State Board to rule on Riverview Gardens School accreditation
It looks like the Riverview Gardens School District will have one more year to shape up.
The state department of education is set to recommend on Thursday that the north St. Louis County district get one more year to gain provisional accreditation, at a minimum, from the state. (Click HERE for the complete agenda item.)
Because the district has been unaccredited for two years, the state board of education could take measures as severe as removing the district’s dual superintendents and appointing a new one, removing elected school board members and appointing a new board — as was done at St. Louis Public, with much debate – or even dissolving the school district and carving out chunks to give to other districts.
But state department leaders have said that the district, which lost accreditation in 2007, is improving.
“They’re still not near where they need to be, but they have shown progress and improvement on some of the issues,” said Stan Johnson, assistant commissioner of the division of school improvement.
Johnson said district governance has improved, and staff is working hard to recover from previous years of over-spending.
The move, if approved by the board, would basically use a calendar loop hole to give the district one more year — three years total — to gain provisional accreditation.
“They still have got a lot of work to do,” Johnson said. “But having said that, we think they merit an additional year. Turning around schools is not an easy task.”
The state of Missouri has yet to prove that it can “turn around” schools it has taken over. Wellston’s test scores remain abysmal, even after years of Missouri intervention. SLPS has not been under state control for as long but will likely face the same problems.
The problem is that the state has been fixated with the symptoms (test scores) rather than the cause of those symptoms (public health issues, poverty, family problems, cultural factors, and, most recently, the foreclosure crisis). Add to that the fact that it’s exceedingly hard to recruit and retain good teachers to these jobs (there are better paying opportunities in the county) and you have a very difficult situation.
Effecting change in Riverview (or Wellston, or SLPS) will require a lot more than just test score mandates. It’s going to take a comprehensive, passionate community reform of which the school is just one small part.