PEORIA -- Below is an edited version of the brief talk I gave to the Greater Peoria League of Women Voters meeting on Jan. 15.
PEORIA SCHOOL DISTRICT 150
The Facts While District 150 has lost 13 percent of its students in the last decade, its expenses have almost doubled.
Enrollment – 1999: 15,258. 2010: 13,021. Loss: 2,200 students.
Percent low income: 75 percent.
Expenditure per pupil - 1999: $6,953. 2008-09: $11,669.
Equalized Assessed Valuation per pupil: 1996 tax year: $60,167. 2007: $102,978.
Tax rate: $4.88 per $100 of Assessed Valuation now. Estimated at $4.92 later this year.*
Average teacher salary: $55,736.
Demographics: 1/3 white, 62 percent black, the rest: other.
Test results: below state averages from 2002- 2010. 64 percent meet or exceed state standards versus 76 percent overall in Illinois.
Total budget: 1999: $107.9 million. 2010: $178.8 million.
Sources: Illinois Interactive Report Card at Northern Illinois University http://iirc.niu.edu/
* Controller David Kinney 1/10/2011.
School Board: There are seven members elected to five year terms or appointed to fill vacant terms. Two seats, in Districts 2 and 3, will be filled in the April election. Three candidates are running for the District 2 seat, but no one filed for the District 3 seat, so a write-in candidate likely will win.
Recent History
The district has what academics call a ‘political’ school board, rather than a traditional board of concerned civic-minded citizens who serve in smaller communities. Some are using the board to run for other offices, some – not all - are using it to make business contacts or hire relatives or otherwise win favors.
The district has suffered from a revolving door of administrators from the superintendent on down, and put many retired administrators on the payroll at very high pay.
Privatization: In the recent decade, the board agreed to an expensive contract with Edison Schools – now costing over $800,000 a year for curriculum its own staff members could develop -- and privatized its food service. Last year it contracted with an outside group to open a charter school.
District 150 critic Terry Knapp says Edison has cost Peoria taxpayers $45 million in fees and extra pay for teachers and bussing over the years, when the district's own teachers and staff could develop the same curriculum.
In 2002, the board hired Kay Royster as superintendent then fired her 2 years later after a campaign against her leadership led by Aaron Schock, Vince Wieland and other board members. Wieland then moved to Dunlap and board president Schock ran for the state legislature but not before he installed Ken Hinton, who was an Edison consultant, as superintendent.
Hinton initially lacked the credentials to sign documents under Illinois school law, so an associate superintendent had to be hired to sign the paperwork for several months. Under Hinton the district made many costly mistakes. It bought properly along Prospect Road, taking houses off the tax rolls, to build a new school before an agreement with the Peoria Park District had been secured. The park district then dropped the idea. The district still owns the houses, has never sold them.
Hinton began “Wacky Wednesdays” a plan to let some but not all middle school students (no equity there) out early every Wednesday, ostensively for more teacher planning, but actually to save money. A protest group, District 150 Watch, formed and continues to meet. Wacky Wednesdays finally was dropped.
Meanwhile some schools were closed, others built culminating in the closure of Woodruff High School, a school of 900 students, without a real public hearing. Then the board had to spend much extra money remodeling Peoria High to accommodate the extra students there, so apparently no money has been saved, and classes are said to be overcrowded there and in several other schools.
The closure of Woodruff High School has been widely criticized by many, and at least one candidate running for the Peoria City Council says he will seek to reopen it if he is elected.
Its closure has generated tensions at Peoria High School and without doubt diminished opportunities for students to participate in school activities, as their chances for leadership were diminished. A few top athletes fled the district for other schools.
The two new schools may have been more costly than necessary. According to a Peoria architect, the new Glen Oak and Harrison schools cost $170 per square foot to built, compared with $135 for a new, comparable grade school in Washington, IL. The large and sturdy centrally located White School was closed and sold to OSF Saint Francis Medical Center.
Opinion: Why close some schools and build others? Why not remodel Peoria's historic, solid and generally well maintained schools? School law requires progress in test scores or closing or restructuring of the schools. The schools that were closed had low test scores, thus placed the district in jeopardy of being taken over by the state. Closing the schools takes away that situation for now. But the clock is still ticking. And new schools elsewhere have not been shown to ever improve student test scores.
Some critics contend there is a culture of corruption in D150. The felony fraud case against Mary Davis, the principal at Lindberg who was promoted to the administration, is pending. Her successor at Lindberg, Julie McArdle, complained about unauthorized credit card bills Davis ran up at the school, and was fired. She is suing the district, likely to collect millions for damage to her reputation.
In the last year: Meanwhile clerks last year were given secret pay raises that later had to be rescinded. The board is supposed to vote on all pay raises.
Critics of the district began to speak out at the regular school board meetings, which were televised live on Peoria cable TV. Last May the board decided without a public vote to drop the live broadcasts, claiming, falsely, they cost too much. (They didn’t.) Instead the meetings were to be videotaped, then broadcast a week late with the public comments censored out.
The D150 Watch group decided to record and film the meetings so the public has access to the public comments. Most of the meetings have been recorded and are on my blog. Appeals to local public radio station WCBU to broadcast the meetings live were rebuffed. Video of the entire meeting proved more difficult. Some meetings were videoed and placed on the WMBD-TV website, but that has stopped. The audio recordings continue on my blog.
Why do this? Because the board meetings are very scripted with little debate or discussion, and the public comments are the most interesting part of the meetings and often bring out information that is otherwise suppressed.
Last month the board said the meetings will be televised live again, but that has yet to happen and it’s not clear whether the public comments will be censored .
Meanwhile the opening of the charter science and technology middle school has been lauded by Peoria's business community. But it has its problems. It now involves long bus rides for some students, and some students reportedly have dropped out. Plans call for it to be expanded into a high school, and moved where? Woodruff?
Last spring the board raised taxes through a backdoor referendum, almost impossible to defeat. And taxes were increased this year as well. Controller Kinney says the rate will be about $4.92 per assessed valuation when figures come out later this year. It’s now $4.88, nearly $1,500 a year for a modest $100,000 property assessed for tax purposes at $30,000.
The board continues to waste money. It refuses to hire in-house attorneys, and instead contracts with law firms, providing an incentive for them to run up the bills.
It lacks a system-wide vending contract, which has brought in thousands for other school districts elsewhere.
It hired Supt. Grenita Lathan, then spent $52,000 to move her and several out of town administrators she hired, to Peoria. Insiders say moving expenses have never been paid for before. That was not voted upon by the board, only approved as payment of bills. The details are on my blog below.
As one of her first actions, apparently designed to intimidate the staff, Lathan last spring fired a long time principal and teacher, Valda Shipp, who had tenure, by telling her to resign immediately, an action which Shipp took then rescinded a day later. Shipp had no due process in this situation, which is required by state law, and is sueing the district. Lathan attempted to fire a long time teacher recently, who was also told to resign, and did resign, but rescinded the resignation. Lathan then backed off after Knapp and others intervened, and is allowing her to retire at the end of the school year.
Now Lathan is saying all principals and administrators must reapply for their jobs next year, except those with contracts -- the group she brought into Peoria with her. Those with tenure that she doesn't want to hire will be assigned to teach. She apparently plans to continue to shake up the school staffs, but to what end? Will that improve test scores or worsen them, as students lose even more continuity and staff morale plumets?
Opinion: Peoria is now a high-poverty, minority school district, and these districts have problems, including low test scores everywhere.
Diane Ravitch's great book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System looks at the situation nationally and offers solutions rooted in neighborhood schools democratically run, the opposite of what goes on now in Peoria.
-- Elaine Hopkins
Interesting post Elaine.
On a similar note, watch for some interesting news
coming out from Dist. 150
this Friday.
Posted by: Dennis in Peoria | January 19, 2011 at 12:41 PM
Dist. 150 has sent an official release to media on this, so I guess I can post it now, too.
"Remarkable Times" coming to Comcast Cable 22 starting Sunday, Jan. 23rd 5 pm on CAPtions. This new reoccuring segment includes:
Mr. Ptacek talks about the IB program; Dr. Sharon Kherat updates viewers on Manual activites, as does Randy Simmons on PHS.
Host of this 30 minute segment:
Dr. Grenita Lathan, Superintendent of Dist. 150. Various video clips of classrooms are also broadcast.
The rest of CAPtions features host Andre Bohannon & Engin Blackstone of the Quest Charter Academy.
Posted by: Dennis in Peoria | January 21, 2011 at 01:10 AM
This is propaganda, not news.
Will it replace live broadcasts of the board meetings?
Posted by: Elaine Hopkins | January 21, 2011 at 08:45 AM
I can't say if it will; I hope they do resume live broadcasts of the BOE, though.
Here is a link to a sample of "Remarkable Times" on
YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irQVd5KKTbk
Posted by: Dennis in Peoria | January 21, 2011 at 01:39 PM