David Bear is tired of the Escambia County School Board’s delays in signing an agreement for Charter Schools USA to take over Warrington Middle School. He and ret. Capt. Tim Kinsella, former head of NAS Pensacola, have spoken at school board meetings. Bear has visited the middle school and met with Charter Schools USA officials.
“The Escambia County School Board has just been kicking this thing down the road for years now,” Bear said on WCOA’s “Real News with Rick Outzen” this morning. “They were ordered by the state to do this turnaround plan, and they have failed to turn it around. They’re still a D school. And so they were ordered by the State Board of Education to convert to a charter or close it down. We are just a couple days before the deadline, and they don’t have a contract.”
School board members have signed the latest proposed agreement had several demands that they consider non-negotiables, including turning the school into K-12 academy with open enrollment that wouldn’t necessarily students in the WMS attendance zone.
Last week, the Florida Board of Education listed to Superintendent Tim Smith and Board chairman Paul Fetsko and were interested in the district’s non-negotiables.
“The lack of sense of urgency is a major problem,” said Bear. “We’ve got these families that we’ve already been failing for years, and we’re just going to let the school shut down if we don’t meet the deadline for this agreement. And those children in this D school are going to be spread among the other middle schools, and it’s going bring the grades down for the rest of those public schools. And busing to other school will only work if the school district has enough CDL bus drivers to actually get ’em to those other schools.”
He said he has toured WMS and found the conditions deplorable. “The school district hasn’t spent any money on the, cleanup or painting of the building. I mean, it’s just a depressing place to go to school and to go to work.”
Bear has met with Charter Schools USA officials. “They were concerned about children. They were excited about the opportunity. They have experience in turning around these schools and want to create some specific programs to provide opportunity and hope for these kids.”
He added, “The Charte Schools USA want to get it cleaned up and try to make it a better environment for everyone, for a better learning environment, a safe place. They’re excited about the opportunity, but they’re just waiting on the school district to get off the pot and make a decision.”
The school board has an emergency meeting scheduled for 8 a.m. tomorrow to make its decision on WMS’s fate.
“We cannot abandon that community.” –Rick
Signing this horrible contract *IS* abandoning that community.
There is nobody I respect more in this community in terms of leadership, courage, intelligence, and *always* wanting the best for the community at large. So it deeply pains me to say that I couldn’t disagree with him more on this issue, as a former educator, a taxpayer, and a resident of the West Side.
David is absolutely right that we are in the current predicament because of foot-dragging on the school board’s part, primarily Fetsko and Adams. Because what that did was provide the State with all the runway in the world to shut down a struggling public school and gift it off to their charter buds, as is the program–increasingly–all over the state and country right now. It’s not as if the poor State and their buds at Charter School USA are left out on the doorstep with snowflakes in their eyelashes, pining for the community’s understanding of how badly they want to help those kids. Because they’re NOT going to help those kids, as their horrible contract makes clear. And yes, Charter USA *did* stall on that contract, as is typical when somebody is getting ready to drop a doozy of a bait and switch, which a lot of us were ready for. What’s the saying? “When somebody tells you who they are, believe them.” I could care less what words come out of their mouths when they’re spreading their PR sunshine around to local leaders; verbals mean less than nothing. The only thing I care about–and that anyone should care about, honestly–is the black and white in that contract.
Whether Warrington Middle stays open in its current form or in the form of a K-12 Charter School USA is nearly a moot point in terms of schools families on the base; in fact, increasingly it’s seeming like a red herring (and I don’t mean that David Bear is using it that way, but that others are happy to employ it that way). Are we really expecting a strong decline in the number of people turning down commissions here because this particular private charter company is ready, willing, and able to stick it to our West Side neighborhoods and the local taxpayers? Kinsella was one of the people pushing to put that state road through the base, so I’m sorry, and truly mean no disrespect, but that’s why I won’t ever be comfortable taking his word on apt solutions towards base longevity.
Nor does the logic that bussing those kids will bring down the grades of the schools they’re sent to pass muster, because those kids are going to be bussed whether the School is closed or Charter USA takes over.
I absolutely share the frustration in how long this situation has been allowed to drag on prior to official state intervention, and that the intervention wasn’t met with the sense of urgency by the Board that it should have been. Yes, they and the community should have had more time.
I do not share that the only two solutions possible are (1) shut ‘er down; or (2) gift this charter with a ludicrous contract that affords them whatever whimsy concerning who can attend the school and for how long. Oh, and the taxpayers can go ahead and foot the bill for whatever infrastructure improvements they want. Oh, and don’t worry about whether it’s hurricane rated construction–Diaz wrote the bill, folks. Should be enough that a long-time official of a sketchy charter college shook his fist in the air, right?
If “close it” or “bend over and take it” truly are the only two options, then the school board should put it back in the State’s lap and let the failure of the lose-lose rest with the people who purposely strong-armed into that corner. Manny Diaz seems to be quite comfortable with dictating how the world should run according to his wishes, so let him decide it. If it’s anything that we’ve learned, it’s that this administration is going to do whatever the hell they want, anyway, rule of law and statute be damned. What they have planned for that campus is tantamount to shutting the present school down and boxing out the current students anyway. So why on earth should I support this absurd sweetheart deal that DOE orchestrated.
I’d rather spend my tax dollars on busing those kids–and raising the bus driver wage–than anything Charter Schools USA and the current DOE cook up there, given the track record on both sides of some of the key people involved. And that’s coming from a person who fought tooth and nail simply to keep Cameron Lane opened to maintain the connectivity of the surrounding residences to the businesses on Navy Blvd. If I care about a maintaining that, then of course it kills me thinking about this school closing.
But doing something–anything!–isn’t always better than letting something go. If the State is going to try to force closure on Warrington Middle, so be it. At least they shouldn’t be given the additional pleasure of gifting the infrastructure off on the taxpayers’ backs while they’re at it.