ST. LOUIS • The governing board of St. Louis Public Schools gave unanimous approval Thursday to a plan that will send more resources to the city’s most troubled schools, which Superintendent Kelvin Adams touts as an important step toward boosting overall district academic achievement.
And if the additional social workers, nurses and intensive tutoring fails to bring enough success in those buildings, the plan allows Adams to hire nonprofit operators to do the work of running them as early as 2015.
Though district leaders said the single paragraph about outside contractors in the 44-page plan is the least significant, it was the single source of feedback at public forums, eclipsing what district leaders had hoped would be a broader discussion about transforming the city school system.
“We heard you loud and clear,” Adams said Thursday, addressing the plan’s critics. “We will be mindful to go back to the table with the community when and if this occurs.”
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The plan creates a four-tiered system of schools that diverts central office attention away from the best performing buildings to those at the bottom.
Under the proposal, the district’s central office would take a hands-off approach to the 14 best schools in the St. Louis district, giving principals more control.
The next three levels of 53 schools would have varying degrees of accountability and oversight. The bottom 18 of them would be directly supervised by Adams, who is already in the “superintendent zone” buildings almost daily.
Adams’ transformation plan is his latest attempt to increase academic performance in a district that produced modest gains since his arrival in 2008, and regained provisional accreditation in October 2012. But that same school year, the district scored so poorly on Missouri’s new performance report that it is in danger of losing accreditation once again in two years.
Rather than target the entire district, the plan concentrates on schools with the greatest need.
“It’s about bringing focus and results to the work,” Adams told the Special Administrative Board. “How the central office functions. How we should look at human and financial resources.”
The plan has the overall support of American Federation of Teachers Local 420 — with the exception of the contract schools component.
“I’m still not accepting that as a viable alternative,” President Mary Armstrong said.
Instead, she has been pushing Adams to create “community learning centers” to address health, language and other needs in under performing schools and the neighborhoods that surround them.
Adams met with national union leaders about a potential partnership toward this end in April, and is considering collaborating with the United Way and Big Brothers Big Sisters on such an approach.
Nearly 6,300 children — or roughly a quarter of those in the district — attend the “superintendent’s zone” schools. Half of them are two years or more behind in reading. Ninety-seven percent of them live in poverty.
The plan will send $6.4 million to those schools for additional nurses, social workers and counselors, as well as training in reading instruction for teachers. Teachers will work an extra four hours a week, using that time for planning purposes.
“The general concept is acceptable to this body,” said Richard Gaines, member of the special board.
But any partnerships or contracts between the district and nonprofit operators would have to come back to the board for further approval, he added.
“Agreed 100 percent,” Adams said.
