Poverty, truancy linked to dropping school grades

PANAMA CITY — Coupling dropping school grades to poverty and truancy opened the School Board's roundtable discussion Tuesday.

"Now that the grades are out, we're going to have to figure out how to get the schools that are struggling up to par," said board member Ginger Littleton. "As long as I have been in education it’s been the same schools or very similar schools and it's been the same issues."

School grades released Friday showed the worst grades the school district has had yet. Bay District Schools now has four F schools — Cedar Grove Elementary, Lucille Moore Elementary, Oakland Terrace Elementary and Everitt Middle. And with the exception of former F school Oscar Patterson Elementary, no elementary or middle school grades improved.

High school grades are still pending.

"Teachers are saying they just don't have enough time with the students," said Littleton.

"This is not news," she told fellow board members. "The only way that we're going to change Bay County's performance in education is by all of Bay County becoming a part of that performance."

Currently, teachers work 450 minutes a day and 300 of those minutes are for student contact time, which is time teachers are required to use instructing students.

"I respect the teachers union and I respect the teachers, but what we're asking for is of the 450 minutes, 330 minutes should be instruction time," Superintendent Bill Husfelt said. "I believe that is a major factor of why we are short-changing and why our scores are lower than some scores.

"We've got to have more time with the teachers and students together," he said.

Of the 300 lowest performing elementary schools, 295 of them were Title 1, or schools in disadvantaged areas, Husfelt pointed out. He said anyone "can deny that poverty has anything to do with it," but records and trends show a correlation.

"If we're going to help these kids, we've got to figure out a way to help them in the beginning," he said, adding, impoverished students don't start out at the same level as students not living in poverty.

"They're not dumb kids; they're very capable of learning," Husfelt concluded. "They haven't been given the same amount of time and opportunity to learn that the other kids have had."

The issue of truancy was another contributor to poor school grades that board member Joe Wayne Walker wanted to discuss.

"I'm just wondering if there's any way we can look at that attendance policy and put more teeth into it," Walker said.

The district dealt with hundreds of truancy cases last year, according to School Board attorney Franklin Harrison.

"We used to have teeth," Harrison said. "You could put them in jail, children and parents and it was a deterrent. … It got their attention, but we can't do that anymore — we can't put them in jail."

Board members seemed to agree that Alignment Nashville, a nonprofit group out of Tennessee that aligns student needs with community resources, offers a hope to draw in community partners to help expose students, particularly Title I schools, to more life experiences that will in turn help their overall academic outlook.

"Title I schools should have lots of involvement that we can't buy," Littleton said.

Bay District school grades

Dropped from D to F

Elementary schools

Cedar Grove

Lucille Moore

Oakland Terrace

Middle schools

Everitt

From C to D

Elementary schools

Parker

Southport

Springfield

Waller

Miriam Cherry Street

Hutchison Beach

Middle schools

Jinks

Newpoint

From B to C

Elementary schools

Hiland Park

Northside

From A to B

Elementary schools

Deer Point

Climbed from D to F

Oscar Patterson Elementary

Maintained A

Elementary

Tyndall

Patronis

Bay Haven

University Academy

Middle

Mowat

Bay Haven

North Bay Haven

Maintained B

Rising Leaders Academy

Surfside Middle

Maintained C

Elementary

Lynn Haven

Tommy Smith

Maintained D

Callaway Elementary