It was built, they came, but then it was torn down

In a comment to yesterday's post, "If you build it, they will come", Nancy asked for stories of other high-achieving schools that were popular with parents but unpopular with school board administrations. Here are two.

St. Francis of Assisi Separate School in Stroud, ON (near Barrie) opened its doors in January, 1994. Under the leadership of a wonderful principal, the grade 1 teachers wrought seeming miracles, using a phonetic reading program called Open Court. By June, every grade 1 child was reading, and almost all were one or two grade levels ahead. The teachers were thrilled. The parents were delighted. The children were bursting with pride. The community, too, sat up and took notice. As word spread, some parents had their children baptized into the Catholic faith so they could go to St. Francis. But the school board was not pleased. The problem, they said, was that Open Court was not on Ontario's list of approved textbooks. (There are no phonetic readers on the list.) And so, a reign of terror began at St. Francis. During the 1994/95 school year, the superintendent began to supervise the principal very carefully. For example, her authority to purchase teaching programs was removed, and she was required to attend a whole language workshop. Despite officials' best efforts to cripple the school's reading program however, the grade 2 students and the new crop of grade 1 students racked up incredible reading scores. The parents were solidly behind their principal and raised $10,000 (in a blue-collar community) to buy more Open Court materials (since the school board wouldn't pay for them). In September 1995, the principal began a long-planned leave of absence, and a new principal and vice-principal were assigned to St. Francis with orders to shut down Open Court. Because the parents and teachers were so attached to the program, the new principal realized she couldn't ban it outright - at least, not right away. The new principal did, however, prevent the parents from spending their fund-raised money on workbooks and readers for the original cohort of children who had now reached grade 3. In addition, there was an extra class of grade 1 students at the school in 1995/96 that had to go without. The next year, a new whole language reading program was purchased by the school. And when the original principal returned from her leave of absence, she was demoted to a half-time principal and banished to a school on the far side of the school board. In addition, she was forbidden to enter St. Francis of Assisi Separate School ever again.

Parkview Public School in Lindsay, Ontario was once a middle-of-the-road school with average test scores. In 1993, the school's new principal, Lynn Hatfield, began working with the teachers to raise the students' academic achievement. Over the next three years, the children's scores on standardized tests rose steadily, until in 1996 the school ranked first in the board. Click here and here for articles by Mrs. Hatfield about the changes she introduced at Parkview. Far from being pleased by the children's success, however, the school board administration continually tried to thwart Mrs. Hatfield's efforts. Finally, with no warning and despite the fact that Mrs. Hatfield and her husband had just bought a house near the school, Mrs. Hatfield was transferred to Bobcaygeon, a 45-minute drive away. Mrs. Hatfield was unable to take up this position, however, because she succumbed to depression and moved to Thunder Bay. When last heard of, she was teaching First Nations students in northern Ontario.

Tomorrow, I will write about parents' efforts to convince their school boards to give them a traditional school.

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