SOUTH BEND — State schools Superintendent Tony Bennett was very clear: He and his team from the Indiana Department of Education were not at Riley High School Wednesday evening to deliberate whether or not the state should intervene.
“We’re here to gather information about intervention ...” he said. “If you intend to debate with me about whether or not we should do this, you’ll leave discouraged.”
“Intervention is not an on/off switch,” he said. “It’s not ‘the state totally leaves us alone,’ (or) ‘our school is taken over by the state.’ ”
Bennett, along with Lee Ann Kwiatkowski, director of turnaround, and other Indiana DOE officials, were in town Wednesday for a legally required hearing at Riley.
In the coming weeks, the hearings will be held at the 18 schools in Indiana — including Washington High School and Rise Up Academy here — that are in the fifth year of academic probation.
Once a school is deemed to have been in its sixth year of probation, the state is allowed to intervene.
That intervention can take many forms, from extra training for teachers to a complete takeover.
Indiana DOE officials, along with Jo Blacketor, a member of the state board of education from South Bend, wanted to hear from stakeholders Wednesday about which intervention options they prefer — should intervention become a possibility.
Nearly 200 people came out to Riley’s auditorium to observe the hearing. About 30 of them, the vast majority of which were Riley teachers and administrators, spoke publicly.
They described all of the new efforts at the school to improve student learning, including the 8-Step Process.
A small handful of parents, mostly those with students in the school’s technology and engineering magnet program, spoke, as did several students from Riley Early College.
Every speaker who indicated a preference for which of five intervention options they prefer, chose either an option in which professional development for staff would be augmented or a more generic option, which was called “other options for school improvement expressed at the public hearing.”
Thaddeus Phillips, a freshman at Riley Early College, talked about the positive experience he’s had there and described the program in which students can earn high school and college credit at the same time as “the land of opportunity.”
Becky Drury, education project manager for United Way of St. Joseph County, spoke, too.
“We heard you loud and clear that the community needs to get involved,” she told Bennett.
She then described a committee of some 130 people who meet regularly to work on a number of school-improvement-related initiatives.
Susan Warner, director of the Public Education Foundation, told Bennett the public has been living under the stress of potential state intervention for long enough.
“The sooner the better,” she said of when the decision about intervention will be made.
In a sense, the hearing could be moot if students' scores on End-of-Course Assessments, which have been given in South Bend schools this week, improve enough to thwart state intervention.
Those test scores, however, will not be available until July.
Plus, other student-attendance data that will determine the groups of students whose scores will count toward the accountability standards has to be gathered, as well.
That means, Kwiatkowski said, it won't be known until August if the affected schools remain on academic probation for the sixth consecutive year.
After the hearing, Bennett said if test scores improve sufficiently, it doesn’t mean the hearing — nor the entire process — was in vain.
Before the school was faced with state intervention, Bennett said, little effort was made to improve student achievement.
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