Education Programs Praised Spokane, Mead Districts Cited At National Teachers Convention

When President Clinton spoke to a group of 10,000 teachers this week about community involvement in public education, it was a lesson many Spokane-area educators had already learned.

“The federal government should not decide what to do,” Clinton told members of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, gathered in the capital for their annual convention.

“We should help you (educators) determine what you are going to do, we should support you when you do it, we should make sure it’s legally defensible and we should encourage every community to do the same thing and put our children back to school.”

The Spokane and Mead school districts are being held up at the convention as models of education Clinton described. Both have site-based programs in which parents, teachers, administrators and students have a say in making decisions.

A theme of this year’s convention is to develop programs around the country similar to those in Spokane and Mead.

On Thursday, a focus group for all 10,000 delegates discussed ways to bring communities and parents back into public education.

“Americans are withdrawing from civic involvement in groups like the PTA, and this withdrawal, in turn, has weakened the immune system of our public schools,” said Keith Geiger, president of the NEA.

Some Spokane teachers set up programs to combat the problem almost a decade ago.

“The school is the community. Schools should all look different, just as communities all look different,” said Maureen Ramos, a teacher of gifted students at Spokane’s Libby Center. “The needs are different for every school.”

To deal with the different needs, several area schools set up advisory panels, called site-based councils, to discuss decisions that affect school policy before they are made. These councils are designed to “give ownership” to those most closely connected to the school.

“The agenda is simply to improve student learning” said Debbie Rose, a third-grade teacher at Colbert Elementary and a convention delegate from Washington state. “This lets people know what’s going on in their schools.”

Four years ago, a joint site-based restructuring committee, which brought together representatives from administration, the school board and the union, was put into place to help facilitate some of the programs.

To date, about half of the schools in the Spokane School District have site-based councils, and the other half are expected to have them by the end of next school year.

“It is long, hard work,” said Assistant Superintendent Cynthia Lambarth. She said that because Spokane schools were some of the first in the country to implement such programs, there were obstacles along the way.

“The process is moving along slowly because as we face each new issue, most of these issues are brand new,” she said. “It’s not like anyone knows how to do this. We are not reinventing the wheel; we are inventing it.”

Clinton stressed the need for schools to open their doors to community and parent input. He said he supports an extension of the Family Leave Act that would allow parents to take time off from work for teacher conferences and called for a nationwide crackdown on students who skip class.

, DataTimes