Proposal Gives Some Students No Alternative State Superintendent Wants More Hours, Yearly Assessments

Linda Woods has taught teenagers on a jail basketball court, and she’s taught them through food slots in isolation cells.

But Woods, a public school teacher based in the Spokane County Jail, says she can’t teach them at all if a new batch of rules governing alternative education is approved.

Woods and teachers across the state are fighting a proposal by the state school superintendent’s office, designed to hold students to higher standards.

At a statewide video conference Wednesday, opponents said the new plan would not only tighten the reins, but in some cases, choke the programs out of existence.

At the heart of the controversy is a proposal to increase the number of hours these students must spend in the classroom each week. Now, they often spend just an hour a week with teachers and another 24 hours doing schoolwork on their own.

State Superintendent Terry Bergeson’s office wants to boost the required classroom hours to five each week.

The new proposal also calls for yearly student assessments and more teacher control over home-based instruction.

“We just feel the state has an interest in a certain level of accountability in those programs,” said Allen Jones, the state’s director of school apportionment.

“We’re seeing rapid growth in programs that provide a major role for parental involvement.”

In Spokane, enrollment at the Jantsch alternative high school has increased from 509 to 651 students in the past five years. District 81 has also added several new alternative programs, including a sobriety school and a school for kids hospitalized with cancer.

Five hours might not sound like much, but for many students, it’s the difference between a diploma and dropping out, say alternative educators.

Woods, who usually spends an hour a week with 15 teenage inmates, says they usually meet one-on-one because the jail has no space for a classroom. There’s no way she could spend five hours with each inmate, she says.

Besides, her most frightening lesson happened when she tried to teach two boys together - boys from opposing gangs. Class ended in a brawl.

Most alternative programs don’t involve jails. Some cater to pregnant teenagers, homeless students, kids with drug or alcohol problems, or young parents who must work full-time to support their families. And many districts have programs in which teachers spend an hour a week helping families with curriculum, while parents provide at-home instruction.

“It’s generated a gray area between home-schooling and public schools,” said Bob Wiley, director of Washington Association for Learning Alternatives.

School districts earn money from the state for each student they work with, even when it’s just an hour a week. But controversies have cropped up when parents of some of those kids include religious curriculum in their home lessons.

“There is a misconception that they can use religious material,” said Calvin Brodie, a program supervisor in Bergeson’s office. “Some of these programs have provided quite a bit of latitude to these parents.”

Parents, on the other hand, said they’d back out of the new programs and return to full-time home-schooling if teachers begin intervening too much.

Wednesday’s video-conference, held at 11 Educational Service District offices, allowed people to voice opinions even if they can’t attend a public hearing Friday in Olympia. Jones said final decisions on most of the proposals will be delayed until spring because so many people have objected.

Some educators said they’d have to shut down alternative programs that operate from small offices. They don’t have enough classroom space to invite kids in five hours a week, they said.

Steve Duncan, from the Eclipse alternative program in the Pullman School District, said he’d lose more than a quarter of his 55 students under the new proposal.

He told administrators to remember the overwhelmed teenage parents who work and have trouble fitting in any education.

“Those are the students we’d be turning away,” he said. “We have an absolute need for as much flexibility as we can have.”