The Board of Education met 02/08/2021, and after reviewing the shockingly high number of Fs and incompletes by Appleton Area School District high schoolers in the first semester the floor was opened for questions.
At the end of the presentation on grades, Superintendent Baseman had spoken about how there are community partners ready to work with AASD to help boost student performance. Gary Jahnke hearkened back to that and said it was really important and sounded like it might have a formal name to it at some point. He opined that it felt like a natural disaster has hit and now the community and nation is coming together to solve the problem. The problem is identifiable and they’re able to target the students who have been affected. He mentioned past discussions of Lawrence students potentially providing tutoring and thought UW Oshkosh and the Fox Valley Tech students could get involved too. He bet there’d be a lot of people in the community that would be willing to help in some way and referenced AASD’s reading program where people come in and volunteer to provide tutoring.
[At this point, I wonder just how many people would actually want to work under the oversight of AASD’s clunky and slow moving administration.]
Superintendent Baseman said that some communities across the nation are calling those types of partnerships Community Learning Hubs. She stated that they go throughout the day and into the evening and are a way of marshalling all of the community forces together to address the problem. She stated that San Francisco and Oakland California have formulated these types of programs and that AASD was going to learn from some of the things going on out on the West Coast, and bring them here to Appleton.
[It should be pointed out that San Francisco just filed a court order trying to force their public schools to open. It sounds like a total nightmare out there. Do Appleton residents and parents really want our schools to be importing education practices from California?]
Kris Sauter appreciated all the information presented that evening. She wanted to know if the grading period had a firm end date after which incompletes could no longer be made up or if students could keep working on those for a couple months. She also said that the Board had been asked about programs/options for students whose grades were lower than in previous years but not failing.
Steve Harrison told her that the district is keeping courses open in Canvas well into the latter part of spring, at least into the 4th quarter so that students can work on those classes. The goal is to really reduce the number of incompletes that are currently represented as well as hopefully turn some of the Fs into passing letter grades. He said that the window for working on those classes is not finalized and that the administration knew going into the second semester that it would need to be extended.
[This took me by surprise. I have watched all of these meetings and recapped them for the public and I do not remember there being a discussion that first semester grades would not be finalized as normal. When the initial failure rate was reported at the 01/27/2021 meeting, I came away from that meeting under the impression that there was a two week window during which students could turn incompletes into passing grades. I also came away with the impression that Fs would not be able to be changed. It’s a little bit of whiplash to now be told that 1st semester grades are not going to be finalized until nearly the end of the year. I was also surprised that no Board of Education members asked how that would affect students’ second semester performance. What assistance is being put in place right now to help students not only make up missed or failing first semester work while also managing their second semester courses?]
Steve Harrison continued, that, with respect to Kris’ question about options for students with lower but still passing grades, for the second semester of the 2019-2020 school year they implemented a pass/fail credit/no credit system. That was the result of having to shift very quickly into the unknown. However, for the first semester of the 2020-2021 school year and into the second semester, they have not looked at a potential change as far as grade reporting.
[Even if they did extend their pass/fail system to this year, it seems to me that all it would do is mask the problem and not actually provide the educational assistance that students need.]
Per Steve, the district has focused instead on the aforementioned extension of student’s opportunity to complete their first semester classes and also on targeting summer school for students who did not pass a course with the intention of addressing the areas that really need to be addressed vs. simply making students retake an entire course.
Kris Sauter said she appreciated that and reiterated that the Board has had quite a bit of feedback on that issue. She thought that if families are concerned, they should first contact their child’s teacher to look at ways in which that might happen.
[It should be pointed out that the Board received public comment from a teacher expressing concerns about the workload and the lack of prep time in this current instructional model. In light of that, it seemed a little inappropriate for Kris to be directing parents to classroom teachers when those teachers are very possibly already overworked.]
Kris was heartened that the door is not closed and said it sounded like there are a lot of open doors. She appreciated all the effort that has gone into that.
Steve said that it was certainly a credit to the district’s teachers, staff, and site-level administrators and that it really takes a team approach to address these very complex issues.
Barry O’Connor wanted to clarify for the public that AASD hasn’t not been paying attention to failure rates at all over the last four year. Instead, they have simply not been tracking grades district-wide, particularly at the secondary level. Rather, individual buildings have been tracking grades for their individual sites. He asked Steve if that was a fair statement.
Steve agreed that that was correct. Sites have each individually looked at not only failure rates and incompletes but also at letter grades in general. He has, however, come to appreciate that, as a large district it’s important to centralize that process and make sure that all sites are pulling the same information from the same source. This change is providing him the opportunity to, roughly twice a month, get together with teams from all three high schools at the same time so that they can dig into this information and collectively look at what areas they need to focus on and be proactive in making adjustments for the coming weeks, months, or semester.
Barry stated that the failure/incomplete rates are high by any recollection he had. He thought that when 9th and 10th graders fail a bunch of classes it’s serious because those kids are headed toward dropping. They can get very discouraged as juniors and seniors. Rather than focusing just on credit recovery and making credits up after the fact he hoped there would be focus on seeing how kids are responding to instruction in the middle of the semester. He thought it would help to get involved at that earlier stage rather than the end of the school year where they’re left to try to get the students into summer school. He thought some of the Covid relief money should go not just for academic instruction but toward motivation for the students because when kids get discouraged you can throw as many tutors or community partners at them as you want but they still aren’t going to finish the work. He thought that would be a good results objective for the Board of Education to review each year.
[Credit where it’s due, everything Barry said there is very reasonable. The frustrating thing is that parents were saying similar things all along and the district did not seem to be responsive to it.]
Barry went on to say that he knows it sometimes sounds like he’s a master critic of but he’s always been impressed with the level of competence and work that the administration and district staff puts into this effort. He wanted to complement them on what they’ve done in all these areas. He will still ask questions and be a pain in the neck most days, but it’s with good intentions and respect for what they’re doing.
Thus ended the questions. Somewhat surprisingly, Barry O’Connor was the Board member to most openly acknowledge that the grades as reported were fairly bad, and three Board members had no comment whatsoever on the matter.
View full meeting here: https://youtu.be/7nkXWOQH6Ac
It would be interesting seeing the GPA over the years. I’m sure there is a drop in usual A students that are now B students, etc. Agree that Barry recapped what the “special interest” parents have been saying all along but at least he finally acknowledged it.