Lesson plan

Next
time a city school closes, critics will be harder
pressed to cry foul. At least that’s what RochesterCitySchool
District officials are hoping. In an effort to
diminish the affect of politics on school operation — especially as the
school closing process gets underway — district officials are cooking up a
strategic plan. Or, to be more precise, they’re putting together a task force
to come up with that plan.

            Since the advisory group is still
being formed, officials won’t comment on who’s been asked to participate, but
groups (including businesses, non-profit organizations, and neighborhood
associations) from each of the Rochester’s three “Schools of Choice” zones will
be approached, as well as parents from around the city.

            Once it’s formed, the task force
will try to complete a strategic plan — one that considers the district’s
buildings, academic programs, and enrollment trends — by the fall. “We’re not
just talking about closing schools; we’re talking about a comprehensive plan
for the district,” says Jana Carlisle, the district’s chief planning officer.

            In a June interview with City Newspaper, RCSD Superintendent
Manuel Rivera said recommendations for school closings would be presented to
the board by November or December, but there’s a new reason now for the task
force to meet that deadline: the potential for $500 million or more in state
aid to fund an 18- to 24-month comprehensive building renovation program. The
deadline to apply for that money is December, Carlisle says.

            At an August 5 meeting of the School
Board’s Community and Intergovernmental Relations Committee, officials
expressed hope that having a strategic plan will help mitigate the damage of
this year’s round of school closings. “If we plan on what our school district
is going to look like five years from today, the parents will understand,” said
School Board member Domingo Garcia. Others agreed, but cautioned that the
process must be thorough. “I do not want to be in a situation where we come out
with a recommendation and then flip-flop later. That’s not going to happen,”
Rivera said.

            Flip-flop or not, the board knows
that any school closure recommendation will draw criticism. Board Member Rob
Brown wanted the planning process to reflect the distinction between closing a
particular building and ending an ineffective academic program. “‘Closing the
school,’ there’s really no content to those words, they’re just inflammatory,”
he says. “You can’t use the same word to describe two
different things and that’s what we’ve been doing.”

            That’s all the more reason to think
strategically, rather than reacting to yearly budget constraints, Carlisle says. “Having
a long-term plan as to which buildings we may want to vacate and what programs
we want to keep needs to be separate from the budget,” she says. “When things
become part of the budget, they become politicized and can’t be viewed
strategically. We shouldn’t be looking at things tactically every year; we want
to step back and have a strategic discussion.”

            The Rochester community
will be a part of that discussion, she says. “We’ve talked about having the
community bring input; we’ve talked about having a discussion with parents,
non-profits, neighborhood associations. When you don’t do that is when you lose
the support of people,” Carlisle says. “If we
don’t come back to the community regularly we lose the public’s trust. We
really do want to seek the input of the people and incorporate it.”

            But most of the school closing
criteria are already in place, with the district taking its cue from other
urban districts around the nation. “We would be remiss in not looking at places
like Baltimore, like Minneapolis, like Buffalo — how they
handle things like this.”

            Input from the community will mainly
be used to tailor the strategic plan to Rochester’s specific
needs. “We want to do what’s best for the community overall from an educational
and economic perspective,” says Carlisle.

            One way the district may evaluate
that could be to split up the input it receives. “It may not end up being one
task force,” says Carlisle, but two advisory groups. If that were
to happen, she says, one would likely tackle issues of economic development and
building modernization, as well as the district’s debt ceiling. The other would
have “more of a community focus.”

This article appears in Aug 11-17, 2004.