After last week’s vote by the state Public Education Department to essentially close the Española Military Academy, the Española School Board has some soul searching to do. Citing declining enrollment, slipping test scores, perennial employee problems and some improper procedures, the Department’s commissioners voted not to extend the Academy’s charter.
The Academy and Los Cariños Charter School sprung up as a direct result of the Española School District’s inability to educate and discipline all students. At the time of the two charter schools’ births, the District’s special education department was in turmoil, spending more time fighting lawsuits than accomplishing its mission of serving special needs children. Test scores were abysmal and drop out rates led the state. The high school and junior high school were battle grounds for unruly students and the security contractor, Akal, barely caught up with the landslide of paperwork documenting the fights, drug arrests, vandalism and general mayhem.
It’s no wonder charter schools popped up.
Now the Academy will be forced to close, in its current incarnation, in May 2009 and Los Cariños is hanging on by a financial thread. The District needs to answer the questions, where will those students go and how will we educate them?
Academy Board members did nothing to stop the oncoming train, much less slow it. Current principle Steve Baca has made some progress and seems to want what’s best for the students but the commission that voted to close the school had the attitude of too little, too late. Baca asked to not be judged by the last five years but only by his tenure since September 2007 but commissioner Dennis Roch made the point we try to make in this space often: what about all the students in the previous years?
Most board members and administrators at the District and the Academy seem to act and react by numbers. Students are head counts, bringing in so much money, costing so much on a the income statement, filling a number of buses, affecting averages and accountability reports in a certain way. They’re actually all little human beings whose lives are now immutably set on a downhill slide.
The Academy was a good idea, a needed institution, created by the wrong group of people with no idea what they were doing. The initial board, loaded with failed city of Española politicians and employees was doomed from the start. Pete Gomez was the only person on that Board who knew what he was doing and he was far outnumbered. The current Board never stood a chance and the administration has been shackled by the cretinous decision to go to a software-based teaching model instead of licensed, breathing human beings interacting with children who needed more attention, not less.
So egos in pocket, the Board will disband, administrators will find jobs elsewhere and the Academy will either cease to exist or the District will take it over and make a bigger mess of it. The District couldn’t educate and control most of these children to begin with. Never underestimate the Española School District’s ability to make a bigger kerfuffle of an already bad situation.
And the students? There’s a lot of parents out there (not as many as last year or prior years) asking where they’ll send their children next fall. Most adamantly state the Española School District isn’t an option. Private school may be too expensive and two working parents rules out home-schooling.
A working, functioning school district would have answers for these parents. The District owes those parents and their children that much and more.