Lesson plan

Citrus County schools are revving up to full speed as summer winds down, with lots of changes in store.

By BARBARA BEHRENDT

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 6, 2000

INVERNESS -- As summer vacation draws to a close for 15,000 Citrus County public school students, the county's educational leaders are scrambling to get ready for what promises to be a hectic year.

In addition to the regular jobs of planning school bus routes, preparing classrooms and lesson plans, district officials have special tasks to finish before students arrive Aug. 14.

For starters, the district will open its 10th elementary school, this one in Forest Ridge.

Superintendent Pete Kelly said he expected the school to open on time. "It will be nip and tuck, but we'll make it," he said.

Students at several schools will see new or familiar faces in their front offices the first day of class.

David Hickey, who has served as the district's assistant superintendent for the last two years, returns to the Crystal River Middle School as principal.

At Homosassa Elementary School, long-time principal Bob Brust has left for a job at the county office and has been replaced by Roberta Long. She had been the district's executive director of management services but, like Hickey, decided she wanted to return to a school principalship.

Also new to the administration is Steven Hand, who takes over as the new director of the Withlacoochee Technical Institute ( see related story).

The changes have also meant shuffling for top officials in the district office. The new assistant superintendent is Linda Kelley, previously the district's planning director and Floral City Elementary School principal.

Long's successor is David Watson, who comes to the district from the Florida Power Corporation. Watson is a familiar face at the district office since he served for 12 years on the School Board before losing a re-election bid in 1996.

A new finance director also will be on board soon since Sara Perez left that post in July to take a similar job in Hernando County.

In the schools, students will see a familiar emphasis on the kinds of skills they need to know to score well on the important Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test or FCAT. Scores released during the summer have some schools celebrating and others looking for ways to improve.

Four elementary schools received A's. Those schools were Rock Crusher Elementary, Lecanto Primary, Inverness Primary and Homosassa Elementary. Homosassa's A was especially welcome because the school had pulled up its score from a D last year.

School administrators already were planning celebrations for their schools to recognize their FCAT achievements.

Three of the district's four middle schools saw their grades drop from B to C and at both the middle school level and the high school level, reading scores were not what district officials had hoped to see.

The test results have officials focusing on beefed-up reading training in the middle and high schools and improved math skills at the elementary level.

All the schools that saw significant enough improvement also will be receiving state funds recognizing that improvement. Schools don't know how much money that will mean yet, but administrators are already thinking of how best to put those dollars to work in their schools.

As the new year starts, Citrus teachers and all employees except blue collar workers are returning with new contracts, pay plans and raises in effect. The blue collar workers, who are represented by the Teamsters Union, have not yet settled on a contract. The last proposal was voted down by the workers in June.

Teachers in some hard-to-fill positions will be seeing $1,000 pay bonuses in the next couple of months thanks to state lawmakers who allocated the funds to keep teachers and attract new ones. Those bonuses only affect middle and high school teachers who teach full time in math, science, computer science, foreign language or exceptional student education.

Filling teacher vacancies surfaced as a problem during the last school year. About 30 positions went unfilled throughout the year and this year Kelly said he expects that number might be similar. Still, personnel officials and school principals have been spending their summers actively recruiting new teachers to come to the area.

Additional pay bonuses also have been discussed for teachers because of the district's current financial position, which officials say is more stable than it has been in several years. Details of those are still in the works.

Many schools have been painted or polished over the summer to prepare for the new academic year, and Crystal River Middle School is in the beginning phases of an expansion project.

The new academic year also brings continued emphasis on student attendance as the district enters the second year of its stricter attendance policy. Only minor changes were made in the policy earlier this summer. School administrators say the stricter rules are working, keeping more students in school.

So many extra students were showing up for class last year that high school principals reported a crowded feeling on their campuses. That feeling will get more tangible in the year ahead as officials predict a spike in attendance at the district's high schools over the next several years.

To deal with that expected crowding, a committee is discussing redrawing the attendance boundaries for the district's high schools. Other ideas are also under discussion including creating grade-level centers or shifting academy programs to ease the pressure, which is expected to be acutely felt at Lecanto High School in the coming years.

After a rocky start, the district's first charter school -- the Academy of Environmental Science -- will start its second year in August. Preliminary attendance figures show that more than 100 students have signed up for the program for 2000-01. Kelly said he expects that soon the program will have a waiting list and someday might expand to other portions of the county.

The new year also brings the start of a block schedule at Citrus High School for the first time, a new elementary program to deter drug use and violence, which replaces DARE, and the final phase of an $8-million technology upgrade. Coupled with an additional $500,000 grant the district was recently notified that it had received, every school in the district should have a computer to pupil ratio between 1-to-5 and 1-to-3 by the end of the current school year.

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