Brighter Choice Students' Departure From New West Hill Middle School Leaves District With Almost $1M Deficit

Many Brighter Choice students aren't enrolling at the district's new West Hill Middle School, leaving the new school almost $1M in the red. Back in the spring, assistant superintendent for business Bill Hogan assured concerned Board members and parents that because the district would no longer have to pay charter school tuition to Brighter Choice, we'd essentially "break even." Now a new report from Dr. V. says breaking even was the best case scenario - it would only happen if every eliglble student from Brighter Choice chose to enroll at West Hill.

Last year approximately 355 Albany students were enrolled at the Brighter Choice middle schools in grades 5-8. How many have enrolled at West Hill so far? Because the new school will only be for grades 6-8, if every eligible student enrolled, total enrollment would be approximately 266 (assuming even distribution of students at each grade level.)

At the August 20 Board meeting, Dr. V. said we had 220 students enrolled. A recent memo dated August 28 doesn't help clear things up: Page 1 says 172 students "as of this writing;" page 2 says 273 students "as of this writing;" page 3 says 182 students had enrolled as of August 24. Why are the numbers decreasing as we get closer to the beginning of the school year? And how can school staff adequately prepare for the first day of school if they don't know how many people will be there?

Low Graduation Rate Likely Again Next Year, Says Albany Principal

New high school principal Dale Getto says even in the best-case scenario, next year’s graduation rate likely won’t be above 52%.

This news, along with an interesting breakdown of how students fall off the path to success, is buried deep on page 68 of the contracts to be approved at Thursday’s Board meeting: “The cohort [students that entered 9th grade in fall 2012] is made up of 625 individuals. 79 students have already dropped out of the cohort bringing the rate to 87.4%. There are 103 students “off grade”, still in 9th and 10th; highly unlikely to accumulate the proper number of credits. Subtracting them brings the rate to 70.88%. There are 63 students that have less than 14 credits at the end of this year [i.e., 11th graders who won’t move up to 12th grade in September]; dropping the maximum graduation rate to 60.80%. Of those graduating, there are still 52 students that need 4 or 5 exams to graduate [out of a total of 5 Regents exams required, which is to say they have only passed one, or none, so far]. Removing them brings the total to 328 or a 52.4% graduation rate. There are 40 students who need three exams to graduate, and if they do not pass, the graduation rate will be 46.08%. The CIO believes that in June 2016 the rate will be somewhere between 46 and 52%.”

I’m impressed that there are 218 students that haven’t been able to pass their classes or Regents exams, but still haven’t dropped out. Are these 218 students still coming to school regularly or are they technically enrolled but typically absent? If they are still showing up for school every day, they clearly have determination and a desire to learn despite their past struggles. What is the high school doing to help them?

Most Professional Development Is a Waste of Money, According to Teachers

 From the article: “We are not approaching this in a very smart way. We’re basically throwing a lot of things against the wall and not even looking to see whether it works.”

Sounds awfully familiar. The only measure Albany uses to determine if its studio classroom professional development is successful is whether the teachers who attended thought the session was useful - based on comment cards filled out immediately after each session, before teachers even have a chance to try out any of the techniques they were taught.