New school year brings new challenges locally

Public school administrators for the Tri-parish region admit that as their 2012-13 academic year begins this week they face a number of challenges.

Beyond reduced budgets, changes in testing structures and greater scrutiny regarding teacher performance, education leaders contend that perception and reality may be their biggest challenge.

Lafourche Parish School District had a $153 million budget for the 2011-12 school year, which was a 3 percent decrease from 2010-11’s $157 million budget.

“The increased cost in retirement that the state has passed on to us has impacted our budget,” Lafourche schools spokesman Floyd Benoit said. “It has not been as catastrophic as it could have been because of local revenues holding steady.”

Benoit said voters approving a bond continuation of 17 mills in April, which will not only help the district continue construction projects, but will defray new expenses. “We asked the citizens to take 2 mills of the 17 mills and put it toward the retirement costs,” he said. “That’s what they approved, so that the school board has that.”

St. Mary Parish School District Assistant Superintendent Keith Thibodeaux said that having the school board take $2.5 million from a reserve fund will ease budget cuts for 2012-13. The St. Mary Parish School Board is expected to address budgetary needs on Sept.13. That district is dealing with projected revenues of $76.9 million while facing expenditures of $80.5 million.

Terrebonne Parish School District Superintendent Philip Martin said that budget issues in his locality have not impacted classroom activities. “Areas that we have eliminated or reduced are areas that do not have direct impact on the instructional life of a child or teacher,” he said.

The Terrebonne school district budget for 2012-13 is $186 million, slightly more than a 2 percent cut from the $188 million budget last year. The difference of $2 million has been absorbed by not filling 90 open positions.

Martin admitted that when dealing with repeated budget cuts many areas can be indirectly impacted. “We are very careful when we have to go into the reduction mode and spend less. We try to do that strategically so it has the least possible, even indirect, impact,” he said.

Staff reductions have been a concern among the three school districts during the past two years. Each accomplished the cost-saving goals by not filling positions from which people had retired or voluntarily departed their respective districts.

“Attrition works when you do it over time, because it happens over time” Martin said. “If you do it over time, you can fulfill reduction needs. No one has lost a job because of financial reasons. I think our employees recognize that we work hard to protect them.”

Benoit said actual jobs jeopardized by a loss of state grant money were dealt with by allowing impacted employees to apply for other positions. “In the two years of reduction in force, anybody that was let go received a call back to get a job,” he said. “But some chose not to take it.”

“No one has been on the unemployment line as a result of reductions [in Terrebonne Parish schools],” Martin said. “We have been very fortunate.

“The thing with the budget is, we are not bankrupt and I’m not going to let us go bankrupt,” Martin said. “We do need to be wise and spend money strategically.”

Thibodeaux said the St. Mary Parish School District has also taken the attrition approach toward staff reduction. “We’re just not filling spots from where teachers and others have retired,” he said.

“The killer [with position reductions] is that the students do not end up with the services they had before,” Benoit said. “There are larger classroom sizes and different remedial and tutoring programs are lost. We’ve had tremendous success with after school tutoring to improve our test scores, but that’s been cut this year.”

According to new education reforms, presented last week by state Superintendent John White, standardized tests including Louisiana Education Assessment Program, End-of-Course testing and the Graduation Exit Examination will be replaced with the national Partnership for Assessment of Readiness of College and Careers program by the 2014-15 school year.

“I’ve always said we need a common standard if we want to make comparisons [between Louisiana public schools and those in other states],” Martin said. “We have had inappropriate comparisons and people have often drawn inappropriate conclusions because of them. I predict we are going to find that Louisiana public education stacks up much better than it has been portrayed.”

“When we get into all those testing things and how they score us and rank the school system, that all has continuously changed,” Benoit said. “Every time we get the protocol we are supposed to follow and the test we are suppose to gear for, they change it.”

“We will have to wait and see how that plays out,” Thibodeaux said. “Sometimes teachers get frustrated when we change testing systems, but we will wait and see.”

All three superintendents agreed that what they do like about the planned testing change is while performance objectives are expected to increase, the grading system will be more in line with typical scoring with 100 percent being the top mark. “Right now we’ve got 106 being a B,” Benoit said. “They just need to leave it like that for awhile.”

Louisiana Federation of Teachers President Steve Monaghan said comments from these and other administrators across the state are to be expected, but do not prepare the public for hard realities.

“It is easy for superintendents and school boards to communicate calm and hopefulness,” Monaghan said. “But putting on a happy face does not change a difficult situation.”

Monaghan said because of laws passed by the Louisiana Legislature that impact elementary and secondary schools, many questions will persist during the next year. “There are a lot of unresolved feelings on the laws without clarity,” he said.

The teachers’ union leader said when talking about protecting students it is necessary to talk about protecting educators – a matter he believes has been slighted.

“I’m not saying the world is going to end tomorrow, but there are complex issues that will have to play themselves out,” Monaghan said. Among his biggest concern is the idea of teachers being evaluated based on students’ performance. “That plan applies to 33 percent of our teachers,” he said.

During a seminar with Terrebonne school management last Tuesday, state Superintendent White said his teacher evaluation and compensation plan includes considering classroom demands placed on given teachers, high accountability situations and years of experience.

Benoit said even with multiple changes facing schools, he does not expect day-to-day classroom activity to be adversely impacted. “I’d say 95 percent of teachers do not even concern themselves with tenure,” he said. “They do their job. From our end, the change for evaluating teachers is more about the outcome of the student. What teachers are doing and how they do it now is not as important as the performance of the students.”

“Our kids continue to progress and do well and we anticipate that happening again this year,” Martin said. “You always have concerns when you change things and do things differently. We anticipate that we will continue to get better and that is attributable to our students, teachers and principals. They always rise to the task and come through for us. I know that will this year as well.”

“The challenge for this year is to make sure everyone is concentrating on student performance,” Thibodeaux said. “We’ve had changes in the past, just not so many at one time like we do this year.”

The Lafourche school district has a student census of approximately 15,000 and instructors number at 1,100. St. Mary has 9,000 students being instructed by 700 teachers, and Terrebonne Parish has approximately 1,500 teachers educating 19,000 students.

Lisa McGuire cuts out bulletin board decorations for her classroom at Southdown Elementary. McGuire, a third grade math teacher, has been teaching at the school for 15 years. 

MIKE NIXON | TRI-PARISH TIMES