For reasons that I don’t entirely understand, it continues to be difficult to gather specific details about programs offered by the Appleton Area School District.
It took some back and forth to learn that, although the school year ends in only two months, the Graduation Coaches program is still in the preliminary stages and the district has no data regarding the number of students who could benefit from those services, the number who have been reached out to, the number who have declined services, and the number who are receiving services.
I had also asked Superintendent Baseman how the district had responded back when the first quarter grades were released and the equity issues being faced by students first became apparent. She pointed to the Virtual Plus programming that they rolled out, saying, “As soon as our teachers, counselors, and administrators saw the difficulty that certain students were having with engaging in the Fully Virtual model last fall, we began providing Fully Virtual Plus targeted interventions and support.”
The obvious follow up to that, and the question that I asked, was how many students performed poorly during the first quarter, how many of those poorly performing students were offered Virtual Plus programming, and how quickly after the first quarter ended were they offered that extra assistance?
I would have expected this data to be available at this point, given how late in the school year it is, but the school district is not willing to release that information. Their position is that, although they can say that special supports were offered to Special Education students, English Language Learners, and students in need of social-emotional support, they cannot say how many students they offered those services to because saying how many students received services could provide enough information for those students to become publicly identified.
Per Assistant Superintendent Steve Harrison, “Since students receiving Tier 3 services could be personally identified by the fact that a small number of students are specifically targeted for support, this information is protected as to not publicly identify students within these targeted groups.”
I honestly cannot conceive of a situation in which that assertion would be at all plausible. Surely identifying the categories of students who were eligible for services–a thing that AASD has freely done–would provide more personal information than simply stating how many students received services.
At any rate, the figures Assistant Superintendent Harrison was willing to provide are so broad as to be worthless, in my opinion. Per his email, as many as 20% to as little as 6% of students received any sort of assistance. (1-5% received intensive level support and 5-15% received targeted level support.) It’s also worth noting that, although I specifically was asking about support for high school students who were failing academically, his email does not indicate that he is discussing only high school students and I am left to wonder if the percentages that he was willing to give included the elementary and middle school levels also. Additionally, the number of students receiving academic support are not separated from the number of students receiving social-emotional support, a data point that would be relevant particularly when talking about interventions specifically targeted at high schoolers who are failing classes.
At any rate, the fact remains that one of the guiding principles of the Appleton Area School District is “Equity: To meet the needs of all students”. As of the completion of the first semester, 27.59% of high school students were failing at least one class which could accurately be described as an equity problem. Beyond that, the academic struggles at the high school level were apparent as far back as the end of the first quarter. I do not understand why it is so difficult to get quantitative data from the Appleton Area School District regarding the steps they say they have taken in response to this glaring equity issue.
The taxpayers of the city are currently funding a school system in which over one quarter of the high school student body is failing. I do not think it is inappropriate for AASD to be expected to state exactly how many of those failing students are receiving additional academic support and how quickly after the first quarter ended that additional support began.
It is not inappropriate at all to ask, and it it is not surprising they won’t say – they are embarrassed at the debacle they created with closing the schools from the beginning of they year.
They have something to hide, and someplace to hide – behind their school board and the fact that the only way that information will come forward is if they are sued for it, and who can afford that?
Thank you again for covering this – nobody else is, especially the poor excuse for a “paper of record.”