DE will not become an action item since the board did not agree with it. Helayne counseled Chris to take the valuable feedback he had received into account and revisit the proposal.

And by the way, if you feel I have misused the singular possessive form with regard to Chris King (Chris' opinion), you can bring over a six-pack and we can spend a couple hours reading through all the contradictory rules of grammar on that particular topic. Being a traditionalist, I refuse to add the extra 's' as has become popular with kids these days ;)