Pinellas schools serve up a less-than-stellar performance in the state's A+ plan, in striking contrast to last year.
By THOMAS C. TOBIN
Published June 16, 2004
[Times photos: Cherie Diez]
Michelle Downs, a Blanton Elementary teacher, learns Tuesday her school received an A grade from principal Robert Poth of Douglas L. Jamerson Jr. Elementary. Downs is teaching at a district reading camp at Jamerson Elementary.
Left, Willette Moore, fourth-grade teacher at Fairmont Park Elementary, waits to hear that her school earned a C score.
Half of Pinellas County's high schools - four out of six in St. Petersburg - received D's Tuesday in the state's latest round of school grades.
Nine of the county's 16 high schools slipped a grade, with most dropping from the C they received last year. It was the second straight year no Pinellas high school improved its grade.
The drop highlighted a less-than-stellar showing for Pinellas in the state's controversial school accountability program, known as the A+ plan.
It also marked a striking contrast from last year, when dozens of Pinellas schools improved their grades and no elementary or middle school got less than a C for the first time since the A+ plan began in 1999.
On Tuesday, however, the number of Pinellas schools that slipped a grade more than tripled from last year. The number that improved their grade declined by more than 38 percent.
Several elementary schools lost their A grades: Bay Vista Fundamental, Dunedin, Lynch, Gulf Beaches, North Shore, Northwest, Rio Vista, San Jose, Shore Acres, Skycrest and Tyrone.
The same fate befell Largo, Madeira Beach and John Hopkins middle schools.
Two well-regarded high schools, St. Petersburg and Lakewood, slipped to C grades - down from last year's B's. Countryside High, which ended up with hundreds of students who had selected other schools under the choice plan, dropped to a D.
Some schools found cause to celebrate.
Lealman Avenue Elementary in St. Petersburg leap-frogged from a C to an A, a happy and sudden result brought on by years of hard work, said principal Carlyn Hallin.
Kings Highway Elementary in Clearwater earned an A after receiving a B in 2003 and years of steady C's.
Mount Vernon Elementary in St. Petersburg rose from a B to an A, partly because Raymond James & Associates supplied 30 employees to mentor and tutor students over the last three years. Principal Valerie White also credits efforts to "throw away the fluff" and "just focus on reading, writing and math, and making that priority."
All three elementaries have high populations of children who come from homes below the poverty line.
On a related front, Pinellas also learned how it fared under the federal government's No Child Left Behind Act. Dozens of federally funded schools in Pinellas failed to make "adequate yearly progress" under the new law for the second year in a row, meaning their students should have the right to move to another school.
But transfers are subject to the rules of the school choice plan, which means it won't be easy to find another school. As many as 11,000 Pinellas students may be eligible to change schools, but only 677 seats are open under the choice plan.
District officials said much of the decline in high school grades were due to the low performance of relatively few students.
Cathy Fleeger, an assistant superintendent in charge of high schools, said several schools earned enough points to be graded a C. But the A+ plan lowers the grade when fewer than half of the lowest performing 25 percent of students do not make reading gains for two years in a row.
Countryside High, for example, accumulated 357 points for its reading, math and writing scores - more than enough to clear the 320-point threshold for a C. But the performance of the school's lowest 25 percent on the reading portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test dropped it to a D.
Pinellas will respond by deploying reading coaches to high schools and emphasizing reading in all subjects, Fleeger said. The district put reading coaches in the three high schools that earned D's last year but "that alone did not bring them up," she said.
The district will be emulating Hillsborough County, which has had reading coaches in all of its high schools for years, Fleeger said.
Only four of Hillsborough's 22 high schools received D grades on Tuesday.
Pinellas Schools Superintendent Howard Hinesley said he plans to spend more time in the next few days reviewing all the data, especially reading scores, with an eye toward making suggestions for improvement.
"We were afraid this might happen," said Largo High principal Barbara Thornton, who said she saw trouble when the lowest performing 25 percent of her student body did not make adequate gains last year.
She cited another factor that may have played a part in this year's high school grades - a sudden increase in students coming out of middle school.
It's a statistical reality that "if you add to your base, you automatically are going to lower your average," Thornton said. "It's a unique situation. We're going to analyze it as we always do and work on it carefully and see what we can do."
Another factor could be the choice plan, which added hundreds of students to high schools that had the capacity to take them. Most were students that could not get into other schools for space reasons or because of race ratios.
Countryside's enrollment skyrocketed to 2,400 students, up from about 1,900, said St. Petersburg High principal Julie Janssen, who moved from Countryside High during the school year. Many of Countryside's new students, she noted, were from families that were not fully engaged in schools and missed the deadlines for enrolling under the choice plan.
"Choice killed us," said Janssen, who did her doctoral thesis on the plan. "Those kids count significantly" on a school grade. "You can't get those kids in and get them ready in time to make a difference."
Janssen said the district will need to look at several factors, including the FCAT itself. Something is happening to Pinellas students between the ninth and 10th grades, she said.
The percentage of ninth graders passing the FCAT reading test has improved steadily since 2001, while the percentage of 10th graders passing has steadily declined. In the most recent school year, only 39 percent of Pinellas 10th graders passed the reading FCAT.
"You shouldn't have a test that has everybody in the 30th percentile," she said. "As a classroom teacher, if everybody scores 30 percent on my test then I have to look at my test."
- Times staff writer Donna Winchester contributed to this report.
