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Learning gap may rekindle lawsuit

Pinellas County has ignored the quality of black students' education by focusing on choice and construction, a group says.

By THOMAS C. TOBIN
Published January 13, 2006

[Times photo: William Dunkley]

At a Gibbs High news conference Thursday, Trenia Cox, president of St. Petersburg NAACP, said district leaders don't think black children can learn.

Pinellas schools have failed to properly educate black students and it is time to push district officials with legal action, a St. Petersburg coalition said Thursday.

Within days, the group said, lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund will trigger a provision in the 42-year-old federal lawsuit that integrated Pinellas schools in 1971 and more recently led to the school choice plan.

That action would push the district into formal mediation with the Legal Defense Fund, a process that could once again land the two parties before a federal judge if they can't work out their differences.

Though settled in August 2000, the desegregation lawsuit, Bradley et al vs. the Pinellas County School Board, is still alive. The district has agreed to work to improve seven areas of its operations where black students are concerned.

But the coalition, Concerned Citizens for Quality Education for Black Students, alleged in a news conference that the district has ignored the most important area: quality of education.

District officials have concentrated too much energy on implementing the choice plan and building new schools, they said.

"Buildings alone do not make for quality education. It is what happens inside that building when the teacher closes the door," said Vyrle Davis, co-chairman of the coalition and a retired district official. "We want something to go on inside the classroom."

Coalition members said the district has violated the spirit and letter of the court-ordered settlement by not working more efficiently and aggressively on the achievement gap between black and white students. They said the group wants to work with school officials to solve the problem, and putting the mediation provision into play forces the district to the table.

The group cited the grim statistics that American educators have come to know by heart: black students trailing white students on test performance by 20 and 30 percentage points; black students being disciplined at higher rates than their white peers; low numbers of black students in honors and advanced courses.

Pinellas school officials reacted Thursday, saying they wanted to work with the group but were stung by their comments.

"At some point people are going to have to decide if we're going to keep addressing the failures of the past or begin to address the future," said school superintendent Clayton Wilcox, who has had numerous meetings with members of the coalition. "How do you expect to go hand in hand, solving the problem, when one of the parties is throwing stones?"

School Board member Nancy Bostock said the district is willing to work with the coalition, "but I will look forward to a day when they are willing to tone down the rhetoric and work with us."

She added: "I am completely confident we are in compliance with the court order."

Said board chairwoman Carol Cook: "I have a real hard time swallowing the (allegation) that we're not doing anything."

Enrique Escarraz, the St. Petersburg attorney for the Legal Defense Fund, said he will send a formal notice today or early next week triggering the mediation provision. The notice will go to School Board Attorney James Robinson.

Citing the reason for the notice, Escarraz said Robinson's predecessor, John Bowen, resisted when he asked the district last year for records that included information on black student achievement. During Thursday's news conference, nearly 30 members of the coalition stood along 31st St. S near the entrance to Gibbs High School. Among them was Tal Rutledge, a prominent black resident in Clearwater and the brother of one of the original plaintiffs in the desegregation case.

Once the only high school Pinellas black students could attend, Gibbs remains a touchstone in St. Petersburg's black community. As the backdrop for Thursday's announcement, it also underlined the coalition's point. The school has been rebuilt at a cost of millions to the district, but its grade from the state last year was a D.

Last year at Gibbs, about 500 black students took the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Only 74 passed the math portion of the test; about 140 passed the reading portion. White students passed at two and three times that rate.

"The effort has been more about our sitting next to one another, black and white, as opposed to looking at the business of education - achievement. And that's where they've gone wrong," said Trenia Cox, president of the St. Petersburg NAACP.

Entering the mediation process in the desegregation case will have the district facing legal action on two fronts regarding black students. A class-action lawsuit pending in Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Court alleges the district has violated the Florida constitution by failing to close the achievement gap.

Davis, the coalition's co-chairman, described Thursday's news conference as a milestone after six years of researching the Pinellas achievement gap and waiting for the district to make progress.

But the group's allegations landed harshly on the ears of district officials, who maintain they have been working aggressively and creatively on the gap.

Coalition leader Adele Jemison said the district never had any intention of abiding by the court order. Cox of the NAACP said district officials do not believe black children can learn.

"It's clear that the sense of caring is not there," she said.

District officials said numerous programs have been put in place that attempt to reduce the achievement gap, including a variety of reading initiatives, remediation programs, and a new assessment system that takes a student's academic pulse at several intervals during the year.

Wilcox and Cook said one problem might be that the programs aren't specifically packaged and announced as being just for black students. They said the district's charge is to improve student achievement for all children. "We absolutely know that black kids can learn and at high levels," Wilcox said. "And we are doing everything we can to see that they do."

[Last modified January 13, 2006, 06:26:02]