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Middle schools get a local boost, too

Pinellas educators don't just sit back and watch the state try to lift achievement.

By DONNA WINCHESTER
Published May 10, 2006

"Community conversations" that began recently in Pinellas middle schools aim to narrow the achievement gap between white and minority students, district officials said.

The initiative won't stop there.

"We want to pull the county together to address the changes we need to make before the Legislature tells us what our middle schools should look like,'' said Michelle Dennard, president of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association.

"We want to be able to say to the state, 'These are the things we think are important.' "

A plan that encourages students to begin plotting a career in middle school overwhelmingly passed the state House in March. The Senate upheld the plan last week.

Anticipating such a move, the teachers union secured a $14,000 grant from the National Education Association to focus on projects likely to boost academic achievement in middle schools.

The first phase involves asking business leaders, civic groups, parents, educators and students to weigh in with their concerns.

The union and its partners, including the Pinellas Education Foundation, the NAACP and the Pinellas Educational Support Professionals Association, will then produce a "community action plan" to link parents to community resources.

Ultimately, Dennard said, the group hopes to offer training sessions to parents to show them how they can work more successfully with their children.

"Communities that have engaged in these types of conversations have made significant differences in moving education forward," Dennard said. "I really do believe that we have every tool and resource we need to make that happen here.''

The first phase of the initiative began with a series of "conversations'' at three middle schools.

More than 150 parents and teachers discussed approaches to closing the achievement gap, including holding schools accountable, providing more resources to schools and engaging parents in their children's education.

Most participants agreed that standardized testing is a good way to judge academic achievement, but they disagreed with the state's practice of rewarding high-performing schools. The state should spend more money to help struggling schools and to recruit and retain teachers, they said.

They agreed that more communication is needed between elementary and middle school teachers and middle and high school teachers to ensure that children know the stakes are higher once they reach sixth grade.

"Kids see middle school as a holding place where they can rest for three years,'' said Joan Ulrich, a reading coach at Clearwater High School. "It's vital that they be introduced to the high school mentality so they will be successful.''

Parent Mary Olivieri said she thinks middle school teachers should maintain closer contact with parents.

Michelle Kranz, the mother of a sixth-grader at Clearwater Intermediate School, said she thinks the district should provide more "hands-on" learning opportunities to hold students' attention.

Teresa Anderson, the principal at Azalea Middle School in St. Petersburg, said she looks forward to future community conversations, one of which will feature middle school students.

"Middle school is the point where you start to see student grades decline," said Anderson, who is one of two dozen members of a steering committee formed after the grant was obtained. "When they come to us from elementary school, they're honor roll students. But you start to see a change, not only academically but behaviorally."

The change is not unique to Pinellas County. While reading scores for fourth-graders improved on last year's National Assessment of Educational Progress test, eighth-grade scores declined. In Florida, eighth-grade reading scores have remained stagnant since 1998, with the latest results putting them 42nd in the nation.

The Florida Department of Education began focusing on middle schools in 2004, adding 300 reading coaches in middle schools to train teachers. The Legislature voted down additional initiatives last year but promised to exert another push this year.

That push evolved into a broad middle and high school reform package known as the "A Plus Plus Plan.'' Among its provisions: demanding that career exploration begin in middle school and retooling the high school curriculum around "majors" and "minors."

Wayne Blanton, executive director of the Florida School Boards Association, applauded the plan's emphasis on vocational education programs for middle and high school students. But he said parts of the bill, which passed the Legislature on Thursday, should have been left up to local school boards.

"What Pinellas or Hillsborough needs to do might be different from what they do up in Jackson County," Blanton said.

Evelyn Lynn, an Ormond Beach Republican who heads the Senate Education Committee, said school districts were made aware of the provisions before they were introduced in the Legislature.

"We're basing everything we're doing on what is the movement in education nationally ... more rigor and more relevance," Lynn said.

Some of the state's ideas have been good, but Tallahassee tends to "tell school boards what to do," said Shelby Harvey, Pinellas' middle school supervisor.

"What the state is looking at is what subjects each child must take," Harvey said.

"Our initiative is a grass roots effort to say, 'Let's work together to build our own way of meeting student needs.' "

Times staff writer Letitia Stein contributed to this report.

[Last modified May 10, 2006, 07:17:50]