State officials argue over governing board for struggling school districts

The Chester Upland School District, under state oversight for the last 16 years because of academic and fiscal woes, could be returned to the control of its elected school board on July 1 - and possibly lose $5 million in state funding.

That's because the law allowing for the state takeover of persistently low-achieving districts, and the extra money it provides, expires on that date.

Efforts to fashion a replacement are stalled amid disputes between Republican and Democratic legislators and state officials over how Chester Upland and another troubled district, Harrisburg, would operate under the new, tougher proposal.

Some observers say the legislation might be put on hold until next year.

Adding to the uncertainty, Chester Upland's popular superintendent, Gregory Thornton, is leaving July 1 to take a job in Milwaukee, and because the future of the oversight board has been unclear, no replacement has been selected. Some residents worry about a return to the instability the district had seen for decades, with the turnover of top leadership undercutting efforts to improve schools.

Under Thornton and a governing board appointed by Gov. Rendell in 2007, Chester Upland took the first tentative steps toward academic progress, many residents say. Test scores and the number of seniors graduating and going on to college have gone up; violence is down; and several private-public partnerships brought new money and programs into the district.

Still, many in Chester Upland have long advocated the return to power of the elected board. Since 1994, a series of appointed boards have been in charge. The current three-member group is made up of two educators and a lawyer, none of them Chester residents.

The 4,450-student district is still one of the lowest-performing in the state and has struggled financially as well. Almost half its students in kindergarten through eighth grade are in charter schools; Chester Community Charter, the largest in Pennsylvania, has 2,400 students, most from Chester Upland.

The nine-member Chester Upland school board, which seems likely to take over on July 1, is all-Republican; its members have been elected to office every four years but have had little power, other than to sign off on tax matters and to hear school disciplinary cases.

Board President Wanda Mann says the district would keep moving forward under her leadership. "We don't plan on going in there and changing everything. We want to keep the momentum going," she said last week. "We most certainly can and will do a good job."

Others say they are worried about whether the elected board can deliver. The current outside board, said Chester Democratic City Councilwoman Portia West, a longtime school activist, has "made a tremendous difference. They . . . really listened to the parents, the students, and the community. . . . I'm fearful that things will change for the worse" if the outsiders are ousted.

From the beginning, the fates of the Chester Upland and Harrisburg districts have dogged the effort to renew and toughen Pennsylvania's Education Empowerment Act, the law providing for state oversight of struggling districts.

The proposed legislation, sponsored by Sen. Jeffrey Piccola (R. Dauphin), went far beyond the current law, under which Chester Upland and Harrisburg are controlled by appointed boards and four other districts are subject to other forms of state oversight. Neither the current law nor Piccola's proposal affects the Philadelphia School District, already under the oversight of an appointed board.

Piccola's proposal would give school boards broad powers to overhaul hundreds of struggling schools and dozens of districts, including the ability to turn schools into charters, bring in outside managers, make staff changes, and close schools.

Districts and charters with the longest history of failing performance, including Chester Upland and Harrisburg, would be run by a single statewide board, with Republicans picking two of the three members.

That's where trouble began.

In Chester Upland and Harrisburg, that would mean their current, nonelected boards would be replaced by the new statewide board. That idea is opposed by the two Democratic state representatives from those areas, Thaddeus Kirkland and Ron Buxton. The governor's office also weighed in against the plan; Rendell had worked for years to wrest control of Chester Upland from Republican appointees he said were doing little to help students.

Kirkland and Donna Cooper, Rendell's secretary of planning and policy, favor phasing in more participation from Chester Upland's elected school board during the next few years. "In struggling school districts, there is a need for professional, intense oversight, which in Chester Upland the school board has no history of doing," Cooper said. "The empowerment board is helping improve the quality of education."

In Harrisburg, Buxton wants control of the city's school district to go back to the elected board. Piccola, who represents the Harrisburg district in the Senate, opposes that, though he has proposed a compromise that would also phase in elected board leadership over several years. Buxton rejected that idea.

Piccola said last week that he was ready to let the law expire and wait until next year. He said he was open to other proposals about how Chester Upland and Harrisburg could be overseen, but they would have to be acceptable to him and to Senate Republican Majority leader Dominic Pileggi, whose district includes Chester Upland.

Pileggi said in an e-mail that he favored "an orderly transition from the Board of Control to the elected School Board by creating a temporary, mixed version of the board," that would include some members of the elected school board and the current group.

House Education Committee Chairman James Roebuck (D., Philadelphia) and Kirkland said they hoped the current empowerment law could be extended for a year, leaving Chester Upland and Harrisburg under the boards now in place. But Buxton said, "I'm just as happy to see the act expire at the end of the month," unless Harrisburg is returned immediately to school board control.