Blocked.

There's a direct correlation between the peaks and valleys of taking care of College Guy, High School Girl, and Scooter the Wonder Dog and nurturing the Knitternall blog-realm. Hence, the looooooooooong break between posts. If I thought the family was busy when the kids were little, that perception has most definitely changed.

Thanks to Council Guy's commitments, I've met many fascinating people who have broadened and deepened my viewpoints on education, community service, sustainability, child rearing, self-employment, and other issues of special interest to me. I am impressed with the stamina of people who wade through the logjams of public education, launch new businesses, wrestle with lifechanging legislation, and take leadership roles in civic organizations. 

I appreciate their positive spirit because I've been very frustrated with the state of public education in our own community. While excellence happens every day in the classroom, the vagaries of politics and "wait for it" breath-holding while the new superintendent decides what's next are considerable impediments to success. For example, the DHS School Council has asked DeKalb's central office to give us a year-long schedule instead of the year-in-a-semester Block Schedule for eight years.

Does it make sense only to the parents that students need year-long math and writing? Does the school system not see the negative impact on arts education with the highly restrictive block schedule? Can they not understand that having multiple schedule models within the same school system makes it impossible for students to transfer from one school to the next? Isn't it obvious that students with ADD/ADHD, a different native language, difficulty in a core academic subject, and developmental delays find the pace of instruction in a block schedule and the very long class periods to be particularly challenging? Do they not see the falling yearly scores for students who need support?

Nope.

And each year, the central office comes up with another reason to keep the block schedule. They've mandated multiple surveys of parents/teachers/students, changed the rules and forms for making the request, "forgotten" to look at the paperwork until it's too late to act on it, and even neglected to tell the School Board that such changes would no longer come under their purview. The latest reason? That teachers would need special training to teach a year-long schedule, so administrators need another year to think about this.

Seriously?


Despite the chronically changing policies of the central office administration (and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Cheryl Atkinson's leadership will indeed improve things), Dunwoody High School, Peachtree Charter Middle School, and our local elementary schools thrive. Our high school ranks among the best in the state and the Southeast, graduates students with competitively high number of scholarships, acceptances to top colleges, and a high number of AP courses making them exempt from many freshman requirements.  Students' special interests in arts, music, athletics, service, scientific, and math advanced programs are satisfied with a robust selection of extracurricular activities. Teachers give far above and beyond the basic school day to their students.

That's what I try to remember when I'm beating my head against the bureaucratic wall.

Stakeholders

Much debate is raging within the Dunwoody High School community about schedules. At issue: block scheduling, where students take 4 classes each semester, just as in college. Some students thrive with the pace and intensity. Many do not. Some teachers utilize the expanded classroom time skillfully and productively. Many do not.

The discussion is heated, emotional, and sometimes surreal as parents deploy logic, careful respect, ballistic jolts of emotional diatribe, earnest pleas for or against a particular option, and multitudes of emails, telephone calls, and carpool chats.

Why not? Our children are the victims or beneficiaries of the decisions adults make on their behalf.

One of the more interesting discussion points has been that students are the primary stakeholders in the school. Comparing public education to a business model, proponents posit that the most important customer of the "product" is the student.

I disagree.

Any business who focuses its energies on one segment of its customer base - and one that provides no funding or time and talent for the venture - is not going to succeed.

The primary stakeholder in public education is, at the broadest level, the taxpayer. If a school can't convince taxpayers to provide basic funding as well as SPLOST and other special tax supports, then it will not thrive. The community must have trust in management and substantive belief in the quality of the end product - educational excellence.  If schools do their job right, students get to go to college or have the skills for a job straight out of high school, and function capably in day to day life.

Just as a nonprofit has to demonstrate fiscal soundness and success in mission to attract donors, a school must demonstrate measurable achievement in its educational mission as well as those all-important intangibles: parent, teacher, and student satisfaction and happiness.

Dunwoody schools are blessed by a high degree of parent involvement, a factor that research proves over and over again is the critical link in a school's ability to stay on mission and meet expectations. By and large, students do very well in Dunwoody. That fact has caused polarization within the county as the achievement gap grows from district to district. My focus is on my kids' schools. But I'm very much aware of the larger issues winnowing through the hierarchy of Board and administration oversight.

My student is not the primary stakeholder in his school.

I am.