RE1J loosens academic watch over alternative high school

Confusion stemmed from district memo

A group of concerned citizens and members of the Site Accountability Advisory Committee (SAAC) of the Gunnison Valley School made an impassioned appeal to the RE1J school board to reconsider the school’s “accreditation watch” status, at the board’s regular meeting in Crested Butte on Monday, June 9.

The group was concerned that the accreditation watch was a step toward closing the school and placed an undue burden on the students to perform at a level that was unspecified, leaving students who are already considered to be “at risk” with additional feelings of uncertainty, according to SAAC members.
But the board vehemently rejected the idea that there was ever an intention to close the school; they instead wished only that the watch would be an opportunity to highlight areas of the school curriculum that needed improvement. They vowed to devote all necessary resources to ensure that a set of undefined goals would be met.
“There were some issues there that we don’t want to let slide and there needs to be a clear understanding of the requirements that need to be met,” says board president MJ Vosburg. “We have to meet state and federal requirements and all schools have the same requirements to graduate. I don’t understand where it came from that they would think that we wanted to close the school.”
SAAC members showed the subject line of a memorandum that had raised concerns of a potential closing.
“There is a memo dated February 20, 2008 sent to the district review committee by a member of the administration,” says Bill Chambliss, a former district educator and superintendent. “And it says right in the subject matter, ‘Re: Recommendations for Accreditation and Continuation of the Gunnison Valley School.’”
The process of placing the school on accreditation watch began at the end of 2007 after Dr. Chris Purkiss, the district’s director of curriculum and assessment, and Mike Adams, principal of the Gunnison Valley School, brought some concerns to the group charged with site accreditation. The school’s status will be reviewed again in October.
The group includes the president of the school board, the superintendent, Dr. Purkiss and Kristi Hargrove of the District Advisory Accountability Committee.
Purkiss and Adams ultimately recommended to the accreditation board that the school be placed on accreditation watch, but not with the intention of harming the school in any way and definitely not as an attempt to close the school, says Hargrove.
“Our normal process of review began in November when they came to us and said there were some issues that needed to be resolved,” says Hargrove, “and [they] were working with the staff and Neal Coen, the school’s head teacher, to get the accreditation plan in order. We said ‘no problem’ and they told us work would be completed in January.”
Hargrove recalls, “In February they said they weren’t ready and we had a meeting with Mike Adams, the principal, and were told that the director of curriculum assessment was working on a plan and needed more time, and it was our decision to put them on watch at that point.”
Part of the rationale for placing the school on watch was its overall performance on standardized tests such as the Colorado Student Assessment Program and the ACT, as well as graduation rates. In 2007, 52.6 percent of GVS seniors graduated, down from 55.6 percent in 2006.
At a DAAC special meeting on Thursday, June 12, Hargrove continued the discussion by asking Janice Welborn, the GVS representative to DAAC, what resources were needed for the planning process and to carry out the plan, adding that DAAC understood that the teaching staff was making a sacrifice to improve the school’s standing.
“If there is no caveat in the budget for more resources, then where will the funding for those resources come from?” asked Welborn, pointing out that an understanding of the next year’s needs will come after the budget is approved.
“We always do an amended budget in October and it sometimes includes additional staff or resources,” said superintendent Jon Nelson.
Also at issue was the way the board went about placing the school on accreditation watch, without the input of the school’s staff members.
As an example of what she sees as backward practices by the district, Welborn cited the discussions between the district and an architectural firm about the remodeled or rebuilt GVS site, discussions that excluded the staff.
“We don’t think that there is a good understanding of the students at GVS and so it doesn’t make any sense to talk with an architect about a building for kids they don’t really understand,” said Welborn. “These kids aren’t storing books—they’re storing skis and poles. That’s why there should be a dialogue with the staff before planning starts.”
The architects have been through the school to see the needs first-hand, said Nelson, adding that it is standard procedure for the planning to go on without input from the school’s staff.
In response to the designation, members of the school’s staff have voluntarily taken on the task of reworking the curriculum during the summer so that the issues can be resolved by the site review in October.
At the end of the session, the school board unanimously approved the status of the Gunnison Valley School being changed from “accreditation watch” to “accredited with academic watch.”
“This is a case of adults having problems with adults and should not be taken as being a problem with the kids. It is a question of the staff being out of sync with the administration,” says Hargrove. “[The staff] was not a part of the accreditation process and that is not an unusual thing.”
The Gunnison Valley School is an alternative school by design, and everyone at the meeting acknowledged the difficulty in effectively teaching at such a school. Two students from Crested Butte attend the school.
“I’m disappointed that it was felt that the elephant in the room was the closing of the GVS and so I am glad to hear every member of the board state publicly that there was never an intent to close that school, to do nothing but support it and to make it better. We have two problems that it boils down to,” Vosburg said.
“One problem is communication. We’ve all touched on communication and we have communication issues between the SAAC staff, the board, the principal’s office and the staff of GVS. We all have roles in improving that process in the communication that flows from one to another. The buck stops here. It’s our job and our responsibility to make sure that the lines of communication are open,” Vosburg said.
“We also have a real severe trust problem in dealing between this board, the administration, and SAAC. That is not going to be fixed with policy, it’s not going to be fixed with meetings—it’s going to be fixed with time, with all of us going forward with the best intentions and work through these problems that we’ve outlined and begin to believe each other, because right now that’s not happening,” said Vosburg.
But perhaps the strongest appeal for unity came from school board member Bill Powell, who recalled a moment from his more than 31 years of education experience that he hoped would serve as a model for the entire group going forward.
“The most vivid [graduation] that I ever sat through was an alternative school ceremony when a young single mother got killed on I-70 in an auto accident two weeks before graduation. When the graduating class, all 12 of them, planned their graduation ceremony, they got up there and there was a row of chairs and one of them was empty,” he recalled.
“They went out in the audience and got that young mother’s child, who was two years old, and put that child in that mother’s chair and then handed that mother’s diploma to that child. There was no dry eye in the audience. Alternative schools are families—they pull together as a family and we need to have that spirit here as we work toward the best solution to make sure that these kids are successful.”