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THOMAS C. TOBINThe School Board pledges to do more to close the gap in black students' education.
ST. PETERSBURG - Several members of the Pinellas School Board said Sunday they were ready to redouble their efforts to close the "achievement gap" between white and black students.
"This is a new beginning," School Board Chairwoman Jane Gallucci told about 175 people at Mount Zion Progressive Baptist Church. Many in the mostly African-American audience were parents and teachers of children in Pinellas public schools.
A St. Petersburg group, Concerned Organizations for Quality Education for Black Students, called the meeting - a rarity for a School Board that seldom convenes outside district headquarters in Largo.
The meeting also was unusual for its frank public airing of sensitive racial matters.
Gallucci and other board members called for future meetings with members of the black community but also asked that the renewed effort be more collaborative than confrontational.
"I am pleading with you. Let's not work in the old ways," board member Linda Lerner said.
"We're not going to address it if we're adversaries or we're pointing the finger," board member Lee Benjamin said. "It's got to be a partnership between the School Board and the black community."
The two-hour forum took place amid a gathering sense of urgency concerning the achievement gap. The problem was a major part of the public discussion leading up to last week's 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, which brought about desegregated schools.
The gap was a factor last month when the School Board hired Clayton Wilcox to replace retiring superintendent Howard Hinesley. Wilcox has taken aggressive steps in Louisiana's East Baton Rouge Parsh School System to improve the performance of black students. On Sunday, some School Board members signaled that his arrival Sept. 1 would mark a fresh attempt at closing Pinellas' gap.
Also, several speakers at the gathering cited figures from a Times series last week detailing the gap and its causes.
In Pinellas, 74 percent of black students who took last year's Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test scored below their grade level. Only 39 percent of white students scored as poorly. The reading gap between the two was 35 percentage points. The math gap was 40 points.
The gap goes beyond test scores.
Only 37 percent of Pinellas black students who entered high school in 1998 graduated four years later with a traditional diploma, compared with 67 percent of white students.
In addition, black students are assigned to special education classes and suspended for discipline problems far out of proportion to their enrollment.
Though School Board members pledged to work on the problem, they said they couldn't do it without help from black parents. Leading the charge was Mary Brown, the lone black member on the board.
Brown said the black parents of 2004 need to busy themselves with closing the gap, just as black parents of the 1950s and '60s worked for desegregated schools. She said the district could be doing a much better job on many counts, including better training of teachers to be more sensitive to black students and better training of administrators to help teachers be more effective.
She said she would work to make improvements, but added that black parents needed to get more involved in schools and better prepare their children for academic success.
"You are the silent power," she told parents. "You have the power to make change."
Brown also was one of several board members who addressed the disparity in suspensions of black students.
"I saw a child in an elementary school use some pretty harsh words with a teacher," she said, recounting a recent school visit. The teacher, she said, tried several ways to defuse the situation but the child persisted.
"I felt like asking (the child), "What is wrong with you?' " Brown said. "But the teachers cannot do that. Only you, the parent, can."
Brown urged black parents "not to put it all on the school first" when a problem arises. "Sometimes our beautiful, healthy children might be wrong."
Scholars who study the gap have speculated that cultural differences between black students and white school officials may be one reason for the disparity in suspensions, which is found in districts nationwide.
But Benjamin said administrators must act quickly to keep order in schools and can't always take time to sort through the root causes of each student's behavior.
"We've got to find a way to help our students," he added. "Some come with attitudes that they're not happy being there . . . We've got to find ways to reduce that anger and that behavior problem."
In addition to Benjamin, Gallucci, Brown and Lerner, board member Nancy Bostock also spoke at the meeting. Board members Mary Russell and Carol Cook did not attend.
Watson Haynes, a black civic leader who helped organize the forum, said the problems with some black parents are well-documented and could be dealt with in another setting. He expressed disappointment that more of Sunday's discussion was not devoted to policy changes the board could make to close the gap.
However, he thanked the board and invited them to hold some of their regular business meetings in St. Petersburg's black community. Several board members said they viewed Sunday's meeting as the first step in what could be a broader attack on the gap.
"It can't be just saying we're going to do it," Lerner said. "It's going to take time, brain power, planning, then being specific."
Haynes agreed.
"This thing is not ending," he said after meeting. "This is just the start of it."