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moving on

September 20, 2012

Walcott visits ex-turnaround schools without addressing turmoil

by Rachel Cromidas, at 11:27 am

Dennis Walcott, with Principal Magdalen Radovich, students, and several officials from the Sports and Arts in Schools Foundation, announced an AT&T grant to fund Flushing HS after-school programs.

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott has quietly visited several former “turnaround” schools in recent weeks, but he has done so without calling attention to the fact that the city planned to close them until just a few months ago.

During the first week of school, Walcott made unannounced visits to two of the schools in Brooklyn. At John Dewey High School, where large-scale scheduling problems are prevailing, he shook hands with students one morning. He stopped by William Grady Career and Technical High School, which was removed from the turnaround roster in April, the same day. Neither visit made his public schedule, and department officials said they had nothing to do with the schools’ ex-turnaround status. Instead, the stops were like many that the chancellor, an avid school visitor, has made outside of public view, the officials said.

And on Wednesday, he shared the stage with the new principal of Flushing High School at a press conference heralding a substantial grant from AT&T to the Sports and Arts in Schools Foundation, which runs an after-school program at the school. Working in about 150 city schools, SASF was only the second group, after the YMCA of New York, to receive a grant through Aspire, a $250 million AT&T grant program aimed at boosting college readiness among high-need students. The grant will help SASF hire staff to support its program at Flushing, which includes targeted efforts to help incoming ninth-graders make up academic ground.

Speaking to the students and staff who attended the press conference, Walcott praised SASF and said, “We expect success from all of you to not just achieve but to achieve at a high level. To do that you need to support great teachers, you need to support great leaders, we need to support families, not-for-profits, the generosity of corporate giving.”

But he did not acknowledge the turmoil the school had gone through in recent months as the city tried to close and reopen it using the turnaround process. Nor did he note the school’s leadership change, made in turnaround’s early stages. And after the press conference, Walcott ducked out without talking to reporters. A department spokeswoman said he was late to a meeting and would be taking questions over email instead, but the spokeswoman did not respond by day’s end.

The city was in the process of overhauling Flushing and 23 other struggling schools when an arbitrator ruled this summer that the city’s staffing plans violated its contract with the teachers union. Many of the changes were reversed, and since the year began, students and teachers at some of the schools have complained of confusion and disorganization that they say might be the result of abrupt leadership and staffing changes that cut into planning time administrators normally reserve over the summer.

While Walcott spoke inside Flushing’s light-filled auditorium shortly after 3 p.m., a half dozen students milled about the school grounds, waiting for the school’s 4:30 p.m. dismissal. All said they had left early because their last period of the day was a Spanish class that has not yet been assigned a teacher for the year. Other students said they had noted few changes to the school since the previous school year but had been surprised to receive first semester schedules that included classes they had not requested or had already taken and passed, such as art.

Scores of students rallied in defense of the school and its principal of one year, Carl Hudson, last winter during a tense public hearing on the city’s plan to close the school. Hudson was arrested near school shortly after the school year ended for possession of methamphetamine, but the city had already planned to replace him with Radovich, a former assistant principal at Queens Vocational Career and Technical High School.

Radovich told reporters on Wednesday she is optimistic about the changes ahead for Flushing and was unfamiliar with students’ complaints. She said she has been offering her staff new professional development opportunities to help them prepare for the rollout of new learning standards.

“The challenge is really to make sure that all of the adults stay focused,” she said. “Trying to meet the mandates and the expectations that we all know are on target, you need to be able to reeducate and retrain teachers, administrators, and for me it was a tremendous learning curve as well.”

One group of students that should see positive changes right away is Flushing’s large population of English language learners and recent immigrants, she said.

“One of the things we did over the summer was we looked very very carefully at how the ELL students are being serviced and we have reprogrammed the entire building to make sure we are providing the mandated services that students need,” Radovich said. “Also we have started through the parent coordinator to start to reach out more to community resources.”

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  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002397245457 Mary Conway-Spiegel

    The turnaround debacle was an ill-conceived idea/plan executed without any alternate strategy if the plan failed – which it did.  Tremendous chaos proceeded enacting turnaround via lack of clear information/transparency.  Schools were moving at break neck pace to enact their individual turnarounds over the summer and were halted abruptly after the ruling came down.  
    Today former turnaround schools are dealing with scheduling problems, morale problems, funding problems and looming closure fears.
    In the real world this would be an unacceptable way to run an organization/business/institution.  In the real world this Turnaround debacle, would be the definition of incompetence.

  • SMH

    Hear, hear Ms. Conway-Spiegel!

  • nuff said

    Just curious about Bloombergs comment as reported in NY Daily News that students in the 24 turnaround schools would receive “No education this entire year” has Walcott ever commented on that statement?

  • guest

    I would love to have been a student at John Dewey with lackey Walcott speaking and gotten up and shouted out, “Mr. Walcott, why did you try to destroy our school and dump our best teachers?”  And I would have loved to have seen his reaction or any of the other lackeys he probably brought with him.

  • http://twitter.com/leoniehaimson leonie haimson

    Right you are Mary.  For years these schools have been overcrowded and underfunded and now b/c of the incompetence of DOE, students aren’t getting the classes they signed up for or are still unassigned to teachers.  This is unacceptable.  Where is the accountability for “hold me accountable” Dennis Walcott and/or Marc Sternberg? 

  • Michael Fiorillo

    Very well said, Mary, but where does the incompetence end and the malice begin?

  • ANGRY DEWEY STUDENT

    I call complete BS. I’m a Dewey student and he obviously had to have been standing in the front with the new principal (Kathleen Elvin from Tweed), an I did not see him AT ALL! But now I wish I did, I would have spat in his face and insulted him, which is against my nature, but how low of him. What a disgraceful person.

    First you ruin our education, destroy our school and place innocent students and teachers in agony, and then when your senseless plan is crushed by the law; you dare show up at our school as if nothing ever happened?!

    THAT’S SICK!! Give those funds to JOHN DEWEY HS! We were the highest performing on that list of 24. Walcott you make me sick! I can’t wait until your leader Bloomberg gets kicked out. How corrupt I can’t stand it ugh!

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002397245457 Mary Conway-Spiegel

    We all know the answer to that:  1.  Which came first, the chicken or the egg?  2.  It’s the gift that just keeps on giving.  

  • Fedupatdewey

    Disgraceful is not the word. He stood outside Dewey with his lackey Elvin and her lackey the AP of Social Studies. He saw very few students and did not seem to enter the building.
    Meanwhile, programming chaos reigns at Dewey with the programmer is still screwing things up. Why is this programmer still there? Why is Elvin still in place? Good grief! If Dewey were a corporation, they both would have been fired already!

  • Dorothy

    “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”. -The Wizard of Oz

  • Vote NO!

    The  story  so  far  in  many  former  “Turnaround  schools”  is  that 
    the  programs  are  very  messed  up,  yet  administrators  are 
    entering  classrooms  “u  rating  lessons”  even  though  the  programs 
    aren’t  settled,  and  many  students  are  sitting  in  the  wrong 
    classes.  If  this  is  true,  where  is  the  UFT?

  • Asdg

    Not true…it began with Bloomberg/Walcott/Klein…many of the “turnaround schools” used to be good high schools.

  • guest

    You don’t get it yet, do you?  The order is out from Randi, try not to rock the boat unless absolutely necessary.  We (the union) don’t want to look as if we are in any way impeding “reform” even if it means we’re throwing many of our members under the bus.  If something egregious happens, okay.  But look at all we’ve done (the union) to throw our members under the bus whether it be in New Haven or now in Chicago (was what the teachers ultimately got in Chicago worth the 7 days or so out on strike?  Did they ultimately “win”?  They’re going ahead with the idiotic evaluations using student test scores which of course lack the slightest degree of validity if exams even exist to be used like in the case of the high schools here but why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

  • Annoyed Newtown student

    I go to Newtown in Elmhurst Queens, and we’re pretty much in the same boat you are, and it’s not over for us yet.

    We (both teachers and students) have been through chaos before school even started. I don’t know if this happened at your school, but at mine, for the first time anyone can remember, students had to come in a day early for programs – only to find out on the first day of school that those programs were invalid, so we had to spend a big part of the morning getting new programs (some spent the whole day chasing people down to get replacement ones). But there’s more.

    In my case, my program originally had no lunch in it at all (seriously), so on top of the hassle of getting a new program, I had to go immediately to the guidance counselor room that same day in order to have it changed. However, as it turned out, program mishaps affected nearly all of the students – nearly 3000 – so the guidance counselor room was bursting at the seams with students trying to change programs for three school days straight if not more (the program office, which usually shares the burden of program changes, probably saw this chaos coming and redirected any traffic to the G.C.’s office). Fortunately, I was able to get it changed after about an hour’s wait, before there was another thing waiting for me: I was put in an underclassmen English class by accident.

    Sometime in the first two days of school – and this is going to sound confusing because it is – codes for classes were redone, which caused the code on my program and the code the teachers have to not match. I didn’t find this out until the second day of school when the period was half-over, and I had to spend the rest of the period going to the program office, synchronizing my program with new school codes, and showing up at the class 5 minutes before it was over.

    Since then, I haven’t had much incident – yet. However, the school is full with program horror stories and stories of general confusion. One person I know was given 3 English periods; another is having to take health again because proof he did the class was lost in the turnaround shuffle; many others were put in classes they don’t need or want; at the very beginning, no lab classes were scheduled for anyone (I don’t know if that’s still the case), and much more I won’t put because this comment is getting long.

    Why is all this happening? It all goes back to turnaround and branches off from there (we students are progressively learning more about what’s happening as the days go by). First of all, because of the confusion during turnaround, absolutely no planning was for the next year, so all we’re seeing now probably should have been done over the summer. Two, because again of turnaround, we had a “brain drain” of people key to the school running, and most of the replacements are learning as they go along (while it’s not their fault, this helps no one). Three, because of yet more confusion that stems from turnaround, the school is currently strapped for cash, so we’re not able to do as much.

    And on top of all that, we don’t know what Bloomberg will do next.

    This is a pitiful state of affairs that seems to be repeating throughout the city and your school, and like you, I’ve lost respect for both Bloomberg and Walcott. You’ve said what most of us are thinking right now, but I guess the best advice for us all is to hang tight, because it’s definitely going to be a bumpy ride.

  • TeachmyclassMrMayor

     Which is why you never had a chance to see him.

  • fabian

    It  looks like another set up to fail scenario across the board, aided and abetted by a “Model Army” of new principals. Keep an ear out for the charter school cavalry to save the day.

  • someone who cares

    At Flushing, they did away with Small Learning Communities except for the Freshman Community.  We spent two break-backing years putting those together and trying to make them work with the threat of closure over us like a black cloud all for naught.  This is why teachers are frustrated.  No program stays in the school for that long.  Every year we come back, it’s something new and then a year or two later it’s forsaken, and they ask why teacher morale is down.

  • Lilhuney

    No, different here at Adams… over 250 room changes and over 2,000 student program changes.. Everyday, every teacher gets 3-5 new students in each one of their classes.. and they are still not done with fixing programs or the rooms… AP, Programming and partner, don’t know what they are doing.. and and another person who has absolutely no experience programming, when there are over 15 people in the building who do!!

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