More poverty, competition challenge Boardman Schools

By Robert Guttersohn

rguttersohn@vindy.com

Boardman

The Boardman school district is changing.  “This is not your mother’s, father’s, grandfather’s Boardman,” said Superintendent Frank Lazzeri.  Today, the district services nine subgroups and has a student body that speaks 17 languages. But the district also has seen an increase in students coming from economically disadvantaged homes.  “The subgroups are shifting,” said Linda Ross, director of instruction. ”We are at the highest point ever in economically disadvantaged students.”

In 1996, Lazzeri said, less than 10 percent of Boardman students were eligible for free or reduced lunches, a measurement of poverty in student bodies. Today, 37.5 percent are eligible. At Market Street Elementary, in the district’s northern corridor, Lazzeri said the level of eligible students reaches into the 60th percentile.  “We are getting in an increasingly diverse population,” Lazzeri said. “School for some students might be that stability, that rock that child has to cling so that student has some semblance of sanity in their lives. But they are achieving.”

For five consecutive years, the state has rated the district as excellent. Despite this, the district continues to lose local and state funding to community schools often rated well below Boardman.  Boardman met all 26 state indicators and out-performed districts with similar demographics in all but one category, and 89 percent of its graduates went on to higher education.

When Lazzeri hired Ross six years ago, she implemented a data-driven curriculum, mapping students’ progress throughout the year in federal-and-state-mandated subjects. She also implemented common assessments in each grade. For example, all fifth-graders in all of the district’s schools would take the same quarterly assessment test.  It “provides real time intervention at a real time setting,” Ross said. “Rather than work on last year’s data, we are working on this year’s data.”

She said via the assessments, teachers can find holes and gaps and can intercede during an intervention period when teachers can reintroduce a topic.  “I look at it like a film reel, so it’s multiple pictures of the child over the year rather than just a group photo at the end of the year,” Ross said.  Lazzeri said the data also revealed districtwide consistent problems.

“For years and years and years, we saw that there were some achievement gaps in our middle schools in mathematics,” Lazzeri said. They examined similar middle schools across Ohio whose students were testing well on math and even visited schools with their teachers and changed a curriculum that had been the same for 35 years, Lazzeri said.  “Last year was our first year in those noble experiments, and our middle- school achievement were the highest ever,” Lazzeri said.

But with the success, the district has seen both state funding and local taxes go toward underperforming community schools, none of which are in Boardman.  According to a report prepared by Boardman schools Treasurer Richard Santilli, the district lost this year a combined $807,762 to community schools, $234,693 to community schools in academic emergency status and $118,989 to those on academic watch.  “We’ve got probably $6.3 million that have gone out of this district in the last 10 years for community schools,” Santilli said. “For years we’ve been saying we don’t mind the competition, but the funding is totally unfair. The state wants achievements, and you can see where the money’s gone.”

Life Skills of Youngstown, a dropout-recovery community school that offers classes with a flexible schedule and work-at-your-own pace scheduling, is one of the schools under academic watch. It diverts $72,920 of Boardman tax dollars and $22,160 of state funding from Boardman schools.  “Life Skills does not take money away from public schools,” said Jeffrey Roth, vice president of marketing and communication for Life Skills managing company White Hat. “The money follows the student and where the student goes.”

Roth said the school takes on students 16 to 21 years old that either could not complete or felt they couldn’t complete at a traditional high school. He argues that comparing Life Skills, which operates mainly in urban demographic areas, to other districts is not a fair comparison, because it takes students that public schools could not educate.  Greg Richmond, the president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, said there is no leniency for schools, such as Life Skills, that educate recovery students and special-needs students.  “You came to us and asked to run a school because you said you could do better,” he said.  Charter schools, he said, are started by those with good intentions.

“Running a school is a very difficult thing. If you open the door to people with good hearts opening community schools, you get a lot of good intentions running a lot of bad schools,” he said.  Ohio is one of the states that has opened hundreds of community schools since the mid-1990s and made it hard to close the bad ones.

“The frustration level is high,” Santilli said. “We’ve achieved, we’ve done what we’ve been told, but you know what, this is your reward.”  Lazzeri said Boardman schools receives $17 per student, or roughly $70,000 total, from the state for its excellent rating.  “I’ll gladly pay $17 to the schools that aren’t doing well and keep what they’re taking from us,” he said.