Discipline school plan readiedBy Diette Courrégé (Contact)
The Post and Courier
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Charleston County School District's experiment with a private, for-profit company running its discipline school ended early and with little to no academic results. But district officials are hoping to provide a better alternative program for its most-at-risk students this coming year when it takes over control of Murray Hill Academy. The school board opted to cut short its five-year contract with Community Education Partners, the company hired to run Murray Hill Academy, earlier this year after schools Superintendent Nancy McGinley said she wanted to take the school in a different direction. None of the company-hired principals lasted an entire year, and the school missed all of its academic goals in its first year of operation and missed one of three academic goals during its second year. Murray Hill Academy in North Charleston serves sixth- through 10th-grade students from across the county who have been recommended for expulsion but instead were offered admittance to the school as an alternative. The district projects it will save $700,000 this school year by operating the school, in part because the district won't pay a premium to the company to run the school and in part because the school will serve roughly 80 fewer students. The total estimated cost this coming year is $2.3 million. Instead of serving a maximum of 324 students, the school will accept up to 240 students. The school was built to hold 432 students, but the school board renegotiated its contract last year so that the school only would take 324 students. Community Education Partners charged the school district for 324 students, although the school typically didn't house more than 250 students, said Denise Nusom, director of the district's prevention and intervention services. A smaller enrollment means class sizes will go from 27 to 28 students to 15 to 17 students, which should help teachers better meet students' academic needs, Nusom said. The school may have a waiting list, but students will be cycled through faster, she said. Community Education Partners required its admitted students to stay an entire school year, 180 days, but the school district will evaluate students' progress at the end of every semester to see whether they are ready to transition back to their neighborhood schools, Nusom said. Students will have to meet criteria based on their grades, attendance and behavior to return to their home schools, she said. About 90 Murray Hill Academy students are being sent back to their neighborhood schools this fall while nearly 150 will be returning to Murray Hill. Students will have to take an hour-long, daily life skills class that will teach social and behavioral skills applicable in their classes and in their lives, Nusom said. Counselors will teach those courses. Classes will remain single gender. The school has four learning communities that each serve 60 students, and three of those will be for middle school students. In the middle school communities, 45 of the 60 seats will be reserved for middle school boys and in the high school communities, the seats will be split equally between boys and girls. The school should have an easier time recruiting staff because teachers can work at Murray Hill without losing benefits of working for the district, compared to before when the school's staff were company employees, Nusom said. The staff mostly will be new. Of the 41 Community Education Partners staff that applied for positions, 11 were hired; many of the applicants did not meet the school district's qualifications for an interview, Nusom said. Many of the same rules and procedures used by Community Education Partners will be used this year, such as students going through metal detectors and eating lunches with their class instead of in a cafeteria. Myrna Caldwell, the school's new principal, said she wants to change the atmosphere to feel more like other schools. She wants to engage parents, establish a PTA and offer more opportunities to students such as leadership or service learning clubs. "I know you don't punish your way to success with these kids or any other kids," she said. "I believe we can do better for these kids." Caldwell has been at high-achieving Charleston County School of the Arts since 1995 as a teacher, assistant principal and, most recently, interim principal. She worked with at-risk students before that, most recently at Brentwood Middle School. James Perry Jr., a member of the North Charleston constituent school board, said Murray Hill Academy wasn't being properly run, he said. "With the district taking over, we have someone we can hold accountable," he said. The constituent board heard many complaints from parents about the school, specifically that it was more of a day care than anything constructive, he said. Reach Diette Courrégé at 937-5546 or dcourrege@postandcourier.com. |
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Comments
This article has 18 comment(s)
Posted by karmann on July 6, 2008 at 7:45 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Hey, how about holding parents more responsible for the behavior of their kids. We need laws that punish the parents for the behavior of their kids. Make the parents pay more for this service also. I am tired of some kids dictating programs just because they have not learned simple social skills and respect while students who want to learn suffer and academics get watered down.
Posted by belovedbliff on July 6, 2008 at 8:08 a.m. (Suggest removal)
another experiment on black kids--can't CCSD think of anything new?
Posted by drp7773 on July 6, 2008 at 8:14 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Discipline and school in the same sentence??????? with the aclu coming to town, how dare you......
Posted by gamecockwoman on July 6, 2008 at 9:33 a.m. (Suggest removal)
why are we continuing to throw away so much money on people who just don't care? Juvie Detention is where they belong if their parent's won't do their job! Bring back hard labor!
Posted by hartley8184 on July 6, 2008 at 9:53 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Hahahhahahahahaha Yeah, I'm sure this school paddled it's students right? So what was the punishment at this "NEW" discipline :-) school? Time out? A therapuetic face time with the counselor? Or even worse, if you stab someone, you get 3 days of detention. Right. And, it ended early? Wow. What a surprise. The last paragraph of the story tells the whole deal: "The constituent board heard many complaints from parents about the school, specifically that it was more of a day care than anything constructive, he said."
Of course, we all know that these parents were really saying that "thar ain't nothin' difrent about this school frum whar we wuz at before. The teachers is all prejudice."
Posted by puddin46 on July 6, 2008 at 10:12 a.m. (Suggest removal)
CEP was a joke from the beginning! I know because I worked there previously and saw first hand what was going on and decided to leave. How could you place kids at age 16-18 or 19 in classes with babies: age 12-13 and expect to have a working classroom. How could you place street criminals, drug dealers and girls who use their bodies for other reasons in to these classes with babies and expect a miracle. How could you POSSIBLY run a school when you don't have adaquate staffing and children cursing the teachers out because they don't want to be taught. I believe that if CCSD hired some of its own CCSD employees and a mixture of those who worked there previously and others who didn't, it would give the students a reassurance that there will be some teaching and learning taking place. Wish you all the best of luck!
Posted by ysillyme on July 6, 2008 at 10:27 a.m. (Suggest removal)
'cockwoman---how about bringing back common sense? Juvie prison, now there is a cost effective way of ensuring learning will result. What think tank did you hail from?
Posted by newbattleaxe on July 6, 2008 at 1:36 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Is this school set up to handle kids with disabilities? I know in other school districts, kids with disabilities who are on IEPs or other such plans can't attend "alternative schools", even if they desperately need to.
Posted by BillytheKid on July 7, 2008 at 12:13 a.m. (Suggest removal)
These schools are for kids that are disrupting the class or have the smarts to do the work but are not. It is a burden on the parents of these kids to bring their child to this school because it is not in their nationhood. The child’s old school was close and it does not have a “special bus” to pick up the kids and get them to the school. That turns into a big problem for family’s to deal with because they already have tight schedules and it becomes a large problem to solve.
I do not want to go into how much the parent is at fault with this problem.
What I would like to see is to have “classrooms” in each school that the problem student is sent to and when they get their grades up to where they should be they can get out of the small(maybe 16 students) class and into their normal one. The students day would be spent in that one class only and it would have enough staff to keep everyone in the learning mode. Normal class breaks to move students from one class to another(for the other students at the school) would mean nothing to this class because they are at where they need to be and normal classroom work(for them) would continue.(No Breaks)
Our smart children will learn in out present system in spite of all the outside influences that distract the masses of students. Most of them will never be in this fast-forward class.
Posted by lou9 on July 7, 2008 at 7:59 a.m. (Suggest removal)
A private company running the school got little to no academic results so they think they can do better with these miscreants? That's a laugh. They can't even teach the good kids. If they wound up here they don't want to be in school to begin with. Send them home to their parents to deal with and let's move on with trying to teach the ones who want to learn.
Posted by theronce on July 7, 2008 at 8:25 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Are these "at risk" (bad) kids forced to go here, or do they have to request it? If they are forced, then just take the opportunity to fingerprint them.
Posted by ThinkAboutThis on July 7, 2008 at 9:47 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Kid started school here 5 yrs ago at age 13 and in first week came home to tell us these schools and kids were out of control! Talking back ot teachers, kicking the doors, vandilism, throwing pencils and paper, no enforcement of dress codes, few or no teacher's in hallways or bathrooms at class change!
And this was suppose to be a "better" school! Can't imagaine what it's like at the "other" schools in CCSD!
Amazing a 13 yr old could figure out how out of control these schools are and in short 7 days!
Posted by LowcountryMoose on July 7, 2008 at 9:51 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Aw, shucks. I was under the impression that private, for-profit companies were a panacea for society's ills.
Posted by bunting on July 7, 2008 at 9:13 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Ms. Caldwell's last gig was AP at School of the Arts. A slightly different clientele awaits her at her new school. Exactly how did the CCSD determine her previous qualifications made her the most desirable candidate for Murray Hill?
Posted by belovedbliff on July 8, 2008 at 2:55 a.m. (Suggest removal)
bunting, excellent question--Why is Caldwell being "punished?" Why have Judith Peterson, who was on oher way out, be named the principal? C.E. Williams was slipping under her tenure.
Oh, the politics!
Posted by hartley8184 on July 8, 2008 at 11:12 a.m. (Suggest removal)
It's amazing how people can't say the truth.
Posted by musicpaladin2007 on July 8, 2008 at 4:25 p.m. (Suggest removal)
I'm rather curious myself, but on the other hand, I would not call her unqualified. She has been an outstanding administrator at an outstanding school. It makes absolutely no sense to send a bad administrator to a bad school to punish an administrator. These failing schools with failing students need a GOOD administrator and GOOD teachers to steer them back on course- not going to happen with bad ones or ones that are being "punished".
Posted by hartley8184 on July 13, 2008 at 11:41 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Quit kidding yourself, musicpaladin. You aren't going to steer these sorts of schools back on track with anything. The United States of America has a 53 percent dropout rate. 75 percent in certain major Northern cities, like Detroit. The national average on the SAT is a C minus. And all this with an education bureaucracy whose budget exceeds the GNP of a developing third world nation. On top of it all, we have an unrealistic reliance on political correctness and a real fear of facing the truth about certain issues. Schools are day care centers and juvenile detention centers. Modern educrats are not concerned at all with teaching. They are concerned with indoctrination. They are accomplishing exactly what they want to do. The rest of us are merely misapprehended that we are all on the same page concerning "academic excellence."
Liberals run the education establishment. They run the legal system. They run the prison system. Which of those three is well run? Which of those three is not a world class joke? So hey, lets give them health care also.