After a firestorm of school news for the past several months, things have been very quiet on the Hamilton County Board of Education front since Rick Smith quit his post as superintendent on March 14.
Smith made the right decision, following crisis after crisis – consistently falling scores, a state report that found $10 million for our low-performing “iZone” schools wasted by lack of planning and focus, frictions with the school board and parents over miscommunications and misrepresentations about school testing times and iZone scores, and the pool-cue hazing/rape of a high-school basketball player and freshman, allegedly by three of his teammates, during an unauthorized out-of-town tournament trip. The young man required surgery to repair his ruptured colon and bladder.
Smith, a Hamilton County principal, coach and administrator for more than three decades, is a good man. Yet to say that leadership in our schools’ and their administrative offices was and is in shambles is a gaping understatement.
Now parents, community leaders and school board members must not be lulled by the sudden quiet. It is not nap time.
It is shake-it-up time. It is opportunity time. So where is UnifiEd and the Public Education Foundation and the Chamber of Commerce’s Chattanooga 2.0 and the local foundations? These groups have been increasingly vocal (and rightfully so) over the past six months, but now with Smith’s resignation they’ve gone dark. Wake up and get busy, folks.
Opportunity is knocking, and there is much to do.
We know what we have, and we know it is not working. Smith may be gone, but his administrative team is not. Nor is the culture – both in the schools and on the school board – that allowed Hamilton County education to sink into this steep decline.
About 60 percent of all Hamilton County third-graders do not read on grade level.
Systemwide, our students tested below the state average in nine of the 10 tested TCAP categories by as many as 16.7 percentage points.
Roughly a quarter of all Hamilton County children attend private schools because their parents have lost faith in public schools and would rather pay – sometimes exorbitantly – for alternative teachers and classes.
The collective price of these school system failures far surpasses the nearly $400 million budgeted yearly to operate the county’s 79 public schools. Yet we often think only of the tax money we spend to operate our schools, not the tax money we spend when those schools don’t actually teach all of our students.
Think of the lost wages for these failed students – the 60 percent of third-graders who are not reading well enough to continue studying and learning on their own in grades 4-12. Think of their future lost productivity (and, yes, that future lost tax revenue) in Hamilton County. Think of the local employers who say we have some 15,000 jobs unfilled by local residents because they can’t find educationally qualified applicants.
It is shake-it-up time – both for fresh, new thinking to re-energize our damaged school system and for reinvigorated public support of our children and schools. Four of nine school board seats are up for election in August.
The superintendent’s seat already is vacant and the two interim superintendents are part of the status-quo school administration culture. These long-time educators also are good people, but we need more now than just educators.
We need leaders who are both visionary and practical – people who can see that just a college-track curriculum for classrooms that have lost the great majority of their college-bound kids to private schools is not serving this community or its children. We need leaders willing to see as much or more value in jobs training education as in ACT prep. And we need administrators who are more intent on finding ways to keep borderline students in school rather than on suspension.
We also need futuristic and practical eyes on how we fund our children’s education. County taxpayers, through the property tax rate set by the Hamilton County Commission, funds 33 percent of the school system’s roughly $400 million-a-year budget. Another 16 percent of the pie comes from a portion of sales tax revenues. State, federal and other allocations (largely foundation grants) make up the lion’s share of school funding – 51 percent. It seems inappropriate for us as residents to complain when we contribute only about a third of the $9,114 budgeted for each of the county’s 43,797 students.
Last year, Smith wisely and properly sought a $34 million increase that would have meant a 40-cent tax increase. The rise would have added about $150 to the yearly tax bill for a $150,000 house.
But the County Commission and the county mayor balked. Rather than think of our children’s future, they thought of themselves come re-election time.
This is not the time to cool off about Hamilton County public schools.
As a community, we’ve rightly gotten fed up in recent weeks and clamored loudly enough to make an opportunity. Now we have to roll up our collective sleeves and make use of this pivotal moment in time.