Retirements May Mean Less Help for Home-Schoolers
By SHARON OTTERMAN
When Karen Holmes decided to home school her daughter, Zoe, in the middle of 10th grade, she sent the required letter to her local school district. But there were problems, and Zoe ended up with “F”s in all of her classes, marked persistently absent instead of legally transferred from the school.
Ms. Holmes, who then lived near Rochester, reached out to a network of home-schooling parents, who advised her to contact an office in Albany, the Office for Nonpublic School Services. An official there sent an e-mail to the district correcting its understanding of the law, and the matter was fixed.
Now home-schooling parents around the state are concerned that there will no longer be anywhere to go for similar mediation. All the professionals in the Albany office have retired, and the state education department has not yet told parents whether the office they staffed will still exist.
For the home-schoolers, the key contact was an official named Nancy Murray. She intervened when things got rough and worked with them to create a F.A.Q. for parents that is more clear-cut than the labyrinth of legal regulations.
“I really don’t know what we would have done if Nancy would have not been there for us,” Ms. Holmes said.
Elsa Haas, who lives in Staten Island and directs a volunteer network of home-school parents called the Partnership for Accurate Homeschooling Information, received a worrying e-mail from the office supervisor, Tom Hogan, before he retired last week.
“I regret to inform you that the senior management of this Department has advised that they will not replace Ms. Nancy Murray,” he wrote. “Therefore, there is no longer anyone on the staff here to deal with Home Instruction questions/issues.”
“In addition, as I will be retiring September 14, 2010; and the last remaining professional Mr. Jim Anderson on September 27, 2010, it is questionable if an Office for Nonpublic School Services will exist after September 27,” he added.
The office also deals with private and parochial school matters. Tom Dunn, a spokesman for New York State Education Department, said Tuesday that there was a plan in place, though he provided no details.
“The State Education Department will continue to provide services for non-public schools and home schooled students,” he said in a statement. “Due to the fiscal crisis, our agency is dealing with numerous retirements. However, non-public schools and parents of home schooled students will continue to have a point of contact here at SED as we all face budgetary challenges.”
Reminders of Division
Two reports came out this week that reminded City Room of how segregated and stratified our area’s school children remain, both by race and ability.
The Campaign for Fiscal Equity, an advocacy organization that seeks equal financing and opportunity in schooling, released a report on Monday that found that the majority of children who are performing below grade level in middle school end up clustered in high schools dominated by other below-grade-level students. Helaine Doran, deputy director of the organization, called the finding an indication of “the restratification of our school system.”
With the ending of zoned high schools in most of the city and the opening of hundreds of new small high schools, “the whole idea is that there are options and choices,” Ms. Doran said. “Instead we see that the most challenging kids are going to highly and severely challenged schools, and the least challenged students are going to other schools.”
As the city moves toward a 2012 deadline when all seniors must earn a state Regents diploma in order to graduate, rethinking how the weakest students are distributed through the system is a matter of pressing concern, she said.
One idea would be reviving a concept that has become rarer in recent years — educational option schools, which are required to take certain percentages of below-grade-level (Level 1 and 2) and above-grade-level children (Level 4), Ms. Doran said.
“It just doesn’t seem like a good strategy that some schools are 70 or 75 percent filled with level 1s and 2s,” she said.
Other findings in the report: Student attendance appeared to be the best predictor of a school’s success in graduating students, and small high schools tended to do better with below-grade-level students than large high schools. That finding was lauded by Mr. Bloomberg’s Department of Education, which has made creating small schools a focus.
By creating “hundreds of new, high-quality options, our small school strategy is improving outcomes for our neediest students,” said Matt Mittenthal, a city schools spokesman. “Despite these gains, we still have more work to do and we welcome the Campaign for Fiscal Equity’s focus on these important factors in student success.”
Separately, Harvard University researchers released a report this week that found that New York metro area schools are among the most segregated in the nation.
Eighty percent of black students would have to move in order to create equal racial distribution in schools in the area, which includes the 19 million people living in New York City, Newark, Edison and surrounding suburbs.
The most segregated schools for black students in the nation by that measure (known as dissimilarity) are in Chicago and Milwaukee. For Hispanic students, Los Angeles and Springfield, Mass., were the most segregated systems. New York was third in both categories.
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