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Dr. David Hopson |
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April 23, 2007 Like most regional school districts—and an ever-increasing number of non-regional schools—Gateway has struggled to weigh student needs against budgetary constraints for many years. This constant battle means that the school committee and administrative team spend a large amount of time balancing the budget rather than fully focusing on improving student achievement. I appreciate the opportunity to share achievement data with the public, as well as budget information, but space prohibits the detail that is often needed to fully understand the issues. For this, and other reasons, I occasionally have to go back and provide additional insights when individuals bring items to the forefront. Like all school systems, Gateway offers a number of advantages to our students that vary depending on the students, their needs, and their abilities. The degree to which we are able to do this depends as much on family perceptions and desires as it does on providing accurate assessment data. We can provide comparative data on items like MCAS scores, graduation rates, colleges attended by graduates, per pupil costs, tax impact of providing education, average SAT scores, percentage of special needs students, percentage of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch, and a whole host of other numerically measured items. The question of whether this makes Gateway a poor, average, or outstanding school system will still vary among students and their families; the schools may be excellent based upon several criteria, but if they’re perceived as not meeting a particular child’s needs, then those parents see it as failing. There are other elements of a school’s success that are difficult to measure. Items such as how well behaved students are, what types of interventions are available for troubled students, how integrated all students are within the student body, the level of bullying, participation in extra-curricular activities, how well staff interact with students, what students do for the school and community, cleanliness of facilities, student safety, school security, support students get in dealing with problems on a daily basis, and many more important—but not easily measured—facets of a child’s education are not typically measured in a quantitative manner. Are these items important to an education? Even the ‘experts’ admit that they are, but do not try and measure them due to the cost and difficulty of doing so. Massachusetts has been using MCAS for years as a measurement of student success and experts still can’t agree on whether this is an accurate assessment of academic performance. Gateway posts standardized quantitative data on our website, we present it to the school committee and public at open meetings, and staff review this data on a regular basis. Whenever I can, I write about the other, less quantifiable items in the Superintendent’s Corner, and the district publicizes many great things being done by students and staff on a regular basis in the newspapers, in weekly on-line issues of Breaking News, and in family/community updates from our schools. I believe that our commitment to students is exemplary and that our students receive a highly competitive education compared to other schools in the area. Gateway does listen and respond to concerns about the district. The reasons for students leaving the district through school choice have been collected for many years. Over the past five years the number one reason given by families for leaving the district (36%) was multi-age classrooms, which were the direct result of decreasing budgets and the towns’ desire to keep five elementary schools open. The second highest reason (32%) was the lack of full-day kindergarten, which was addressed as we added space through the building project. The flip side are the reasons for which sixty plus students choose to enter the district’s schools instead of staying in their own districts—better facilities, more opportunities, integrated technology, caring teachers and administrative staff, better student integration, unhappiness with their own districts, and better services. This seeming conundrum of students choicing both into and out of the district may be best explained by what I mentioned earlier: the perception of how well individual student needs are being met as opposed to some type of quantifiable data. What makes schools great depends on each student and family. Gateway, once again, is facing a funding crisis—not because the towns don’t support the schools but because the state still has not determined an equitable way to fund public education. We are a small, rural school district with declining enrollment. Our communities do not have enough wealth to ignore the fiscal constraints on what we can provide to students. At some point we will have to face the disconnect between what we want and what we can afford in terms of the number of elementary schools we operate. Our challenge is that the state determines aid through the Chapter 70 formula, which is based upon numbers that are unrealistic for our area. The Chapter 70 formula is designed to fund elementary schools of 400 students, middle schools of 650 students, and high schools with 1300 students. We only have just over 1,300 students in the district and only enough elementary students to ‘efficiently’ (by state standards) run one elementary school. As much as it may be philosophically correct to say that student performance should not be based upon funding, the reality appears to be much less clear. It’s the same with most of our current ‘standardized’ performance tests where the most consistent factor in predicting high scores is the social-economic status of the child’s family. Gateway has tried to keep the non-quantifiable aspects of education intact while working on improving the test scores that the state is interested in. Without considering our financial constraints, we’ve done well compared to most schools. When you factor in the fiscal constraints, we’ve done an outstanding job by almost any measure. ### |
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