In The News

A new boss at TPS

Blade Editorial

THE new superintendent of Toledo Public Schools faces two urgent priorities: the district's looming budget deficit and the need to keep improving student academic performance. William Harner, a West Point graduate and nontraditional educator who was the school board's unanimous choice to lead the school district, will need all of the management and financial savvy he can bring.

The schools face a $12.7 million budget deficit next year. The board's selection of Mr. Harner to run the 29,400-student district, contingent on agreement on a financial package, was clearly motivated by his financial experience.

Improving academic performance is vital, but tackling the deficit is the foremost challenge facing TPS right now. It seems highly unlikely that TPS can avoid asking voters for a levy. But the board obviously liked Mr. Harner's demonstrated ability to narrow budget deficits; he is currently striving to fix a $73 million shortfall in the Philadelphia city schools, where he is regional superintendent and special assistant to the chief executive.

If he can repair school finances here, Mr. Harner will quickly win the support of the taxpaying community. Though he has a doctoral degree in educational leadership from the University of South Carolina, he doesn't come from the customary mold of a big-city superintendent.

He's a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, and though he also taught there, he otherwise had never set foot in a school as an employee until he became a high school principal in Hilton Head, S.C., after leaving the Army in 1998. His career follows a nationwide trend - more districts are looking for leaders who do not have exclusively educational backgrounds.

The former Army officer's first experience as superintendent, in Greenville County, S.C., drew mixed reviews. Four years into his five-year contract he was asked to resign. A majority of the Greenville board let Mr. Harner go, even though some former members attributed the district's success to him. After a stint as a middle school principal in Georgia, he took the job in Philadelphia.

That's not all that different from what happened in Toledo. More than a year ago, new board members indicated they no longer wanted TPS Superintendent Eugene Sanders, even though he is credited with raising students' academic performance. Now he heads Cleveland schools.

Toledo schools are fortunate that they have had long-time employee John Foley, one of the three superintendent finalists, to lead the district on an interim basis. His disappointment in not getting the job on a permanent basis is understandable, but to his credit, he pledges to make the transition seamless and smooth.

Though we have admired what Mr. Foley brought to the job on an interim basis, TPS' last five superintendents have come either from the district itself or the immediate area.

Perhaps Toledo Public Schools will benefit from someone who is seeing the district for the first time but knows exactly what he's getting into.



Education evolution
Career and technical schools are keeping pace with the marketplace
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Charlie Boss

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Mornings at the school sound of water splashing on soapy hair, onions sizzling on a skillet and computers humming.
But afternoons at South-Western Career Academy buzz with the sound of a calculus lecture, the quiet talk of a student being tutored in English as a Second Language and the foot-tapping tunes of 1930s swing music as the dance club gathers.
Students say the academy allows them to study the skills to become a carpenter, makeup artist, mechanic, chef. But it also has the extras of "regular" high-school life: advanced-placement classes, a parent-teacher organization, a student council and a chess club.
"It’s not our old vocational education," said Sherry Minton, career and technical education director for South-Western schools. "It’s bringing their academic learning to life. They see the connections, and that’s important."
Experts say career and technical education has long been stereotyped as an alternative for students who can’t cut it in high school. But career and technical schools have evolved, offering students honors-level academics and more activities than students normally would get back at their home high school.
"It’s been an evolution over time," said Alisha Hyslop, assistant director of public policy at the Association of Career and Technical Education, based in Alexandria, Va.
"A high-school diploma wouldn’t be enough for students in a skilled trade. Now, students need more rigorous academics. They need to go on to postsecondary education. As the economy has evolved, the career and technical schools have been responsive."
More school districts in Ohio also are recognizing the benefits of such programs and hope to create their own academies, officials said.
"We know they are growing, and we’re excited about that because it’s the vision we’re looking toward," said J.C. Benton, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Education.
Ohio’s career and technical programs are original compared with others throughout the country, Hyslop said. Most states offer career and technical programs within their high schools, but Ohio is one of only two states that has standalone programs at separate sites.
Tolles Career and Technical Academy in Plain City, for example, draws students from seven school districts, including Dublin and Hilliard. Along with the career programs, students learn Spanish geared specifically to their occupation of choice.
Delaware Area Career Center in Delaware, which attracts students from 11 schools, offers higher-level math courses such as statistics and calculus.
"The skill set we need today is no longer manufacturing," said Sheila Scott, high-school career and technical coordinator at Columbus Public Schools. "We need employees that need to know how to read, do math, work effectively in teams and problem solve."
Columbus is in the midst of revamping its career and technical program, with administrators studying what kinds of new classes could help students.
Some career centers, such as South-Western Career Academy, now offer opportunities all day long, so students can take their academic courses and career classes in one building.
South-Western, in Grove City, draws students from the district’s four high schools. Students wear uniforms that include tan sweat shirts and blue smocks. The shirts they wear are of different colors, signifying a specific career program, and have the student’s name embroidered on them.
The academy has about 500 teens enrolled, with 25 students per class. The school’s size makes it easier to connect with students.
"It’s much friendlier here than at my high school," said Tarinesha Caldwell, a senior at Central Crossing High School in the dental-assisting program. "People come up and say hello."
Tonight, they will gather for the school’s annual Snowflake Dance. It’s a chance for the students from the different schools to come together and make new friends.
"I thought I would miss my home school," said Rachel Morris, a junior at Franklin Heights High School and a culinary-arts student. "But I’m happy where I’m at."




Charter dream may die
Founder plans to close schools in mall, but overseer fights decision
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Jennifer Smith Richards

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

These schools, with their navy-and-white uniforms and hallways with easy-listening music and classrooms in former department stores, were her dream.
Teachers, students and parents bought into Anita Nelam’s vision and followed her three years ago into the unknown — brandnew charter schools, built from scratch, in the Columbus City Center mall.
Now, the dream is dying.
"I worry about what’s going to happen to them," Nelam said of the roughly 250 students enrolled in the Harte Crossroads schools. There were 70 students in the first year, when there were two single-gender schools; 500 signed up this school year, though many never showed up.
Nelam said she’s closing her schools after class next Friday, because there is no money to keep them open even a day more. The schools’ overseer and some staff members are fighting the closures, but Nelam sent a letter yesterday informing parents of her decision.
It went home with students because Nelam didn’t have the money for postage to mail it, she said.
The situation is a far cry from her dream, which began with the idea that girls need a safe place to learn, away from the distraction of boys. She called it the Harte School.
When boys’ parents clamored for a school of their own, she obliged with Crossroads Preparatory Academy. It began a pattern of quick growth that continued despite difficult times running the schools and achieving results.
The first year began with sixth grade, and seventh grade was added later. Two years later, Nelam’s schools serve students from kindergarten to high school; the two operations now are a high school (Harte Crossroads High School) and a lower school (Harte Crossroads Academy).
"I’m just so mad," said Monique Hall, whose son is a kindergartner. "We were told school is in session on Monday, but what about Tuesday? "
Hall wondered how the schools’ overseers could have let the finances get so out of hand. She said parents should demand answers from the sponsor and the Ohio Department of Education.
The Education Department says the schools owe the government $900,000, repayments for federal and state charter school startup grants. Todd Hanes, who oversees charter schools for the department, said there’s no documentation of how that money (which most charters receive) was spent.
Harte Crossroads’ sponsor, or overseer, is Richland Academy in Mansfield. Officials there say the schools also are $450,000 in debt and owe $100,000 in overpayments for students and $85,000 to the Internal Revenue Service for unpaid employee withholdings.
Nelam agreed that the schools are deeply in debt, but she blames Richland Academy and the management company that all Richland-sponsored schools use. She has filed complaints about their practices with the state.
The management company, Innovative Learning Solutions, handled the banking, she said. And the company takes 20 percent of schools’ revenue in return for providing fiscal, recordkeeping and other services.
For Harte Crossroads, that meant as much as $40,000 a month for services the company didn’t provide, Nelam said.
Richland Academy took an additional 3 percent to pay for its oversight services.
Without the consulting fees, the schools would be in better shape, Nelam said.
"We’d still be broke, but we’d be making it," she said.
That’s not true, said Marianne Cooper, executive director of Richland.
"Things have been dire for a long time there," she said. "They go back to the first year of operation. The financial woes were there."
Furthermore, Cooper said, Nelam doesn’t have the authority to close the schools. Richland put the schools on probation late last month, and schools on probation can’t make such decisions without the approval of their sponsor and school board.
In this case, the school board and Nelam have agreed that shutting down is best, but Richland disagrees.
"To close a school is a very disastrous thing," Cooper said.
Richland officials have been working with a small group of teachers who want to take over the schools. It’s unclear how that would work and how that would solve the debt worries.
An outside company also could come in and take over the schools’ operation and debt, Nelam said.
Some teachers are hopeful that Friday won’t really be the end.
"I’m trying to have faith that everything is going to be OK. I just concentrate on the kids," said Mary Tackett, who teaches first-graders. "I hope for these kids’ sake they don’t just close it."
Like the other teachers at the schools, Tackett has had paychecks come late, which forced her to be late on a payment for her new car.
Eric Jenkins, who teaches science to seventh- and eighthgraders, is one of the teachers who wants to help keep the schools open.
"We’re just trying to make sure we can finish out the year," he said. The teachers’ plan includes allowing two of the schools’ programs to declare bankruptcy and letting the sponsor step in with a stronger hand. "If it works, thank the Lord. If not, I’m going to have to find another job."
Jenkins said he has faith; he assigned his students a project that is due Friday.
Despite the state and sponsor’s claims that Nelam can’t rightfully close her school, she said she will — and she has to. Richland said it has attorneys at the ready to take action if she does.
"There will be no students here. I cannot ask teachers to continue to work and not know if they’re going to get paid," Nelam said. "When you cannot pay the bills, it’s irresponsible to stay open."
On Sunday, The Dispatch published an editorial opposing the proposed constitutional amendment, Getting It Right for Ohio’s Future, designed to guarantee a high-quality education for all of Ohio’s schoolchildren and to fix Ohio’s unconstitutional school-funding system.
The Dispatch suggested that the cost was excessive, but the sponsors of the proposal believe that Ohio’s voters should make the decision about what they are willing to invest to better prepare our children for college, improve Ohio’s work force and stimulate the economy.
The editorial further states that the sponsors "want to take decisions about how much money to spend and how to raise it out of voters’ hands and give unchecked authority to courts and an unelected committee" and that "the amount to be spent on schools would be determined … by a committee appointed by the Department of Education."
If these statements were true, the proponents themselves would oppose them. But they aren’t. Instead, Getting It Right for Ohio’s Future gives the authority to determine the components, programs and services necessary to provide a high-quality education to the State Board of Education, an existing constitutional entity, of which 11 members are elected directly and eight are appointed by the governor, Ohio’s highest-ranking elected leader. Hardly an "unelected committee."
It is the state board, not the Department of Education, that would appoint an 18-member advisory commission to assist in the deliberations, but the board retains the sole right to determine the necessary components and calculate their costs.
Then, in direct contradiction to The Dispatch’s charge of "unchecked authority," the proposal allows the General Assembly to adopt its own plan by a three-fifths majority in both houses, as long as it retains substantially the same components, programs and services.
Further inaccuracies in the editorial include the statement that "this would be an intolerable removal of public input" from the process of funding schools. The state board, a public body, by law must conduct its business in full public view. Any citizen, expert or otherwise, could provide input during these proceedings. A majority of directly elected members, along with a minority of gubernatorially appointed colleagues, would determine public investment levels in a totally transparent process. Hardly a "removal of public input."
Later, the editorial says that "removing voters altogether from the equation would free those controlling school spending from any accountability." Simply not true. Voters aren’t removed. They directly elect 11 of the 19 members of the board, as well as the governor, who appoints the other eight.
In addition, Getting It Right for Ohio’s Future creates an independent nine-member education accountability commission appointed by the governor, the speaker of the House and the president of the Senate with the specific responsibility for monitoring educational investments to determine whether they are implemented in an effective, cost-efficient manner and whether they are having a positive impact on student performance.
Obviously, The Dispatch is free to draw its own conclusions. But it does a disservice to its readers by distorting the truth to make its case.

SANDRA C. NEKOLOFF
President of the Ohio PTA
Parma

Tom Sawyer's road back to Columbus

He packs a wealth of knowledge on key issuesBy Steve Hoffman, Beacon Journal editorial writer
What a long, strange trip it's been for Tom Sawyer. When he entered his first election, a race for the Ohio House in 1976, Sawyer's North Hill neighbors thought the Akron Democrat was running a numbers racket out of his dining room.
Charts with columns of numbers were stuck to the walls. People huddled nervously around the dining room table. There was a steady flow to and from the house.
What Sawyer was doing, of course, was carefully plotting his political future, precinct by precinct. Such attention to detail became a hallmark of Sawyer's style as his career advanced. He was elected mayor of Akron in 1983, a big victory for the city's Democrats, who had been shut out of the mayor's office for two decades.
When Democrat John Seiberling decided not to seek re-election to the U.S. House in 1986, Sawyer battled through a seven-person primary and a tough, expensive general election campaign against Republican Lynn Slaby. (He faced Slaby again in 1994, another difficult and expensive race.) Tom Sawyer looked unstoppable. He had never, ever lost an election.
The wheels started coming off the Sawyer bandwagon after his vote in 1993 for the North American Free Trade Agreement. It seems like ancient history these days, but the Democratic leaders of the day (President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore) believed in embracing free trade as the best pathway to a prosperous future.
Sawyer, lobbied by the White House, eventually agreed. Labor promptly blamed NAFTA for all manner of evils, chief among them the loss of manufacturing jobs in Ohio and other Midwest industrial states. It was a potent political message but one that ignored, among other things, the fact that most job losses were due to the adoption of highly advanced manufacturing technology and that Canadian workers weren't exactly driving wage and benefit levels down here.
By 2002, Sawyer found himself redrawn into a sprawling congressional district that stretched to Pennsylvania. He lost a primary election in the 17th District to Tim Ryan, a young state senator with strong labor ties.
Last year, Sawyer tried to navigate yet another multicandidate primary, as he had in the old days, this time in the 13th U.S. House District. He lost to Betty Sutton (another labor favorite), then recovered to win a seat on the state school board against Republican incumbent Deborah Owens Fink, who had thrown the board into a fit (and Ohio into the national spotlight) over her criticism of teaching evolution in high school biology class.
This week, state Senate Democratic unanimously appointed Sawyer to a vacant 28th District Senate seat, which covers all of Portage and southern Summit County, putting him, essentially, back where he started.
Hopefully, Sawyer has put the NAFTA vote to rest. He will return to a state legislature scrambled by term limits, a chronic drain on the institutional memory needed to make progress on tough issues such as school funding.
For starters, Sawyer, unlike many new legislators going to Columbus, understands how school funding works and can offer concrete ideas about how to fix it. He also brings years of congressional experience to bear on education reform, including areas such as math and science education and adult literacy.
From his days in the Ohio House and working with members of Ohio's congressional delegation, Sawyer also has a sense of how diverse and politically complicated the state is. With those attributes, he will be an important ally for fellow-Democrat Ted Strickland as the governor advances ideas on school funding in the face of increasingly sharp questioning from majority Republicans in the House and Senate and the leaders of a ballot initiative backed by school districts across the state.
Sawyer also is poised to help advance another agenda, for Ohio's cities.
During years of Republican control in Columbus and Washington, the needs of urban areas have been pushed to the back legislative burners. Even Strickland, who represented a congressional district in southeastern Ohio, struggled somewhat during the campaign to connect with big-city mayors.
Sawyer understands the vital role cities play in the economic development of entire regions.
For all the plotting and planning that got Sawyer to the Ohio House in the first place and advanced his career to the Akron mayor's office and the U.S. House, the latest developments in his political career came somewhat by happenstance.
Few could have envisioned how far Fink would push her idea of teaching ``intelligent design,'' essentially warmed-over creationism, or how strongly Ohio's scientific community would react, to the point of recruiting Sawyer to run against Fink.
Then, state Sen. Kim Zurz, from Green, was picked by Strickland to head the Ohio Department of Commerce, a surprise choice. Another surprise was that Portage County Commissioner Chuck Keiper, in line to succeed Zurz based on a longstanding agreement to rotate appointments between Summit and Portage counties, dropped out of the running, creating a wide-open competition.
No matter how hard he tried, Tom Sawyer could not have charted that course on his dining room walls. But, once in Columbus, he will know how to navigate on issues vital to the future of the state.

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