District hears recommendation to save alternative education

Cost comes in higher than hoped

A committee’s recommendation to save some of the vital elements of the Gunnison Valley School (GVS) suggests bringing the best of what the alternative education program has to offer into the fold at Gunnison High School next year. But the plan, initially, wouldn’t bring any immediate financial relief to the school district as it was intended to do.

After the district’s Administrative Council (AdCo) recommended closing GVS as one part of a plan to balance the budget for the 2011-12 school year, a large community contingent with ties to the school pushed back at the idea.
To find a compromise, an ad hoc committee was formed from the ranks of parents, teachers and administrators with the goal of offering the board a recommendation on Monday, May 23 that could be implemented by the time the district passes its budget in mid-June.
The result, after a month-long search for a solution, would create one high school campus in Gunnison that includes the two neighboring buildings. The hope is to bring some of the experiential and standards-based learning that was the norm at GVS into a more structured, traditional school environment. According to committee member Russ Banano, the plan isn’t “perfect for anybody, but it meets all of our needs and all of our beliefs.”
In a tag-team presentation of the ad hoc committee’s recommendation, GVS parent Jessica Young and community member Banano told the school board both the traditional high school model as well as the alternative education program at GVS—which gives students the freedom to move through coursework without pressure in an environment focused on students’ social and emotional development as academics—have merit. Both have unique challenges, as well, they admitted.
One challenge is the cost of educating students in an alternative environment, which requires space, staff and a custom curriculum. At the unveiling of AdCo’s recommendation to make some drastic changes at the school, superintendent Jon Nelson explained that it was costing the district significantly more to support a GVS student, compared to one at the high school.
And while it might cost less to educate a student at the high school, Young told the board that not every child is being served by the lecture-oriented courses offered there. So a common-sense solution, she said, would be to combine elements of the two programs to lower the cost and increase the individuality of each student’s education.
The core of GVS’s alternative education is a system developed by the Re-Inventing Schools Coalition, known as the RISC model, that relies on a standards-based approach to education. That model, according to the recommendation, would continue to be used at the current GVS building that will be renamed the Northwest Building.
The committee also recommended that the district keep the entire staff of both schools unchanged initially, as students and administrators transition to a new normal. To help in the transition, GVS students would get individual help from “case managers” and the school’s practice of having “morning gatherings” when people can talk and share concerns before school would continue.
“What we have come to recognize is the pretty much every student has some alternative [education] needs,” Young said.
With that in mind, the committee recommended that some of the alternative methods being used to connect with students and move them through the course material at the Valley School be encouraged at Gunnison High School, which would be called the Central Building.
“At the center of our recommendation is the idea of merging the strengths of the sites into one campus and build a bridge that takes advantage of the strengths of these two entities,” Young said. “That’s at the center of what we’re talking about opening in 2014 and as early as next year.”
Among other recommendations that would merge the two schools, the committee hoped the board and district administration would decide to keep a process open for stakeholders in local education to have an opportunity to communicate with each other and the district’s policy makers.
But the committee’s list of suggestions would also force the district to dip into its reserve funding for the first year to cover more than $120,000 that was needed to fund the recommendation in full, in addition to the $165,000 that had already been budgeted for the program. After deliberating the recommendation, the board agreed that there wouldn’t be any extra money, since closing GVS in the first place was part of an attempt at balancing the budget.
A public hearing on the budget will be held June 6, before the board takes a final vote on the 2011-12 budget on June 13.