Jackson Free Press

A governor-appointed panel on school district mergers is withholding the data it used to identify 18 Mississippi school districts for potential consolidation, frustrating a group of education advocates.

The community-organizing group Southern Echo, along with a coalition of Delta-based community groups, is criticizing Gov. Haley Barbour's Commission on Mississippi Education Structure for what it considers a lack of transparency.

"It's just common sense, that if you're going to target 18 districts based on certain data, that you get to see the data for the whole 152 school districts," Mike Sayer, a Southern Echo senior organizer and training coordinator, said.

The Commission used private funds to pay a Colorado-based consulting firm, Augenblick, Palaich & Associates, for a study of potential savings from merging school districts. Lead consultant John Augenblick delivered a report to the Commission April 19 that identified 18 districts--all rural, mostly located in the Delta--as targets for consolidation. Consolidating these districts could save up to $13.8 million in administrative costs at the district level, but the mergers would save the state no money, Augenblick said.

Augenblick used three criteria to identify the target districts: lower-than-average academic performance, enrollment below 2,000 students and higher-than-average administrative costs per student.

Sayer asked Barbour's education adviser, Johnny Franklin, who serves on the Barbour commission staff, for a table of Augenblick's original data. Franklin initially denied the request on the grounds that no such table existed. Commission member Rep. Cecil Brown, D-Jackson, said that Franklin could not have granted Sayer's request.

"Number one, (Franklin)'s a staff person," Brown said. "He's not authorized to release that. The commission would have to do that."

Sayer has since submitted his request to the working group of the commission that is developing a draft of the final report that it will issue next month.

Brown added, however, that the data Sayer is seeking is already available to the public.

"All the information is public," Brown said. "There's nothing that Augenblick did that's not public information. It's all on the state websites."

Data for academic performance, district enrollment and percent spending on administrative costs is available on the MDE website. Augenblick's formula for identifying school districts, however, relied on a weighted enrollment figure based on relative numbers of students with specific disabilities and percentages of students in poverty. Sayer says that the consultant's weighting system is not immediately clear or easily replicated.

"It's a formula he created; it's unique to his criteria," Sayer said. "It isn't readily available. It's certainly the hard way around the barn to say that ordinary citizens need to go out and do all of this research and calculation, when a public entity already has it."

Brown said Franklin has also suggested that the data should only be released when Augenblick and Commission members could address questions about it.

"To just release the raw data doesn't necessarily mean anything," Brown said. "You'd have to interpret the data. (Franklin is) concerned about anybody getting the data and saying, 'Why didn't you pick this school district? Why didn't you pick that school district?' without having somebody there to answer those questions. ... You just get people upset for no reason without having any kind of explanation of what the data means."

The Commission's working group will meet tomorrow at 1 p.m. in Room 216 of the state Capitol to draft its final report. Brown remains skeptical that forced consolidation will work in any school district without significant efforts to enlist the support of parents and community members.

"We already have a law that allows districts to consolidate on a voluntary basis," Brown said. "If the parents and the kids and community leaders, if they don't buy into that, it's not going to work. If you're going to force school districts to consolidate against their will, you've got a real problem."

Previous Comments

ID

157935

Comment

This commission and its report is a waste of time sand money if it was accepted before hand that: -No district could be consolidated legally without consent of the district -No state funds go toward local district administrative costs (the only area where consolidating could save money) -Only districts that are "struggling" under Augenblick's private and convoluted formula would be eligible (Madison county schools supt., who's on the commission, was already on record as saying that Madison would not consolidate with Canton). These factors, among others (private funds for a public commission's report?) point towards this whole consolidation talk being a smokescreen. The reality is the only sustainable successes we see in MS public schools are with districts that actively benefit and maintain class segregated student bodies in their districts. Notice how every year we hear more and more reports about districts really enforcing residency statutes and policies. That is because that is how they enforce the segregation they know actually is the key to their supposed 'high performance" state accreditation ratings. If it was curriculum, instruction, and leadership that was to account for it, than why wouldn't Madison readily consolidate with Canton? -

Author

Renaldo Bryant

Date

2010-05-24T13:14:31-06:00