The Omaha Public Schools are hosting public budget forums this week to solicit comments and ideas about how to operate with $22 million less next year.
In late January, the Douglas and Sarpy County Learning Communities announced they would close the Underwood Focus School – the first joint-district facility which is just in its third year. The OPS, Westside, and Elkhorn school districts shared a $1 million+ budget to offer children (who attended by lottery system) extended school days, an extended school year, enrichment classes, and more. Principal Bret Anderson said “teachers just blossomed” in the experiment, but Elkhorn pulled out of the relationship because their $300,000 portion of the operating budget was too hard to bear. Anderson said that the school cannot get learning community dollars and the state does not recognize a focus school split between districts.
Two weeks ago the Archdiocese of Omaha announced that due to financial hardship, it would close Cristo Rey Catholic High School, an innovative concept school designed to provide quality and affordable private education to students regardless of their financial situations. The school provided work-study experiences for the students – a model hit hard by the economic downturn. Expenses proved to hard to meet.
I don’t know if the Archdiocese and the joint districts will try to resurrect their concept schools. I’m sure they would like to, and I believe there are people whose lives were touched by the experiments who will seek to see them active again.
Of course the Omaha Public Schools will plow forward with their mission/directive to serve the students of our city, but the budget cuts will push them – as they do for us all – to be even more resourceful and perhaps even leave past constructs behind.
No question these are growing pains. But out of the pain will come formulas to crack the code on what 21st Century education needs to be. A critical component must be community involvement. The discussion is ripe for parents, grandparents, teachers, administrators, and business leaders in our community.
I encourage you to attend an OPS budget meeting. Attend an open-to-the-public Learning Community meeting. Ask parents, teachers, and administrators of the Underwood Focus School and Cristo Rey School what they liked best, what worked well, what they intend to do now. Help if you can.
Join us Sunday, February 27th at 3 PM at Brownell-Talbot School for a FREE showing of Waiting for Superman, the documentary on the state of education in our nation today.
We call all of this “the most important conversation of our time.” Please join us.
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I appreciated Brownell’s offering the free screening of “Waiting for Superman” to the public on February 27th. I was glad to have seen it, but I also wanted to share a review by Diane Ravitch that challenges some of the facts and conclusions of the film.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/
As we seek answers for improving education of the children and families in our metro area, it is important that we not get swept up in broad, polarizing characterizations of teachers, unions, types of schools, or types of parents that a film like this can easily foster. The issues and solutions are a lot more complicated and the circumstances in our metro area are in many ways different than those portrayed in the film. We need to be thoughtful about the solutions for our community, using data to guide our actions, and finding ways to support and sustain models that work in our community.
With respect to the closing of the Underwood Hills Focus School, I wanted to be sure that readers understood that this was not a decision made by the Learning Community of Douglas & Sarpy Counties, but rather by the school districts who collaborated on its operations for the last three years through an interlocal agreement – Omaha Public Schools, Westside and Elkhorn. In fact, the school does not come under the purview of the Learning Community at all. Under existing law, Learning Community focus schools must be sponsored by a single school district and efforts to get the Nebraska Legislature to change the law to allow for the collaborative model pioneered by Underwood Hills have thus far not been successful. The closing of such a successful model school is still a huge loss and it speaks loudly to the need to find ways to fund and sustain innovative schools that work.