You can’t actually hear a giant clock ticking as you walk through Sheridan’s Alice Terry Elementary School, but there is a palpable urgency coursing through the halls.
There have been big changes lately at the little school, which looks like it could have been built at about the time its namesake retired from the district, in 1961. There is a new principal. There are new instructional processes. And there is a new laser focus on academics.
Those changes have made a difference. Alice Terry, which houses kindergarten and first and second grades, and the third-, fourth- and fifth-graders a few blocks away who together populate Fort Logan Elementary once ranked among the state’s worst schools. In the past two years, all those changes, some possible because of a federal grant, have brought improvement.
Fort Logan Elementary is no longer considered a “turnaround” school, the lowest rung on the state’s ranking system. And neither is the district itself. Between the 2009-10 and 2010-11 school years, Sheridan pulled itself out of the bottom ranking.
Half a dozen of the state’s poorest-performing districts, though, have not made that progress and are now coming up on a deadline laid out by lawmakers in 2009: Get better or risk having the state withhold funding, replace existing schools with charters or even take over the district altogether.
Because the state is taking into account districts’ ratings under its previous rating system, “some districts could be entering year four on our accountability clock,” said Keith Owen, deputy education commissioner for federal programs and accountability.
Owen said the state is finishing up its school-district rankings for 2011-12 and can’t make them public until they are final. But the Colorado Department of Education acknowledges that there are half a dozen districts — three in urban areas, three in rural areas — under intense state scrutiny.
Adams 14, Westminster 50 and Vilas, a tiny district in the southeastern corner of the state, spent two years at the bottom ranking, known as “turnaround.” Two others — Karval, an online district based in the southeastern plains town of Karval, and Pueblo City 60 — dropped from the second-lowest rung, “priority improvement,” to the lowest during that time.
“Basically, we can’t allow a district or a school to stay on priority improvement or a turnaround plan for more than five years,” Owen said.
In Sheridan, which is entering year three of unsatisfactory performance but has made improvement, district officials are watching carefully to see what unfolds next year.
“It will be interesting to see what the state is going to choose to do,” said Sheridan Superintendent Michael Clough.
For the past three years, state guidance and counsel for schools and districts trying to pull themselves up has been spotty, districts charge, and Owen doesn’t disagree.
But, Owen said, securing a waiver that got it out from under some No Child Left Behind regulations has enabled the CDE this year to become more flexible and creative in helping individual districts.
“We’ve always had some support mechanisms for lower-performing schools, but they’ve been more scattered. Now they are more comprehensive,” he said.
Part of past support has been helping schools get a share of federal improvement dollars.
In 2009, the U.S. Department of Education said it would invest up to $3.5 billion to help improve the schools in the bottom 5 percent nationwide.
Colorado got more than $52 million of that, which went to 25 low-performing schools within low-performing districts.
Sheridan’s Fort Logan was one. Now, in the third year of a three-year grant, the school is wondering how to retain some of the programs and improvements that money bought.
In the 1960s, the Sheridan School District, wedged between Federal Boulevard, Fort Logan National Cemetery and a state mental hospital, was booming. The high school spent six years on double sessions.
By the late ’70s, the boom was over, and as Sheridan’s residents began to fall on hard times, the school district fell with them.
When the state’s new accountability system took effect, Sheridan was a turnaround district. That triggered dramatic changes.
Principals had to be fired — under state rules and to qualify for federal dollars. Consultants were hired to help redirect teaching efforts and evaluate teachers and staff. The result was that all but two of the 20 teachers now at Fort Logan Elementary are new since 2010.
In a district of about 1,560 that just enrolled its 205th homeless student and where more than 80 percent of students are living in poverty, teachers were extremely caring and kind but not necessarily fired up about improving academics.
“We couldn’t get them to the urgency piece,” said Barbara Johnson, a former Alice Terry teacher who is now principal of Fort Logan.
“We were more likely to bring in new pairs of shoes for kids who needed them” than to home in on a child’s reading problems, she said.
Parents had to be convinced too.
Clough remembers a school- board meeting shortly after the changes began.
Parents were enraged.
“There were 150 people at that meeting, and 149 of them wanted to kill me,” Clough said.
He wasn’t entirely joking; the district had to have police at the board meeting because it was so contentious.
Johnson believes they haven’t sacrificed the caring, just added an emphasis on achievement.
“I don’t think we’ve lost that caring,” she said. “We just had to make sure academics got equal weight.”
Now, Clough frets about how he’ll keep the enrichment programs, the tutors and other things the federal grant bought once it is gone, and worries that some of the district’s hard-won progress will be lost.
A report released last month documents just how difficult a school turnaround can be.
In the examination of the 25 Colorado schools that received turnaround money, A+ Denver Schools wrote, “Turning around a persistently failing school is enormously difficult work.”
A year earlier, the Donnell Kay Foundation cited research that found that, nationwide, “dramatic change efforts are successful on the first try only 30 percent of the time.”
State leaders know that, Owen said. They know, too, that taking over a district or forcing it to consolidate with another would be “very complicated, very difficult work.”
At the same time, he said, “We take our role seriously as advocates for children. When there are districts who year after year are not achieving excellence and continue to not even make progress from year to year, at what point do we not allow that to continue?”
Karen Augé: 303-954-1733, kauge@denverpost.com or twitter.com/karenauge
