Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > August > 09
Wednesday, August 9, 2006
Eight years of upheaval
(Jackson School demolition in 2003)
I think often about kids like Aire’Anna Stevens — kids who were in kindergarten on the day I started covering Dayton schools in the Spring of 1999.
Aire’Anna was featured in my story Tuesday on the first day of school in Dayton. In eight years of education, she’s attended six different schools and every one of them closed after she left.
How did that happen? Aire’Anna and her classmates have rode along while the district has traveled a bumpy route over the course of their academic careers.
The day I started work, the school board was swirling in controversy. Just days before a state audit report unveiled a previously undisclosed, multi-million dollar deficit and the board was already moving toward what would be an unpleasant ousting of then-Superintendent James Williams.
Also that year, the first charter school opened, and in short order Dayton became one of the nation’s hottest charter school markets.
Those combined trends — a leadership vacuum at the top and intense financial pressure from enrollment losses to charters — created quite a bit of turmoil for those first five years I was writing about Dayton. As interesting as the debates and trends were to cover, down in the trenches the kids lived through a lot of uncertainty.
More than 15 schools have since closed — some because of enrollment declines, some to make way for new schools that will be built through the district’s massive construction program.
Kids in Dayton tend to be mobile anyway. It’s never been unusual to find a kid who’s been to lots of different schools. And the tend to roll with the punches. It was interesting to me, for instance, that it was the adults, not the kids, who seemed most affected by the closing of Roth Middle School last year.
Even so, that doesn’t mean it’s been easy. School board member Mario Gallin told me recently she hoped the district’s move toward neighborhood schools would have a calming effect on kids’ lives over the next several years. Perhaps it will mean more kids spend more of their growing up attending schools near their homes that are, she hopes, more connected to their communities. That will be something to watch for as we move ahead.
Meanwhile, there will always be Aire’Anna and her classmates, the kids who’ve been bounced from school to school and for whom these Titanic changes in Dayton were very much up close and personal. Anytime you wonder how much what’s happening at the top politically in a school district really affects the kids at their desks, think of them.
(Photo credit: Jan Underwood, DDN)
Permalink | Comments (7) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, My Favorite Posts
