Board discusses sanctions against schools failing to meet adequate yearly progress

Students who attend Collier County schools that are considered economically disadvantaged received a blow Thursday, as more schools are facing sanctions for not meeting federal education standards under the No Child Left Behind Act.

The news came as School Board members got a taste of what its Title I funds would look like for the 2006-07 school year.

Title I money targets economically disadvantaged schools. To receive them, schools must meet certain benchmarks or face sanctions or loss of funding.

The bad news for the district is that 14 schools are facing sanctions this year, up from 12 during the 2005-06 school year.

Kimball Thomas, director of state and federal grants for the Collier County School District, told the board that the No Child Left Behind Act sanctions affect only schools that receive Title I dollars. As a result of sanctions, the district now must set aside 20 percent of those dollars for the sanctions that schools face for not making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) two years in a row or more.

Next year, the district will receive about $6 million in Title I funds. The district will have to set aside $1.2 million of the money for sanctions incurred by the schools that did not make AYP.

AYP is determined each year after students statewide take the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which measures their skills in reading, math, writing and science. Those scores determine whether individual students will be in remedial classes. The scores also can mean being retained for another year for students in third grade. They also determine what letter grade the school will get from the state and whether the school will achieve AYP according to the federal act. Schools that receive federal money may face sanctions if they don’t make AYP two or more years in a row.

Those sanctions include school choice, which allow students at those schools to elect to attend another school in the district; free tutoring programs for students in schools that do not make AYP; corrective action; and a restructuring plan for school resources.

In Collier County, two schools have had sanctions for their failure to meet AYP standards since the 2003-04 school year. Those schools are Pinecrest Elementary School and Immokalee High School. Both are facing all of the above-mentioned sanctions.

The Collier County School District has 14 schools facing sanctions for not making AYP, though not all of the schools are facing the sanctions that Pinecrest Elementary School and Immokalee High School are facing.

Board members wondered what the district needs to be doing to ensure that there were not 14 schools facing sanctions next year.

Cynthia Janssen, the district’s chief academic officer, said the district would continue to build on its foundation and literacy programs. She said the district was working with all schools, not just Title I schools, to analyze data on students and help them improve their scores.

“There is proof that those things are working,” she said.

Board member Dick Bruce said he was concerned that the district was not helping the schools achieve AYP with a high teacher turnover in the neediest schools. He worried that the district was spinning its wheels by training teachers for these schools only to have them leave.

Board Vice Chairman Steven Donovan agreed.

“We need to make a change,” he said. “We should be sending our best teachers out there, not necessarily the newest.”

After the discussion on Title I schools, the board heard from its legislative lobbyist, Vern Crawford, on the recent state legislative session and its impact to the district.

Crawford discussed the impact class-size amendment legislation would have on Collier County. Florida voters passed the class-size amendment in 2002, limiting the number of students in a classroom to 18 in kindergarten through third grade, 22 for fourth through eighth grades and 25 in high school by the 2010-11 school year.

In Collier County, schools have been able to meet the standards for the class-size requirement, but that will change as districts must adopt a school average this fall. Currently, class-size amendment quotas are measured on a district level, which means the district can stay in compliance by averaging crowded schools with sparsely populated schools.

Michele LaBute, the district’s chief operations officer, has said if the class-size amendment is figured on a school-by-school basis, 13 schools in the district would not meet that requirement.

Crawford said the district will receive $37 million in 2006-07, up from $25.8 million in 2005-06, to make sure the guidelines will be met.

Crawford also discussed housing legislation that would allow the districts to help teachers and other employees find affordable housing; the Special Teachers Are Rewarded program that will reward high-performing teachers in each district; and voluntary prekindergarten enrollment and the Legislature’s plan to revisit the issue next year.