Carla Lovett presented last night Newpoint Education Partners’ improvement plan for Newpoint Pensacola High and Newpoint Academy. For the Escambia County School Board, the plan was too little, too late. The board voted to terminate the contracts for both the Newpoint high and middle schools.
Let’s add some perspective to this saga.
NEP is an education management company. According to its website, “the Newpoint executive team has collectively led the development and launch of over 75 schools and is keenly aware of the financial and support resources necessary to facilitate the start-up of a new school or the take-over and continuation of an existing school.” The company  claims to have extensive experience in the design, launch, and operations of charter schools.
Lovett has been part of the NEP executive team since June 2008. She is NEP’s Vice President Curriculum and Instruction and “has led the curriculum and instructional elements of Newpoint since the organization’s inception. She has been instrumental in the continuous improvement efforts and adaptations of Newpoint’s educational models to ensure and improve their academic effectiveness.” She is no rookie.
Lovett was formerly the Supervisor of Secondary Education, Curriculum and Instructional Services at Bay District Schools in Bay County Florida. She was the start-up director for Newpoint’s high school in Bay County. She supervised the Pensacola Newpoint charter schools. Â The Pensacola School Director, John Graham, worked for Lovett and NEP in Bay County. He was part of the the NEP system before coming to Pensacola.
Lovett is the expert on Florida high school education. How could she have allowed Pensacola Newpoint High to not have the proper systems in place for attendance, student records, grades and graduation requirements? Shouldn’t those systems have been part of the design, launch, and operations for the schools?
Lovett ran secondary education for a Florida county, has worked for NEP for eight years, and has set up and run charter high schools in the state. Newpoint Pensacola High is completing its fourth year of operation. This proposed improvement plan should have standard operating procedure by now.
These are my notes on what Lovett proposed to fix the problems at the Pensacola schools:
1. Hire strong and experienced school leader. We’ve already began the process of identifying the person.
2. Hold that leader accountable for implementing policies, procedures and following through on these policies, procedures and making sure that everyone on staff is implementing those items as well as recruitment initiatives. The school director will be over and responsible for all three schools to ensure consistency and cohesiveness. The assistant director I understand that would be working directly underneath the school director would be expected to and held accountable to ensure processes, procedures and rigorous educational environments are being maintained.
3. Over the summer we would think under the leadership of the new director we would evaluate each current staff member to determine their capacity to meet the high expectation that the leader would set. Any staff member who is not capable of implementing the required processes and procedures and performing the jobs at an exemplary level will be replaced.
4. Evaluate client responsibilities of each staff member and redistribute duties and/or at staff to ensure that all job duties are completed thoroughly and correctly.
5. Implement a strategy to attract high performing staff particularly teachers and retain them. These strategies may include increased compensation, bonus structures and other incentives.
6. Provide intensive staff training for teachers, records clerk, administrative assistants, guidance and ELC personnel. In doing so we would request assistants from the district staff with this training to ensure that we’re all working together to achieve expected results.
7. Then starting in the summer and continuing through the next school year, administration will attend all the state trainings and principals’ meetings.
8. School staff will work closely with district staff to address concerns with FOCUS and regarding students in all areas. Specifically the school staff and management will work closely with the district staff to address concerns regarding grade reporting. Consensus will be reached and the protocol will be implemented at the school with all the teachers.
9. School director and assistant director monitor all classrooms with the on a weekly basis. The director and assistant director will have weekly improvement meetings with staff members who are not ensuring rigorous classroom procedures. This will be documented on an improvement plan tool. EMO representatives will conduct a school monitoring visits bimonthly.
10. We will establish and maintain a clear protocol for acquiring and maintaining student records which has already began by the way.
11. Establish and maintain a clear protocol for student supervision and discipline incidents.
12. We’ll reactivate … Unfortunately our parent advisory or parent organization has dwindled away. The participation has not been strong. We’ll reactivate a parents’ advisory board and give them more structure to be regularly in the school’s staff and the school’s board to ensure transparency. The advisory board will be made up of three parents from each school, a staff member from each school, the school director and one of the schools board network.
13. We would request monthly meetings with the district staff to maintain open lines of communication before and address concerns on both sides promptly before we ever fully ever get to a position where either side is surprised.
14. We also will request to appear before you this country board at a regularly scheduled monthly workshops to provide a report to answer your questions and ensure transparency.
15. Finally we would work very hard to reestablish a relationship of professional basis and collaboration with the district.
Most of these items are High School 101. A professional management company that has launched 75 schools should have had these systems in place…at least, by the fourth year of operations.
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The other bothersome point by Lovett, who heads curriculum for the entire NEP system, was her description of the curriculum at the Newpoint high school as a “blended model.”
“So as to the Apex concerns, they don’t necessarily tell the whole story and it’s difficult to explain especially standing in front of a crowd, how the blended learning model is used,” said Lovett.
However, the school’s website doesn’t mention a blended model. The high school curriculum is an entirely digital curriculum provided by Apex Learning. The school district found that students in Spanish, Pre-calculus and Geometry were completing only 20 percent of required work in the Apex system, but were still getting credit for the classes.
If Apex is the cornerstone of the high school curriculum, how could a student pass a class by doing 80 percent of his/her work outside of Apex?
It doesn’t make sense and lends credibility to allegations that teachers were pressured to change grades for students to graduate—especially if the grades don’t match the work in Apex.
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However, I do believe that Lovett and NEP were genuinely surprised that Superintendent Thomas recommended the termination of the Pensacola charters. After all, they had gotten away with these problems for over three years, received A grades, and had gotten bonus checks from Governor Scott.  They had little reason to believe the district would shut them down.
And that is what Thomas has to explain. How could a charter school go without the proper attendance, grading and records for three and a half years before the district became concerned? Â And why?
