Normandy restarts as new school district

NORMANDY • The signs outside the Normandy School District offices didn’t change overnight. Most of the previous administrators were expected at work this morning.

But state education officials promise the Normandy school system will be a different place now that it’s fallen under state oversight. As of 12:01 a.m. today, the district has a new name, a new governing board and a level of state oversight never undertaken in a Missouri school district.

But district parent Lionel Brown said these changes must bring drastic improvements in academics before he will be happy about sending his son there. His son, Sonny Brown, had attended Francis Howell Central High School last year under the controversial school transfer law, and is among the hundreds who have been told they must return to Normandy.

“They need to fire everybody and go for it,” Brown said of Normandy. “Get some new teachers in there. It all comes down to the teaching. Finding what’s going to make their brains click.”

Missouri education officials agree.

All staff contracts became void when the north St. Louis County district lapsed Monday at midnight. Of the 102 teachers who have been offered jobs in the new district, the vast majority are returning teachers — those with the best attendance records, the best performance evaluations, and those who were most effective in the classroom, state education officials have said.

Their salaries will remain unchanged. But they will have to work four to five years to regain tenure. They will have four weeks of intense professional development, with two weeks before school starts. The state must hire close to 100 more teachers before August.

The Missouri Board of Education met by conference call Monday to make a second round of staffing decisions. Already, it had rehired Superintendent Ty McNichols and his administrative team, all of whom will work for a new appointed board on an at-will basis.

The appointed board is to meet for the first time at 1 p.m. today. Its members are Sheila Williams, vice president of the district’s disbanded elected board; Andrea Terhune, a former executive at Enterprise Rent-A-Car who’s active in Girls Inc. and the Mathews-Dickey Boys’ & Girls’ Club; Charles Pearson, a former school administrator in Normandy, Clayton and Maplewood-Richmond Heights; Richard Ryffel, a private banker with J.P. Morgan and board chairman of Beyond Housing; and Reginald Dickson of Pasadena Hills, chairman and majority owner of Buford, Dickson, Harper and Sparrow Inc., an investment research and portfolio firm.

The board will report quarterly to the Missouri Board of Education. It will begin with a razor-thin budget.

Starting today, the new Normandy has no state accreditation status. The state’s transfer law says children in unaccredited districts may transfer to higher performing schools at their home district’s expense. Because Normandy now has a blank slate on accreditation, area districts are not required to keep Normandy transfer students who attended their schools last year.

So far, 580 Normandy transfer students have been told they cannot continue at their new schools, forcing their parents to find a different address by August or enroll their children in Normandy.

“I just hope we can put together a system of education that gives them the education they deserve,” state board member John Martin of Kansas City said Monday.

Earlier that day, the Ferguson-Florissant School District announced it would be sending 58 transfer students back to Normandy. The announcement followed similar school board decisions in Francis Howell and University City. And this morning, the Pattonville School District said it has notified the 23 students and their families from Normandy that they would not be allowed to return. The reduced tuition of $7,200 is roughly half of what Pattonville residents spend per pupil, officials said in a statement.

"We understand this is disappointing for the 23 students and their families who may have hoped to return to Pattonville for the coming school year," they wrote. "However, we have always strongly believed that in order for neighborhood schools to improve, become strong, and provide the quality public education local communities deserve, their resources must remain in their home district."

The Parkway, Brentwood, Ladue, Maplewood-Richmond Heights, Hazelwood and Webster Groves districts will allow 140 Normandy transfer students to continue in their schools. Those students also met the state board’s requirement of having attended Normandy schools in the 2012-13 school year.

Decisions are pending about the enrollment status of 280 Normandy students who transferred to other districts — the most notable being Ritenour, with 72 children from Normandy applying to return. Kirkwood Superintendent Tom Williams has said he will recommend to the board that the district keep the few Normandy students who asked to return.

On Monday, the Normandy administration responded with a statement: “We understand the mix of emotions that many Normandy families may be experiencing as a result of the decisions that are being made about transfer program participants. As indicated a few weeks ago, the returning students will once again be welcomed by teachers, staff, administrators and the community of the new Normandy Schools Collaborative.”

The district, which enrolled about 3,000 students last year, will become a place where different ways of teaching and learning may be tried. State officials are discussing flipped classrooms, which involve watching lectures online outside of class and using class time for discussions and problem solving.

“We’re open to innovation,” Missouri Education Commissioner Chris Nicastro said last week. “Normandy is a small system when you think about urban systems. In some ways that makes it ideal. It can be more nimble. It can move more quickly. It’s not as cumbersome. When you have something that size, if you make a mistake it’s going to show up much more quickly. If educators have a failing it’s that we’re slow to correct errors.”