District cancels community meetings after one got contentious
Officials sought community feedback for a proposed school report card but parents questioned its timing during a funding crisis
IT APPEARS the district and Philadelphia school parents are not meeting eye-to-eye.
School officials planned several community meetings to collect feedback from parents about what they seek in a school report card - an evaluation of schools. Parents and community members, meanwhile, would rather ask the district why - as in why are officials seeking to implement new methods for evaluating schools when the schools are in a crisis born out of scarce funding and massive layoffs?
A contentious meeting Monday was a clear indicator of the push and pull.
By yesterday morning, shortly before a second planned meeting, the district had canceled the remaining meetings with little notice.
"It's almost like they didn't like what they were hearing so they canceled the opportunity for parents to tell them that," said parent Terrilyn McCormick, whose two children go to the Creative and Performing Arts High School and Penn Alexander Elementary.
McCormick and at least 10 others showed up early to yesterday's meeting, which had been scheduled to begin at 11 a.m. at the McMichael School in Mantua, and were told it had been nixed.
"To be turned away with no explanation, that's not transparency working," said Shanee Garner, a co-director of Education Policy at Public Citizens for Children and Youth, who also attended.
District spokesman Fernando Gallard said later that a new school report card was still in the works, but that the district is "changing the structure on how we collect parent input."
"The forum did not fully serve the purpose of the meeting regarding what they [parents] wanted to see in the report card," Gallard said.
The district and Tembo Consulting, which is charged with providing the new report card by Dec. 31, will "explore different ways how to collect input from parents in the design," Gallard said. They are looking at surveys and focus groups, he added.
"We want the forum to be more focused on what should be in the report card, not whether there should be a report card or not," he said.
Tembo is to be paid $175,000 under a contract approved by the School Reform Commission in June. The funding is coming from a private donor, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.
Online: ph.ly/DNEducation