The demonstrations, comprised of truant students, parents, teachers,
and alumni of two high schools, one whose charter operator was being changed
and the other that soon will get merged into another, followed on previous days’
refusals of some students to attend classes at both. They “demanded” the
undoing of certain personnel changes and cancellation of the merger.
The main controversy came regarding the merger of L.B. Landry High with
O. Perry Walker. Personnel, including one popular coach/academic counselor,
were let go at the former because of much lower enrollments. District resources
realignment had led to changing enrollment patterns away from the school, as it
emphasized getting students into higher-performing schools, and population
losses as a result of the hurricane disasters of 2005 have created an overbuilt
infrastructure. The coach in question, who was offered the chance to stay on as
an unpaid assistant, had presided over an alumni group that wanted to take over
the Landry charter rather than see the merge, so opponents speculated this
caused his removal from a paid position.
And all of this hollering and fussing came about over a school with a
2010-11 School Performance Score of 46.7, where only 25.7 percent of students perform
at or above grade level. Not only is this far short of passing under state
guidelines and even farther away from the state average, it’s one of the lowest
scores in the state, period. Meanwhile, the school with which it will merge,
Walker, with its 95.5 with 78 percent of students performing at or above grade
level score was well above the state average, even though its student
population is almost identical in terms of the (high) percentage of students eligible
for free or reduced lunch programs and in proportion of students with
disabilities.
The SPS scores at Landry have not significantly changed over the past
few years. Clearly, something in the very culture at Landry has been wrong for
years if a similar student population can perform so much better at another
institution, and why so many students, when offered the chance to bail out of
it, did. With such a dismal record, its problems don’t occur at the margins,
they are deeply embedded and ingrained and no amount of trimming is going to
solve for them.
A student remark revealed one sign of the poisonous culture, a comment
about the firing of the coach where the student vouched for the coach’s ability
by testifying in the past year under his guidance the football team’s
collective grade point average increased from 1.1 to 3.2. Such an admission
leads one to wonder how a team was fielded last year, since the state
organization that runs Louisiana high school athletics had mandated a 1.5
average, now raised to 2.0.
It also leads one to wonder about the academic honesty of the school as
a whole. Few high school students suddenly go from a D to B average in one year
no matter how hard they try and the presumably massive amount of extra work
teachers must put in. It’s impossible to deprogram that quickly that large of a
cohort out of a culture of inattention and laziness to achieve that well if standards
are not lowered by those in charge. If that really happened on the level, we’ve
got another Coach Carter here.
Oh, and the other high school around which protests occurred, Walter L.
Cohen, scored a dazzling 28.8 SPS, with only 17.2 percent of its students at or
above grade level – and that was with significant growth in achievement over
the previous year. With this level of performance, why the RSD didn’t yank the
previous operator here sooner is the mystery.
If anything, the protesters should have been venting their spleen about
how these cesspools of ill-education have shortchanged the children at great
taxpayer cost but, more importantly, as the expense of the students themselves.
They little more than warehoused them instead of educating them. Only pulling
out their roots, as the RSD effectively proposes, will lead to any chance for
improvement.
Instead, we get blather about how the Landry identity can’t be allowed
to go away. Besides the obvious question of why anyone would take any pride in
this kind of sub-mediocre identity in the first place, such individuals need to
understand it’s time to grow up. It rather would indicate one hasn’t done much
with one’s life or moved much beyond high school to get so upset over dismantling
one’s alma mater that clearly has not done what it was supposed to do. There
should be many other things in life to which one invests time and resources.
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