I am really okay with the dance program taking some hits while it re-establishes itself as the JEFFERSON dance program.

Schools like LaGuardia School of the Performing Arts (the FAME school) or School of the Arts in my hometown of San Francisco do not offer co-op programs. You’re either in or out. You make choices.

As the enrollment increases, so will the offerings. Also there’s nothing that says that Cleveland or Lincoln or Lake Oswego High can’t start their own dance programs for their students using their own resources.

I think we have sent really mixed messages about creating community, fairness, etc. when we allowed this co-op business.

This is the ideal that David Colton was working toward, but it was hijacked by administrators who continue to see small schools as autonomous academic silos and prevent students from taking classes outside their own communities.

Unfortunately, this is part of a national trend, pushed by gazillionaire educational know-nothings Bill gates and Eli Broad through their foundations. Micheal Klonsky and Susan Klonsky wrote a book about it, called “Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society.”

So there’s nothing to say that “small schools” and “comprehensive schools” are at odds with one another. The original thinking was that the former could be a way of organizing the latter, not a stripped-down replacement.

What exactly are the small schools supposed to achieve? Clearly not college entrance.

Again and again we see it: in less wealthy schools principals spend FTE on “core” academics (those darn tests again) at the expense of not just libraries, the arts, and foreign languages but also science, literature, writing, economics, business and history.

Just look at the courses offered at Jefferson and those offered at the next school over. Repeat comparisons for any of the small schools at Madison, Marshall or Roosevelt vs. any of Cleveland, Lincoln or Wilson.

(Disclaimer: I do not know whether these syllabi listings are complete for each school, but the Jefferson one looks pretty close from what I can tell.)

As for the cost issue, I completely agree that to do K8 right (or small schools in high schools for that matter) you need to be willing and able to devote significantly MORE resources than you would otherwise. This is Econ 101. You are losing economies of scale by creating smaller entities, requiring additional expenditures to provide both the infrastructure (science labs, retrofitted bathrooms, etc) and inputs (teachers, counselors, library books, support staff, etc.) to maintain the same level of service. Unless you don’t intend to provide the same level of service.

I go back to questions I had when this reconfiguration movement first started: what problem is the reconfiguration supposed to fix? How is it supposed to fix it? How will we know if/when it’s been fixed?

Now, maybe those answers were provided and I missed them, in which case I’d love to be enlightened.

As I looked at the original materials presented to the Board in support of Vickie’s proposal, it certainly appeared that cost savings were supposed to be a principal benefit since the reconfiguration was to be linked with school closures. As far as I can tell not only have there been no real savings, but there have been increased costs. Granted, fewer closures happened than they anticipated, but I have never seen any evidence that costs associated with wholesale reconfiguration were ever factored into the decision. They certainly need to be factored in now, though.

So I’s like to ask the original questions again: what problem (or problems) are K8s supposed to solve? Are they solving them? How do we know? If doing K8 right will, in fact, require resources that PPS just doesn’t have and likely won’t get any time soon, is it time to apologize, declare the experiment a mistake, and reverse the whole thing?

Realistically, that may not be possible for a whole variety of reasons, but I certainly want these questions to be considered BEFORE we embark on a high school redesign process, especially if small schools are going to be part of the grand scheme. We need to identify the lessons of the K8 reconfiguration so that we do the next process a whole lot better.

Access to library services, and a library is another area of concern for many of our K-8’s. A few schools have made use of parent volunteers (again) to staff the library - but they have done so without any support from the central district office. In fact, the policy has been that schools that do not have any paid staff (either licensed or unlicensed) are not allowed use of the district’s computerized system. It appears that this stance has been to try and force Principal’s to allocate some of their precious FTE for media staffing. I cannot begin to say if this has been an effective strategy - but I must say that it seems rather bizarre that parents are encouraged to teach electives, but are not allowed to support a school library? (And, I know, I am simplifying things - issues like supervision of students, etc.) But - really - the goal is parent involvement and some access to a school library in every school… right?