Tag Archives: Sybil Knight-Burney

Harrisburg Schools Fail to Meet Performance Goals

November 6, 2014 | by Lawrance Binda and Paul Barker

Harrisburg public schools failed by a wide margin to meet academic standards set by the state-appointed chief recovery officer, according to state Department of Education academic performance measures released today.

None of Harrisburg’s schools met the academic goals for the 2013-14 school year set forth by Chief Recovery Officer Gene Veno in an April 2014 amendment to his recovery plan for the district. Several schools fell short of these goals by about 20 points.

The state’s “Building Level Academic Score” uses a 100-point scale to measure school performance. Much like a student report card, a score above 90 is considered excellent, while a score below 70 is deemed poor.

The following list shows each school’s performance, followed by a number in parenthesis that includes Veno’s goals for each school for the 2013-14 academic year.

Math Science Academy: 75.9 (94.2)
Harrisburg High School SciTech Campus: 63.8 (72.3)
Foose School: 57.8 (59.8)
Scott School: 57 (62.4)
Melrose School: 53.1 (69.7)
Downey School: 49.4 (67.5)
Benjamin Franklin School: 44.6 (63.5)
Marshall School: 44.4 (61.4)
Rowland School: 42.6 (56.5)
Harrisburg High School: 39.7 (57.6)
Camp Curtin School: 39.6 (60.3)

Scores are based upon several measures, including students’ performance on state standardized tests, improvement since the previous year, graduation and attendance rates and, in the case of high school students, SAT and ACT scores.

School Superintendent Sybil Knight-Burney indicated during a press conference in September that scores would be poor, as she described the results as “very disappointing.” However, at the time, it was not known just how poorly the city’s schools had performed, as the state prohibited the release of the results until today.

Not only did school scores fail to meet Veno’s goals, many scores declined significantly from the prior year, before the recovery plan was put into effect.

Math Science Academy suffered perhaps the greatest year-to-year decline. During the 2012-13 school year, the school received an excellent score of 92, which last year fell to 75.9.

Making the Grade: For years, Math Science Academy has been the gem of the Harrisburg school system. Can its success be replicated?

October 30, 2014 | by Paul Barker

Over the summer, to create a sense of unity in the Math Science expansion, school leaders adopted a new motto: “Together We Achieve.”

These days, if you’re a public school in Pennsylvania, your worth is measured in colored shapes—squares, triangles and stars. Of these, the triangles come with the most drama. Either they’re pointing upwards and blue, which means you’re succeeding, or they’re pointing downwards and are yellow or red, depending on the depth of your failure. A square is usually indifferent, referring to missing data, unless it’s green, in which case you’re middle-of-the-road—an assessment that, in a world obsessed with constant improvement, is its own quiet condemnation. Stars, which indicate surpassing perfection, are rare.

The shapes correspond to test scores and other measures released by the state Department of Education under a program that began last year. Harrisburg’s public schools got their first set of shapes in the fall of 2013—mostly triangles, of the yellow and red, downward-pointing variety. But one school, the Math Science Academy, stood apart. In the box for its overall performance stood an upright triangle, bold and blue, corresponding to a score of 92.2 out of 100—a rating on par with the best public schools in the commonwealth.

The Math Science Academy opened in 1994 as a specialized program where gifted students in the district could excel. In its first year, MSA enrolled one section each of the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grades. At the core of its philosophy were two main ideas: one, that teachers should work as a team, coordinating lesson plans and student interventions; and two, that the teaching should be “project-based,” with hands-on assignments, often involving multiple grade levels. The program also featured frequent field trips, a “looping” model under which teachers taught the same students for two years, and, as the school’s name suggests, a curricular focus on science and mathematics.

Requirements for entry to MSA were rigorous. Teachers, parents and students who sought to join were all interviewed. Teachers, in particular, faced higher than usual expectations. Maureen Dunbar, who has taught in the district since 1985 and who joined MSA in its second year, recalled that the administrator who launched the program, Dr. Gail Edwards, had a message for teachers who applied: “This is going to be taxing on you. You have to put in extra time.”

This year, MSA became the subject of an ambitious experiment. Throughout the school’s existence, there have been leaders in the district who felt an MSA-quality education ought to be made available district-wide. At the start of last school year, the district shuffled its building plans, breaking up some of the K-to-8 “neighborhood” schools. As part of the transition, MSA was moved from its previous home, at the Ben Franklin School on N. 6^th Street, to the Marshall School on Hale Avenue, behind the high school. Meanwhile, Marshall, formerly a K-to-8 school, was converted to a 5-to-8 middle school “academy,” much like MSA.

Last spring, the district began implementing a plan to merge the schools. The short-term goal is to double MSA’s size from 200 to 400 students; if the expansion is successful, it’s possible the MSA program, or something like it, will be brought to additional schools. But the plan also raises uncomfortable questions. MSA has always been predicated on high standards for admission. Are there sufficient numbers of so-called “gifted” students in the district to fill an expanded program? Or will MSA’s expansion simply mean its excellence gets diluted?

The district is also carrying out the plan in a period of intense scrutiny. In late 2012, the state declared the district to be financially distressed. Under the auspices of a law passed earlier in the year, the education secretary appointed Gene Veno, a private consultant and the CEO of a trade group for public insurance adjusters, as its chief recovery officer. His primary task was to get the district’s finances in order, but his recovery plan, released in April 2013, also spelled out benchmarks for academic improvement. If the district doesn’t meet them, it might be placed under even deeper state control.

In this environment, asking whether MSA’s success can be replicated is really a way of asking a larger question: can the district be saved?

Maureen Dunbar teaches fifth-grade math at MSA. A native of upstate New York, she has short hair, glinting eyes and an unharried air. The first time I met her, I was escorted to her classroom at Marshall, where her fifth-graders were working quietly. She was content to do the interview there, at the front of the classroom, prompting me in a whisper to start asking my questions.

As a college student, Dunbar wavered between art, mathematics and teaching. After deciding she couldn’t make art into a profession, she settled on math and education. Her first teaching job was in San Antonio, Texas, as a volunteer teacher at a private school. After two years there, she moved to a public middle school. “I loved it,” she said. “I found from that early age of my teaching career that you could see the camaraderie between the staff members and even the administration, and what they did for the kids, and how the kids responded to it.” In 1985, Dunbar returned to the East Coast, taking a job in Harrisburg, and she has remained in the district since.

When MSA opened, the city had one large middle school teaching the sixth through eighth grades. The program was originally located there, but it quickly became a nomad within the district. Dunbar joined the team in its second year, when it was moved to a school called Riverside. (Both the old middle school building and Riverside are gone now.) That year, its enrollment was doubled to 200 students, in two sections each of the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grades. The following year, it lost favor with the superintendent and was disbanded. When it reopened, a few years later, it moved from one school building to another, until finally landing at Ben Franklin, where it remained until the move to Marshall last year.

All of this movement may have contributed to MSA’s sense of itself as off-beat, doing its own thing—as being what a former MSA teacher, Judd Pittman, described to me as “a school within a school.” Pittman, who has a blond buzz cut and a toothy grin, joined MSA after one year at the high school, where his methods, as he put it, were “too free-flow.” The principal walked into his classroom one day to find his students kneeling over a blue tarp, searching for life forms in a mound of dirt he’d brought in. But his style was a perfect fit for MSA, where, as he put it, the kids were “just old enough and just quirky enough” to get on board.

In the summer of 2013, the superintendent, Dr. Sybil Knight-Burney, and the assistant superintendent, Barbara Hasan, spoke with Dunbar, Pittman and a third MSA teacher, Kelli Recher, about expanding the school. It wasn’t the first time the idea of duplicating the program had come up. A year or two before, the principal at Ben Franklin had asked the same three teachers to write up a draft document outlining the school’s policies and methods. They prepared a write-up, but, according to Pittman, the district never did anything with it. Now, however, with the upcoming move to Marshall, the district was revisiting the idea of expansion.

In one sense, expanding MSA was about providing equal opportunities. If some students in the district enjoyed hands-on projects and field trips, shouldn’t they all? But the motivation may also have had a harder edge. Both Pittman and Dunbar spoke of perceptions that the MSA program was “elitist”—that it skimmed the best students from the district and set them apart from the rest. “There was something in the community that wasn’t fond of it,” Pittman said. “There’s a view that every child should have an opportunity for everything.” In addition, the prevailing atmosphere in public education, in which schools and teachers are measured by students’ test scores, tended to breed resentment for a program that attracted the district’s top performers.

In a way, however, the aura of elitism was a sign of the program’s success. At one point, Dunbar told me that she embraces the “elitist” label. “I think they should believe in elitism, actually,” she said. “Why not? There’s a Harvard. There’s great basketball teams. They don’t take every kid that tries out for the team.” The idea that some students could be turned away was part of what gave the program its prestige. Pittman, too, invoked the Ivy League analogy. “I was in the top 10 of my graduating class, but even then I’d never get to go to Harvard,” he said. “Does that mean there shouldn’t be any Harvard?”

Throughout last year, Marshall and MSA operated side by side in the same building. They had different teachers and different school colors, and they ate lunch separately. Banners for each year MSA had made “adequate yearly progress”—a federal accountability measure, which no other Harrisburg school met in 2012—hung in the MSA hallway. “It created a natural divide,” Ryan Jones, a former English teacher at Marshall who was dean of students last year, told me. MSA also had a tradition of purchasing school T-shirts, which students wore on certain days. “Marshall kids didn’t have them, and they’d kind of point that out. Like, ‘Why do they get to do that?’” he said.

Jones, who was promoted to assistant principal this year, gave me a tour of the Marshall building during a visit in early September. A former employee of a record label, where he planned tours for musicians, Jones has pomaded brown hair and a laid-back, raffish manner. On his arm, exposed by a rolled-up sleeve, is a tattoo of a Tarot card, labeled “Le Fou.”

Jones explained how, before the start of this school year, he and the principal, Marisol Craig, formed a leadership team to help brainstorm how to make the building more unified. Under the expansion plan, the programs were combined over the summer into one school, Marshall Math Science Academy. “We broke everything down,” Jones said. They combined Marshall’s colors, yellow and black, with MSA’s green and silver, arriving at a new color scheme of yellow and green. Out of Marshall’s prior mascot, the Lions, they fashioned a new mascot, the Pride: “We’re multiple lions, we’re coming together,” Jones said.

They also worked to create a sense of unity among teachers. The day of my first visit, a staff member in the IT department was putting some final touches on a short video that Craig and Jones had directed. Set to Katy Perry’s “Roar,” the video traces a path through the school’s hallways, passing a succession of teachers who each hold up signs explaining who they are, what they teach, and how long they’ve been in the district. It concludes with a shot of the entire staff in school colors posing in front of the building, shouting Marshall Math Science Academy’s new motto in unison: “Together We Achieve.” Watching it, Craig and Jones exchanged a high-five.

After the video, we sat down in a conference room. Craig, a tall woman with light brown hair and a calmly enthusiastic bearing, has worked for the district since 2003 and was most recently a principal at the high school. She became Marshall’s principal in 2013, overseeing its first year as a fifth-through-eighth academy with the MSA program in its halls. She began by saying she was happy to have me there, because she felt the MSA expansion was a positive step for the district. “We always invite media and community folks to come in and kind of see what we’re doing, but it seems like they never come unless we have an issue,” she said.

Cosmetic changes, like the ones made to the mascot and colors, are important to the school’s image and morale. But the most substantive aspects of the expansion relate to academics, where the hopes and challenges inherent in the plan come more clearly into view. In the past, students applying to MSA were scored on a rubric that takes into account test scores, grades, recommendations from past teachers and an in-person interview. According to Craig, there were “more kids out there” in the district ready for the rigors of MSA. “It’s really hard when you’ve got one slot left, and you have to choose between 10 kids,” she said. Doubling the program would “provide the same opportunities for more students who could meet the same criteria.”

The reality, though, is more complicated. Starting last spring, all of the Marshall students went through the traditional MSA application process, but only some scored high enough on the rubric to be admitted. Over the summer, the school sent out copies of an unusually gentle rejection letter. It explained that, though the student hadn’t been admitted to MSA, he or she would still be invited back to the building next year, and would be able to partake in all the same opportunities as the regular MSA students. The result is that this year, “Marshall Math Science,” though portrayed on the district website as a single school, is actually two schools on paper: Marshall, with two sections each in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades, and Math Science, with two sections in each of these grades and four in fifth.

Partly, the school retained Marshall students to appease parents, for many of whom Marshall was the neighborhood school where they had sent their children for years. When Craig and Jones announced they could stay, the parents “were like, ‘Oh, my God. Thank you, thank you, thank you,’” Craig said. Under the expansion plan, the Marshall school will be “phased out” over the next three years, as the Marshall classrooms age out of the program.

But the decision also foreshadowed a challenge that will face the school in years to come—and one that has implications for the school’s state rating. Contrary to what Craig suggested, at least in the initial year of expansion, the district simply didn’t have enough students who could “meet the same criteria” as the smaller MSA core. Up until last year, the minimum score on the rubric for admitted MSA students was 80 out of 100. This year, in order to fill the available MSA classrooms, the school had to lower the threshold to 70—and that’s for students admitted to the program, not the ones enrolled as Marshall students, who scored even lower.

Dunbar, acknowledging the change, was not particularly dismayed. Referring to the expanded fifth-grade class, she said, “Are all 100 of our kids at the level our 50 were? No. But we still have enough that there’s more than the 50. It’s not like there’s 50 great and 50 that are not great.”

Additionally, for students who are new to the program, its reputation can be a powerful incentive to better performance. Craig told the story of one child who struggled as a Marshall student all through last year. As a student at Marshall Math Science, however, he’s flourishing. “He’s like, ‘Mom, I gotta be straight, because I’m Math Science,’” she said. “I gotta do this, and I need you to be doing this for me, and getting me here on time, because I can’t be late for school.”

Last summer, the Harrisburg school district relocated its offices from Front to State Street, inside what used to be the Lincoln School. On the morning of Friday, Sept. 26, district leaders gathered for a press conference in the building’s gymnasium, which has served as a venue for school board and other public meetings since the move. They sat at a long table at half court, basketball hoops and steel mesh-covered windows to either side and a projection screen on a dark stage behind them.

The purpose of the conference was to discuss district schools’ scores on last year’s state assessments, which the state originally planned to release to the public on Sept. 24. In the end, the release was delayed, but district officials, who had seen the scores privately, went ahead with the conference anyway. At least in theory, a great deal was riding on the results. In an update to his recovery plan last April, Veno set new goals for improving district test scores. Some people, most notably Harrisburg’s new mayor, Eric Papenfuse, criticized the targets as too low, but they were still ambitious. Veno wanted to see average gains in proficiency of around 4 percent in each subject area tested.

Superintendent Knight-Burney began the Friday conference by saying there was “no good way to share bad news.” Though she was forbidden from revealing the actual scores, she could describe them in general terms; the overall results, she said, were “very disappointing.” As she later confirmed to reporters, it wasn’t just that district test scores had failed to climb as high as Veno wanted—they had actually fallen from the previous year.

Then the conference took a curious turn. Despite Knight-Burney’s disappointment, neither she nor the other district officials showed any urgency about what the low scores might mean. In fact, Knight-Burney said, the results were “not unexpected.” The scores were explained, she said, by Harrisburg’s extraordinary rate of turnover in recent years. (According to figures later provided by the district’s public relations officer, since the 2012-13 school year, 247 teachers and 28 administrators have either resigned, retired or been furloughed.)

The conference illustrated the peculiar disconnect between the things district leaders identify as key to their success and the steps they actually take to achieve them. At no point did Veno, in releasing his updated benchmarks, couch them with the anticipation that the district would perform poorly because of high turnover. Nor did his plan take any steps to retain or identify top teachers. (To the contrary, the likely explanation for at least some of the turnover was the 5-percent pay cut for teachers implemented in his plan.) The district mentioned the turnover rate as an excuse for past scores, but it ought to have been a warning. However impressive the recovery initiatives look on paper, they are meaningless without skilled teachers to implement them.

This is particularly obvious at MSA, whose curriculum depends heavily on exceptionally committed teachers. Judd Pittman, the former MSA teacher, told me that, during his seven years at the school, it “defined” him. One Saturday per month, he led students on what were called “inner-city outings”—outdoor excursions like hiking or canoeing, often funded by donations or grants that the teachers pursued themselves. “Working at MSA, it’s not a job, it’s a lifestyle,” he said. “The academy is a family.” Last spring, after his wife gave birth, a group of former students showed up on his doorstep in Midtown, saying “We heard Mr. Pittman has a little Pittman.”

On a follow-up visit to the school, I met Sue Gibson, a Marshall teacher who has been with the district for 27 years. Last year, when MSA entered the building, Gibson resented it. “There was a lot of jealousy from the other teachers,” she said. When the school announced the expansion, which initially seemed like it would exclude her Marshall students, “My feet were stomped so far down on the ground you couldn’t see them,” she said. “‘Cause I was pissed. I’m like, ‘If I’m not part of Math Science Academy, I don’t want to play.’”

When she learned about the plan for the combined Marshall Math Science Academy, however, her attitude changed. The message to her, as a teacher of the “Marshall” sections of sixth grade, was “Get your butts down here, you are a part of Math Science Academy. You may not have the top-level children, but you have children here who want to learn.” In her first week, she stayed an extra two hours after school, working with the fifth- and sixth-grade team on lesson plans and objectives. “We literally have everything already planned til May. Everything! Projects, lessons, things you wanna focus on for the whole year.” Where she used to be out the door at 3:36, now she routinely stayed til 5 or 6. “It’s the best year I’ve ever had,” she said.

Characteristics like these may be less quantifiable than test scores, but they can still be detected and, in some rough way, measured. At one point I asked Dunbar about MSA’s identity. In addition to having a new principal and assistant principal, it had lost a core teacher in Pittman, who left to enroll in a professional development program through the state. Was the MSA culture still intact after all the changes? “No,” she said. But, she thought, it could be built back in the next four years. “I also think that the kids rise, if the expectations are up there,” she said.

The great thing about Math Science, she said, was the feeling of collaborating as a team. “You build it with the teachers, with each other, and then the kids build it, and the kids build it with the teachers. And it goes from fifth grade to sixth grade to seventh grade to eighth grade.” When her students go on to high school, she said, their new teachers report back to her: “All of your kids aren’t the smartest,” they tell her. “But they know how to work together.”

School Board Awards $63,000 Contract To Retired Assistant Superintendent

October 21, 2014 | by Paul Barker

The Harrisburg school board on Monday night awarded a $63,750 contract to Barbara Hasan, a former assistant superintendent who retired from the district in June, for services as a principal mentor, a position newly created this year.

The contract, under which Hasan will be paid $70 per hour, will be for 25 hours per week of work and is effective Oct. 21 of this year through June 30, 2015.

Two other principal mentors, Lori Dixon and Joy MacKenzie, were hired at last month’s regular board meeting on Sept. 15. Their contracts are for the same hourly rate of $70 per hour, but for a smaller number of hours than Hasan’s, with Dixon slated to work 25 hours per month and MacKenzie 20 hours per month.

Hasan’s contract is between the school district and Hasan Educational Consultant, a firm founded on Sept. 18, according to a business filing with the Pennsylvania state department. The filing lists Hasan as the business owner.

Carol Kaufmann, the school board secretary, said at Monday night’s board meeting that this is the first time the school district has hired principal mentors.

The board agendas for Sept. 15 and Oct. 20 describe the position somewhat differently, with the September agenda referring to “principal mentor services” and the October agenda, which describes Hasan’s larger contract, referring to “support, evaluation, and guidance to Principals assigned by the Superintendent or designee.”

Kaufmann, however, said the jobs had the “same focus.”

After Monday’s board meeting, Superintendent Sybil Knight-Burney said she was “excited” about having the principal mentors, who she said would help principals “in content areas as well as data analysis.”

All three mentors are past principals themselves, said Knight-Burney, herself a past principal. “Being principal sometimes is a very lonely place,” she added. “Sometimes they need that support.”

Hasan, who retired on June 27, has several family members currently employed in the district. Her daughter, Aqila, was promoted in July from high school math teacher to assistant principal at SciTech, a position newly created this year at an annual salary of $87,624.

Another daughter, Ayesha, is a first-grade teacher at Foose, while a son, Bilal, is the district’s federal programs coordinator.

The Harrisburg school district currently employs 10 principals and at least as many assistant principals in its 10 schools, according to individual school pages on the district website.

June News Digest

June 29, 2014 | by Lawrance Binda

School Tax Unchanged

The Harrisburg school board last month kept the school portion of the local property tax unchanged, as it reported a rare budget surplus.

The board unanimously passed a $133 million budget for the 2014-15 school year that retains the tax rate at 27.92 mills. School property tax bills will go out this month.

Recently, school property taxes have increased each year, as the board has struggled with recurring budget deficits. However, Gene Veno, the district’s chief recovery officer, announced last year that a financial analysis had discovered an unexpected surplus of about $12 million.

In addition, the board announced last month that it would reinstitute full-day kindergarten for the coming school year. Two years ago, kindergarten was cut to half-day after being threatened with elimination entirely.

The board also reappointed school Superintendent Sybil Knight-Burney to another four-year term. Her base salary will remain unchanged at $160,000 per year.

Lastly, the board unanimously denied the revised application of Key Charter School, which had hoped to open in the former site of Bishop McDevitt High School at 2200 Market St. in Harrisburg. The board cited numerous deficiencies in the application in such areas as curriculum, student assessment and staff training.

Zoning Code Effort Revived

Harrisburg has revived a long-dormant effort to re-haul its aged zoning code, with a City Council vote expected early this month.

Council last month began discussing the code in a committee meeting, after which two public input sessions were held. A final vote on the new code is slated for the July 8 legislative session.

The effort to revamp the city’s zoning code began about five years ago to try to streamline and simplify a code that had become overly complex and even obsolete, according to the city. Over the years, the code, originally passed in 1950, had grown to include 27 base zoning districts and six overlay districts. The new code includes just nine base districts and four overlay districts.

After a year of work by Harrisburg’s planning bureau, City Council introduced the new code in 2010, but never acted on it. The code, with just a few adjustments, now has been reintroduced as the 2014 Zoning Code draft.

In a separate effort, Harrisburg also is in the process of developing a comprehensive plan for the city.

Task Force Meets

The Harrisburg Strong Task Force has held two meetings so the public could comment on a future nonprofit that will decide how to spend the city’s dedicated infrastructure and economic development funds.

The 10-member task force met twice at the Greater Harrisburg Area YWCA, briefing the public on its mission and asking for input. Ideas from the audience ranged from fixing sinkholes to fighting blight to helping employ youth.

The task force now will draft a governance structure and action plan that will guide the work of a future non-profit corporation that will disburse money earmarked exclusively for improving Harrisburg’s infrastructure and boosting its economic development efforts.

The Harrisburg Strong financial recovery plan created two funding silos, each for $6 million, for these two purposes. The future nonprofit will allocate money after judging the worthiness of projects and their ability to raise matching funds.

311 Number Confirmed

Harrisburg is on track to have a new 311 information system for non-emergency government services, thanks to the state Public Utility Commission’s approval of a city petition to administer the three-digit dialing code.

The 311 code, which will be restricted to Harrisburg residents, will connect callers to a centralized, automated directory of city services. Under the existing system, residents either would need to look up the numbers of individual city departments or, as often happened, would simply dial 911 with non-emergency calls, tying up the county’s dispatchers.

Mayor Eric Papenfuse recommended the adoption of a 311 system during his campaign for office last year. In March, the city submitted a petition to the PUC, which announced its approval following a 5-0 vote by its commissioners.

Papenfuse added that certain infrastructure upgrades necessary for running the system were well underway. In the next few months, the city expects to replace its phone system with one that will be able to accommodate 311 calls.

Summer in the City

The Dauphin County regional tourism bureau has budgeted close to $100,000 for Harrisburg’s “Summer in the City” promotional campaign, an effort to market the city’s summer cultural offerings on billboards, buses and the Web, city officials announced Friday.

The campaign highlights such events as the “Harrisburg Independence Weekend Walkaround,” a three-day program of festivities scheduled for the July 4 weekend. The full program, which can be viewed at Stayandplayhbg.com, includes free concerts in city parks, “family fun” festivals, a martial arts tournament and a reading of the Declaration of Independence.

The campaign will be promoted on area billboards as well as on each bus in Capital Area Transit’s 80-bus fleet. The Hershey Harrisburg Regional Visitors Bureau hired Top Flight Media, an advertising agency headquartered on Lindle Road in Swatara Township, to design the campaign.

Funding for the marketing campaign comes from the county’s hotel tax, a levy on overnight lodging that was raised from 3 percent to 5 percent in 2008. According to county ordinance, a portion of hotel tax revenues—about 13 percent—is to be spent on “appropriate and reasonable marketing and promotional expenses” for tourism in Harrisburg.

New Manager for Market

The Broad Street Market last month hired Ashlee O. Dugan, a member of the market corporation’s board and the founder of a local food-recovery organization, as its newest full-time interim manager.

She replaced Len Cobosco from the Camp Hill accounting firm Carey Associates, who came on as an interim manager in June 2013. Cobosco will remain employed by the market as a part-time financial manager, board members confirmed.

Officially, the position is transitional, since the market’s operations and organizational structure are still under review by the Broad Street Market Task Force. The market may open the search for a permanent manager again following the task force’s recommendations, Dugan said.

Amy Hill, a volunteer board member doing public relations outreach for the market, noted that Dugan has a “legacy connection” to the market. Dugan’s great-grandfather, Gilbert S. Miller, operated a butcher stand at the market from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s.

Previously, Dugan served as a membership and marketing coordinator at the Pennsylvania Downtown Center. She also is the founder of The Greenhouse, an organization with the goal of locating and saving food that might otherwise go to waste.

The Broad Street Market has gone through numerous managers over the past few years. For more about its history and the efforts of the task force, read our feature in the April issue (“A Simple Plan,” p.14).

Fire Bureau Gets FEMA Grant

The Harrisburg Bureau of Fire last month received a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Assistance to Firefighters Grant of $114,840.

The grant will provide for advanced training and education of firefighters and fire officers in the bureau, said Acting Chief Brian Enterline.

“This grant was successfully obtained due to the collaboration and dedication of the city’s grants manager and some young brilliant firefighters and fire officers that are eager to rebuild the Bureau of Fire,” Enterline said.

He added that, over the coming year, firefighters and fire officers will attend classes that offer training and education in areas such as technical rescue, nationally certified fire officer and firefighter safety.

“These classes are essential for keeping our firefighters safe and expanding their knowledge in many aspects of firefighting,” Enterline stated.

The primary goal of the grant is to meet the emergency response needs of fire departments and nonaffiliated emergency medical service organizations. Since 2001, the grant has helped firefighters and other first responders obtain needed equipment, protective gear, emergency vehicles, training and other resources to help protect the public and emergency personnel from fire and related hazards.

Changing Hands

Adrian St., 2474: M. & B. Sumy to M. Jones, $58,000

Allison Ct., 6: T. Pham to 2013 M&M Real Estate Fund LLC, $38,000

Benton St., 600: A. Allegrini c/o J. Chubb to T. Griffin, $114,900

Benton St., 631: Fannie Mae to PA Deals LLC, $50,000

Berryhill St., 2306: T. Vo to Jiang Brothers Realty LLC, $40,000

Berryhill St., 2321: R. & L. Mason to L. Chen, $270,000

Berryhill St., 2437: J. Howarth to C. Still, $54,000

Briggs St., 231: J. Theurer et al to C. Natcher & J. McCadney, $92,500

Brook St., 346: Kirsch & Burns LLC to LMK Properties LLC, $31,200

Chestnut St., 2114: T. Cubitt to S. Felmlee & R. Church, $169,000

Duke St., 2433: P. Bui to 2013 Central PA Real Estate Fund LLC, $45,000

Duke St., 2622: PI Capitol LLC & J. Pierce to J. Conjar, $116,000

Forster St., 123: M. Warden to Heit Holdings LLC, $345,000

Forster St., 1815: Trusted Source Capital LLC to Blackscotch LLC, $30,000

Fulton St., 1705: Cartus Financial Corp. to R. Dickinson, $125,000

Green St., 1400: T. Wiestling to P. Misivich, $119,000

Green St., 1928: R. Riley & K. Stutzman to M. & S. Young, $205,000

Green St., 2223: C. Barner to J. & B. Readinger, $50,000

Harris St., 212: E. McKee to R. Evanchak, $136,000

Herr St., 1933: J. Kim to Bajwa & Rana LLC, $250,000

Hoffman St., 3100: B. Cates to A. Bhatti, $154,900

Hummel St., 203: Vitosh Investment Group LLC to Brethren Housing Assoc., $73,000

Kelker St., 218: Integrity Bank to C. Proctor & J. Mesa Cruz, $114,500

Kensington St., 2364: PA Deals LLC to M. & D. Graeff, $68,000

Kensington St., 2422: L. Schroeder to PA Deals LLC, $43,500

Locust St., 110 & 112: Mid Penn Bank to Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, $140,000

Midland Rd., 2401: D. Hollinger to J. & L. Arnold, $155,000

N. 2^nd St., 2437: D. Powell to C. Dove, $41,500

N. 4^th St., 2144: Kirsch & Burns LLC to LMK Properties LLC, $33,967

N. 14^th St., 322: D. Boyle to G. Lopez Figueroa, $30,000

N. 18^th St., 800, 1716 North St., 1717 North St., 1820 North St., 1913 Forster St. & 1915 Briggs St.: Shokes Enterprises LLC to JDP 2014 LLC, $499,000

N. Front St., 17: Association of County Commissioners to Harrisburg Building & Grounds Co., $525,000

Reily St., 219: PA Deals LLC to S. Briffa, $109,900

Royal Terr., 135: PA Deals LLC to S. Maurer, $38,500

S. 14^th St., 400: J. Rodriguez to R. Rodriguez, $40,000

S. 18^th St., 31 & 33: N. Grove to Capital City Investment Properties LLC, $67,500

S. 25^th St., 615: R. Pursel & Keystone Guardianship Services to 2013 Central PA Real Estate Fund LLC, $42,250

S. Cameron St., 443: P. Dobson to F. & D. Miller, $100,000

S. Cameron St., 1607: J. & R. Mallonee to I. Claytor, $61,900

S. Cameron St., 1660: Bemar Enterprises to D&F Complex on Cameron LP, $281,000

State St., 1935 & 1937 State St.: W. Kyles to C. Johnson, $112,000

Susquehanna St., 2142: FTM Properties LLC to A. Moore, $88,000

Verbeke St., 112: Random Properties Acquisition Corp. III to PA Deals LLC, $46,250

Verbeke St., 340: 44 Breed Street Nominee Trust & F. Ciccone to Historic Holdings LLC, $380,000

Vernon St., 1553: D. Boyle to J. Rodriguez, $30,000

Washington St., 111: Sirva Relocation Credit LLC to C. Altman, $129,000

Harrisburg property sales for May 2014, greater than $30,000. Source: Dauphin County. Data is assumed to be accurate.

Cyber-Minded: Online education is transforming the way public school is taught, including in Harrisburg.

October 29, 2013 | by Paul Barker

Jada Rosario

On a typical school day last year, Jada Rosario got up, ate breakfast and brushed her teeth. Then, she logged on to her computer—“You know, still in my pajamas”—and started taking classes. Around noon, she would break for lunch, and maybe watch a movie. Most days, she wrapped up her studies by early afternoon.

Rosario, who graduated high school in the spring, was a member of Cougar Academy, a virtual school within the Harrisburg School District. Cougar students work remotely, using software that delivers their coursework and quizzes, and they can phone in or visit the school’s drop-in center if they require personal instruction. The district provides laptops and printers to participants and reimburses families for Internet costs. When the school first opened, in the fall of last year, more than 100 students enrolled.

Rosario, a cheerful, articulate young woman who wants to become a paralegal, like her mother, signed up for Cougar in the hopes of bringing up her grades. At first, she thought online learning would be boring, but soon she settled in. She raced through her English lessons, doing “up to, like, 10 lessons” each morning, and saved math for evenings or the end of the week, when her mother could assist her. Around Christmas, she had the option of returning to traditional school, but she declined.

“I was more focused,” she said. “I wasn’t in the halls, playing around like I was in school.” She wound up finishing her coursework early, and graduated May 26.

Rosario’s experience in Cougar Academy, as it happens, was rare. Of the total number of students who enrolled, only 21 were left by the end of the year. More than 80 were removed because of poor grades or low attendance, and, of the ones who remained, 10 were failing. In the final tally, a mere nine students of the initial 103 passed the majority of their classes.

Part of the trouble was the freedom. Allison Burris, a teacher who helped direct Cougar Academy last year, said that students struggled to complete assignments on time, often letting coursework pile up until the last minute. “You had to log in by 2 p.m. every day,” Burris said. “You could ‘log in’ at 2, but do all of the work on the weekend. You could see the influx of work at the end of each marking period.” In addition, about half of the students were “re-entry,” meaning they had previously dropped out or gotten into trouble with the law, making them risky candidates for less supervised study online.

Then there was the problem of the loaned computers. “The risk of borrowing equipment was an issue to me,” Burris told me. “It’s a $300 charge to us, and if it goes missing, it’s supposed to be the student who pays, but they just don’t pay it. So we absorb that cost.” Of all the equipment loaned last year, Burris said, about half was returned with something missing or damaged. She worried that, in the case of most students, the program was a “waste of money.”

Harrisburg’s in-district cyber-education program is not the only online school whose performance has been called into question. Last May, the National Education Policy Center, a University of Colorado think tank, published “Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2013,” a scathing survey of 311 online schools across the country. “Despite virtual schools’ track record of students falling behind their peers academically or dropping out at higher rates,” the study’s authors wrote, “states and districts continue to expand virtual schools and online offerings to their students, at high cost to taxpayers.”

Indeed, Cougar Academy is slated to expand. In January, the district will pilot an option for full-time online study for the fifth through eighth grades. In 2015, the program will be available from the first grade onwards. Gene Veno, who was appointed Chief Recovery Officer for the district in December of last year, has included the expansion of cyber offerings as part of his recovery plan.

“In terms of meeting the needs of parents and students, the predominance of cyber enrollment presents a competitive opportunity for the Harrisburg School District,” Veno wrote. “The issue and challenge for the District is to understand the goals and objectives of the students enrolled in cyber schools, and to present a District-operated alternative that meets or exceeds the performance of the non-District cyber schools.”

Why would Harrisburg expand a program that had achieved such dubious results? I put this question, in various ways, to a number of education professionals inside and outside the district. As it turns out, the answer has little to do with whether the instruction is working, and everything to do with what it costs.

*****

The Harrisburg School District, like the city itself, projects an agitated mood. Its many efforts at reform and renewal are shadowed by recurrent crisis. Every year for the past 10 years, one or more of its schools has failed to meet state goals for attendance and academic performance. In 2010 and 2011, the district closed five schools and eliminated almost 400 positions. Enrollment, which was just under 9,000 in 2005, had fallen to 6,340 by the end of last year.

In spite of the contraction, the district continues to face intense budgetary pressures. Its expenditures last year were approximately $137 million—about the same as they were in 2011, before the closures. The recovery plan, extrapolating from recent trends, projects that costs will increase to $174 million by 2018. Among the factors the plan cites in its projection are a prolonged spike in health care and energy costs and an increase in the district’s annual debt service. Even in the wake of events like the one in October, when the chief financial officer discovered an unaccounted $11.5 million in funds, no one denies that the district is en route to debilitating shortfalls. “The sum of all the assumptions produces a grim picture,” Veno’s plan says. “If the District does nothing, it will be out of business.”

An increasingly significant source of expense is the exodus of district students to charter schools. Last year, 672 Harrisburg students enrolled in charter school, more than double the number in 2010. Of these, about 70 percent have opted for a “cyber charter”—that is, a school where courses are provided mostly or entirely online.

The cost to the district is substantial. In Pennsylvania, lawmakers have prioritized families’ freedom of choice, providing for tuition-free enrollment at both public and charter schools. To achieve this, the law requires each student’s home district to reimburse the charter school for the cost of the student’s education. The reimbursement amount is determined by a complicated formula and is based on the per-student cost within the district—an amount calculated by taking the district’s annual budget and dividing by the number of students. If the overall number of students declines, the district’s budget is spread over a smaller pool, leading to even higher reimbursements.

In Harrisburg, the effect has been dramatic. According to Tim Eller, at the state Department of Education, Harrisburg’s reimbursement payment for a non-special education student was $9,646 in 2011-12. A year later, it had climbed to $10,804; this year, the payment will be $11,829. (For special education students, the payments are $20,536, $26,311 and $28,473, respectively.) The charge also applies when parents enroll previously homeschooled students directly in a cyber charter, which is a frequent occurrence, given that cyber school is essentially homeschooling with tech support. In the 2012-13 school year, the total cost of charter-school reimbursements for the Harrisburg School District was around $9 million.

Within the district, the financial pressure of cyber-charter enrollment has produced a kind of schizophrenia. Administrators have their doubts about the efficacy of online instruction, but they also know that an in-house cyber option can realize substantial savings. The cost of educating a student at Cougar can be as low as $3,000—almost a fourth of the cost of sending a non-special education student to a cyber school outside the district.

In June, I spoke with the district’s superintendent, Dr. Sybil Knight-Burney, and Mary Lou Sypolt, the coordinator of pupil services, in the district’s administrative offices on Front Street. Initially, when I asked for an overview of Cougar Academy, their comments were positive. But when pressed for measures of success, they struggled to produce meaningful answers. “I’ve seen cases of success, but I don’t have any research,” Sypolt said. Knight-Burney could think of just one example: a girl who had gotten pregnant and used the online courses to catch up on missed work. They began to qualify their assessment. “To be honest with you, when we had about 88 kids starting, we thought this could be successful,” Knight-Burney said. “We learned, ‘Wow, this is very tough coursework.’”

When I observed that other Pennsylvania cyber charters had struggled to produce good results, Knight-Burney suddenly sounded relieved. She, too, had doubts about the benefits of learning online. “Now we’re finding out the reality of it,” she said. “We’re getting kids back and seeing the education’s not working.” She mentioned a phone call her staff had received from some concerned neighbors, who had approached a young woman they’d repeatedly seen wandering the street in the middle of the day. “I’m doing cyber school,” the girl had told them. They asked what time of day she did her online classes. “Oh, whenever I get a chance,” she replied.

Despite these doubts, Sypolt and Knight-Burney still believed the program had potential. Sypolt felt Cougar Academy was the district’s chance to address “cutting-edge technology.” They were also developing criteria to determine whether students were likely to succeed online. But, depending on how strictly the academy screens applicants, it may wind up at cross-purposes with Veno’s plan. If students feel the district is too restrictive, they’ll migrate somewhere else.

*****

When money follows a cyber student out of the district, where does it go? In August, I met with Michael Wilson from Commonwealth Connections Academy, a cyber school with a drop-in center on Reily Street, next to Brothers Pizzeria. The school, which last year enrolled more than 6,600 students from across the state, is one of Pennsylvania’s five largest charters. (Of the remaining four, all but one are cyber charters.) Like many other online schools, Commonwealth Connections is the local branch of a nationwide education provider—in this case, Connections Academy, which has schools in 24 states. On the occasion of the launch of a new curriculum initiative, the academy was hosting an open house.

Wilson greeted me out front, wearing a pinstripe suit and a glossy pink tie. An administrator at the school in 2010 and 2011, he had left briefly to work under the former state education secretary, Ron Tomalis, as a special assistant focusing on the department’s oversight of charter schools. He returned to Commonwealth Connections over the summer, following Gov. Tom Corbett’s abrupt dismissal of Tomalis in May, and now serves as the school’s director of government relations and outreach.

We walked to an empty classroom equipped with a Smart Board and projector, the room still smelling fresh and new. Wilson, an ardent defender of cyber schools, had advised me in an email that there was “so much misunderstanding and misinformation out there” about online education. He told me that a cyber school like Commonwealth Connections was suited to any number of needs. It could free up a student’s schedule to focus on athletics, dance or acting; it could allow them to complete school while holding down a job; it could enable faster study for the gifted. Online learning, he said, was geared to the current generation of young people, whom he described as “digital natives.” “Everything they do is customized, geared towards ‘me,’” he said.

We headed outside, where he showed me one of the school’s signature assets: a mobile classroom, a 38-foot orange bus retrofitted with WiFi, computers and lab equipment, which travels around the region providing cyber students with hands-on activities. On board, surrounded by a multitude of brand-new equipment, I raised the topic of funding for cyber schools.

Wilson has no doubt that charter funding is equitable; if anything, he thinks local districts keep more money than they’re due. When a district reimburses a charter school, he estimated, the formula allows it to retain about 20 percent of tuition costs, “even though they don’t participate in the education of that student.”

“When a student ends up here, there’s a reason they’ve made that choice,” he said. “The bottom line is, they’ve made that choice. It’s not a school that’s entitled to funding. It’s taxpayer dollars.”

I had a similar experience with representatives of Agora Cyber Charter, another of the state’s largest online schools. Kevin Corcoran, Agora’s assistant head of school, told me he saw cyber learning as a viable alternative for “kids who don’t feel satisfied or served” in traditional public school. He invited me to attend Agora’s statewide graduation ceremony, which took place at Hershey Park stadium in June, and where I watched a diverse crowd of evidently proud parents applaud as their sons and daughters accepted their diplomas.

But when it came to questions about funding, it was difficult to get clear answers. Agora, like most cyber charters, contracts with a for-profit service provider, purchasing a bundle of services, including curriculum, tech support and management consulting. I wanted to know what it actually cost Agora to educate an individual student, but, because of the structure of the law’s funding formula, Agora does not valuate its services in this way. Instead, starting from the guaranteed reimbursements from local districts, the school comes up with its per-student purchasing power. Several years ago, Corcoran told me, the average reimbursement was in the “low 7,000s,” but, by last year, it had climbed to between $8,700 and $8,900.

According to Corcoran, the higher the average reimbursement rate, the better the services Agora can purchase for its students. “What school wouldn’t want more money?” he said. But the money also flows to its provider, K12, Inc., where it buys things that aren’t expressly about education. Some of the money is spent on advertising, though the school would not disclose the exact amount, saying only that K12 “provides certain advertising to the school as part of a school management fee.” And some of the money is spent at the statehouse. Nationwide, K12 has spent more than $1.2 million on lobbying over the past 10 years, according to data from FollowthMoney.org. In Pennsylvania, it has employed 11 different lobbyists since 2009.

It’s true that cyber schools can incur substantial costs, especially for special education, and that they must find a way to provide services under fixed revenues, just like a traditional school. Yet a review of the services online schools do provide suggests they’re able to deploy substantial, costly resources. A Connections Academy promotional video, for instance, advertises “more personal attention from teachers,” who “connect with students through phone calls, emails, live online sessions and sometimes even in person.” So, while Harrisburg experiences teacher layoffs and salary cuts, Connections Academy is able to provide one-on-one instruction on demand—and still have money left over to run a first-class website, retrofit a mobile lab and purchase advertising to attract more students to the fold.

*****

Alongside the question of funding, of course, looms a more basic question: can a student be successfully educated online?

During my tour with Wilson, parents and students were attending a workshop on roller coaster design. The workshop was simultaneously a supplement for students and a media event, a not-uncommon combination in the world of cyber charters. Later, the group would have a virtual chat with a Hershey Park engineer, through something known as “LiveLesson technology.”

Towards the back of the room, I met the parents of a high school student who, they said, “loves” his online schooling. “As a teenager, he doesn’t have to get up in the morning,” his father said. After homeschooling their son for years, they had enrolled him in a traditional public school for seventh grade, but found that “disruptive” students in the classroom bothered him. Now that he was able to work at his own pace, he was thriving. In addition, they felt free to “not worry about the scariness of what goes on in high school.” In the school next to where they lived, in Carlisle, “there’s drugs and there’s violence,” they said.

A mother sitting nearby chimed in. She, too, had been delighted with her experience. Her son, who was dyslexic, had struggled in a traditional classroom, but in the cyber school, she said, “he gets to be him. He doesn’t have to bend so much.” Like the other parents, she found it a relief to have options outside the district. “My kids were horrified to go to public. But my son likes this atmosphere. It’s small. It’s private. It’s a chance for him to spread his wings far more than he ever could in a traditional public school.”

A common refrain among cyber-charter advocates is that online study allows students to work “at their own pace.” This can occasionally mean at a pace slower than in a traditional classroom, but most often it implies convenience and speed. One of the Commonwealth Connections parents, for instance, mentioned a nephew who graduated high school a full two years early. “There’s no reason for them to sit around and do nothing,” she said. Another was pleased with the possibility that students primarily interested in science, for example, could accelerate through subjects that held less interest. “They could conceivably have all their liberal arts stuff done before they get to college,” he said.

If that’s true, then perhaps the emergence of cyber school reflects a more radical change: not just in educational technology, but in what is expected of an education. I recalled what Jada Rosario, the Cougar Academy student, repeatedly said about her English courses being “easy.” Over the summer, I had paid a visit to Holly Brzycki, the director of the Capital Area Online Learning Association, or CAOLA, which provided online courses and support staff for Cougar Academy.

During a walkthrough of CAOLA’s online learning software, which included a visit to a virtual campus with an art gallery and an arcade, Brzycki opened a sample lesson in American Literature with text from the F. Scott Fitzgerald story “Winter Dreams.” At the end of the lesson was a quiz consisting of five multiple-choice questions. Brzycki explained that a student would have to score at least an 80 percent before she could move forward to the next lesson.

The first question asked which Fitzgerald novel was an extension of the themes in “Winter Dreams.” Of the four possible answers, only one, “The Great Gatsby,” was written by Fitzgerald. It occurred to me that a student could use Google to confirm this without ever having identified the themes of either “Gatsby” or “Winter Dreams.” But, when I asked Brzycki about this, she sounded unconcerned. For one, she said, students can cheat in brick-and-mortar classrooms, too. Anyway, in her belief, knowing how to Google for answers is part of what makes a well-rounded student in the 21^st century. “Isn’t that a skill we want them to graduate with?” she asked.

Despite our best guesses, we scored only 60 percent, which meant we had to review the lesson and try again. This time, a “Learn More” link appeared, which took us to a supplementary video about narrative structure and anachronisms. It showed a series of short clips, including one of a man with a Mozart bouffant playing a Game Boy. The connection to “Winter Dreams” was beyond me, but no matter—the student was not required to watch and could click out of the video after about five seconds. After the video, we took the quiz again. This time, four of the five questions had us identify parts of speech. We passed.

I thought about this later when, interviewing Rosario, I asked her what sorts of things she had read for her online English class. She thought for a moment, and then said, “I think I did read ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ I think that was one of the books I had to read.”

“You think?” I asked.

“I’m pretty sure,” she said. “I don’t really remember, because it was, like, a while ago.”

Rosario is only one student, of course, but I wondered whether her inability to remember what she’d read might reflect a fact about cyber school. From my experience with Brzycki, it appeared it was possible to pass online English through some combination of guesswork and skimming. Without a teacher in the room, how do cyber schools ensure that students are learning and not just racing through the quizzes?

*****

Over the summer, Cougar Academy got an overhaul. In August, the district appointed Kathy Ames-Borrel, a former ESL supervisor and John Harris High School alum, as the program’s full-time director. For her interview for the post, Ames-Borrel drafted a three-year plan for expanding the academy in accordance with the recovery officer’s recommendations. To address the problem of failing students, she added phone interviews to the application process to try to ensure that parents and students would be the right fit for the cyber option. “We want to go with the mindset that cyber is not for everyone, and bricks and mortar is not for everyone,” she said.

A month and a half into the year, her adjustments seem to have met with some success. Of the 26 students enrolled at the time of this writing, seven had returned to the district from cyber charters. Another Ames-Borrel initiative was to divide the online school into several tiers, requiring students to demonstrate self-discipline before being granted complete independence. Upon enrollment, students enter a 45-day trial period, during which they take their classes on laptops, but do so in the confines of the drop-in center at the school, supervised by teachers. At the end of the trial period, they can progress to full-time study at home, or to a mixture of home and classroom study. (They can also have their trial period extended, if they haven’t successfully adapted to learning online.)

Not everyone is thrilled with the new arrangement. Allison Burris, who moved this year to SciTech Campus, a smaller, selective school within the district, regards the trial period as essentially a negation of the purpose of online learning. “You can’t require a kid to come in,” she said. “That isn’t cyber school.” There are rumors of resentment among teachers, who feel they’ve been reduced to the role of babysitter. Burris had heard stories of students spending the whole day on cell phones or looking at YouTube videos.

In addition, there are signs that the pressure to meet financial objectives has led to haphazard implementation. Just before the start of the year, the district abruptly changed service providers, abandoning CAOLA in favor of a group called Compass Learning. Veno, the recovery officer, told me the choice was a cost-cutting measure: the school already subscribed to Compass for online supplements, which could easily be adapted for full-time study. But the decision will also require the district to negotiate out of its two-year contract with CAOLA, which Brzycki, CAOLA’s director, said she intends to enforce, at a cost of $26,000. (Some have suspected other motives for the switch. One John Harris teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me that the school “got Compass because it’s easier for our students to pass.”)

To some extent, the recent growth of cyber learning parallels the emergence of any disruptive technology. Institutions, in their effort to catch up with the latest invention, will naturally find themselves stumbling through a transitional phase. What’s unique about the cyber-school proliferation, though, is that the primary incentive—the need to compete financially—is largely a creature of the legislature’s making. The state, in applying the current funding formula, has put extraordinary pressure on districts to make changes that they might otherwise have avoided.

In late September, I spoke with Ames-Borrel about how Cougar’s second year was going. Our conversations had soured somewhat, after she and Veno had declined my request to visit the classroom itself, on the grounds that the program was “still in its infancy.” But she was able to explain some of the reasons she thought cyber education could help certain students. The computer program had the ability to detect which skills were most difficult for each student and could tailor future lessons to address those areas. It could also create individualized reports for the teachers, who could then pull the student aside for “targeted intervention.”

Are these things that teachers couldn’t do without computers? I thought of a passage in “Player Piano,” the Kurt Vonnegut novel about a society run by engineers, in which a manager asks his subordinate to come up with an instrument for detecting mice in a factory. Meanwhile, he is holding and petting a cat.

Ames-Borrel and I went back and forth for several minutes about what, exactly, a teacher did in the classroom of Cougar Academy. I couldn’t understand how a single math teacher, for example, could provide instruction to a room full of students across all four years, all simultaneously working on different subjects. I observed that, in my high school math class, if a student started doing science homework, he’d get in trouble. Was that not the case at Cougar?

“No, and—” Ames-Borrel sounded frustrated. “I don’t even know where these questions are coming from. Like, really? It’s online learning. There isn’t a true comparison. What we’re trying to do in these 45 days is teach the students how to be online learners. So, in the course of your day, you may decide, ‘I’m gonna check email first, then I’m gonna do this, then I’m gonna check my Facebook, then I’ll do Twitter.’ Those are all things that you do because you have unlimited access to those resources, because you’re online. One of the things about online learning is that you have the option to choose and do the things that interest you, or whatever. There is no prescribed time.”

In that case, I thought, teachers at Cougar Academy were hardly teachers at all—they were more like instructional training wheels, to help the students transition to self-guided learning at home. Of course, that’s ultimately the experiment of cyber school: to see whether some or all of a teacher’s functions can be fulfilled by programmable devices.

I thought of a moment during my walkthrough with Brzycki in June. At one point, in the school’s virtual study hall, we entered what’s known as a “whiteboard session,” an interval of teacher-led instruction on a digital chalkboard. A handful of student avatars stood in the room, along with a pair of teachers. Brzycki approached one, and a chat box opened. She explained she was an administrator on a tour.

Where are you? Brzycki typed into the chat box.

Pittsburgh, the teacher replied.

What do you teach?

Math.

We asked the teacher for a whiteboard session on how to solve for x. But, for reasons unknown to Brzycki, the program was acting buggy. There were long lags between the teacher’s marks on the board, and for a while the screen went black. When we finally exited the session, the virtual lab was empty, and Brzycki’s avatar stood alone. “Uh-oh,” she said. She clicked around in vain.

“Our teachers are gone,” she said.

Correction: The print edition of this article contained an inaccurate statement about the way in which charter school reimbursements are calculated. When a student leaves a school district to attend a charter or cyber charter school, her departure does not affect the total number of district students in the reimbursement formula, as was originally reported.

Towards Recovery: A Q&A with Gene Veno & Sybil Knight-Burney

June 29, 2013 | by Lawrance Binda

Last month, Harrisburg School District Chief Recovery Officer Gene Veno and Superintendent Sybil Knight-Burney stopped by TheBurg offices to talk about the recently passed school recovery plan, designed to lead the district to financial stability and improve academic performance. We share most of this extensive interview on these pages.

TheBurg: The recovery plan is designed so the district can achieve a budget surplus by 2017. That seems like quite a monumental task. Can you take us through how you hope to achieve that?

Veno: First, I’d like to thank you for having us here today. Anytime we can get out positive information about the school district, we’re very appreciative.

The plan is designed on a forecasted five-year model. The idea, when we came into the district, was first to see where we were financially. That was not known prior to coming in. We found out there was a deficit in the current general budget of which the superintendent had known previously, but we didn’t know the depths of how much. We started to drill down on what could we do without making cuts, what could we do without closing schools, what could we do without furloughing educators or eliminating any programs.

I’ve been saying this now in the community, and it seems to be really a catchphrase: this is really “Recovery 2.” “Recovery 1” was the board previously working on doing some of the harder decision-making as far as closing five schools; they had to furlough a number of employees; they cut $22 million in their operating budget. So, I call the recovery plan the Phase 2 process, which will give the board and the superintendent the opportunity to get through to the next stage of recovery.

Now, that being said: how do we get from where we were to a balanced budget in the 2017-18 school year? Well, there are very specific initiatives within the plan. If you’ve reviewed the 128 pages, there are guidelines that have to be followed, not necessarily just financially, but academically.

Financially, there are ways that we have now to manage our budget, and one of the areas that we have to look at is that we will see a dollar amount of $14 million. That will be from $6 million to $14 million in this budget year to next budget year of money going to charter cyber schools. We looked at 672 students at $15,000 approximately a student. That is money that we would like to see stay within the district. So, one of the initiatives to achieve that goal is to, hopefully within the next month, retain a cyber director who will oversee the cyber Cougar Academy, which we currently have, which is only 9-12. We’d like to expand it to K-12. It would be a blended model, where students will be both on site and at home. That’s one area.

The other area is looking at where we can bring in additional revenue. As I said, there were five shuttered buildings. One of them, we’re going to try to keep for the school administration building, that being Lincoln. The board had previously looked at the admin building cost and targeted about $40,000 a month. So, there’s about half-a-million there that will go away in the 2013, ’14, ’15 years. So, by 2017, we won’t be spending that half-a-million. So, if you add up there, we’re almost at a point of eradicating the current deficit that we see for next year, which would have been $14 million, if we didn’t do something, which we did.

Finally, there are many other aspects of the recovery, such as sale of buildings, which would come into the general fund, increasing student population (we average about $14,000 per student cost). So, we’re looking, as every student brings in revenue, our goal is to immediately to start to keep our 6,340 students and increase it. We want to see the population change, and that’s the challenge in the urban district.

TheBurg: The additional funding that comes in per student, does that essentially come in from state aid?

Veno: State aid, yes. But the point being: you don’t get it unless you have the students. So, it’s the average daily measure—the ADM as they call it. We want to stem the egress of students outside the district. We want to keep students in the district and increase the student enrollment in the district. And that’s one way of increasing the value revenue of the school.

TheBurg: Do you plan to do that mostly through the Cougar Academy?

Veno: That’s only one stage of that. We’ll have three academies, which I want Doctor (Knight-Burney) to speak on. It’s her vision to create special academies for children of [grades] 5, 6, 7 and 8, which we believe will inspire many parents to keep their children in our schools not only through 5, 6, 7 and 8, but on through graduation.

TheBurg: Getting back to this revenue question—if you have greater enrollment, you will get more money in from the state, plus you hope to get more students from the cyber charter school, correct?

Veno: If you take the number I gave, times the number we’re looking at, we’re looking at almost $10 million we’d like to stay in the district. So, right there, if we had $10 million this year, we’d have beyond a surplus, and we wouldn’t be looking at a 5 percent budget and 5 percent wage cut.

Knight-Burney: And provide options in our district so that families who are looking at other options can consider us.

Veno: So that was one area that we noted immediately in our discussions—that we needed to do something about the egress of students. When we got down to it, we said, “672 students times 15,000.” Right there, that was one area that we targeted. 672 are in a cyber school right now in the school district. Statewide, there are currently 103,000 students in a cyber charter school. That is their choice. We commend any parent who wants to do that. That is not for us to make that determination, but we have an obligation under the school code to pay that fee. We looked at it as, “Why are they going there?” And we are going to come out and do an aggressive marketing campaign to educate the community, the citizenry and the parents of these children that we do have a good product. We need to have a quality product, and one of the areas is through our academy. So, we’re going to do that.

Knight-Burney: This whole charter and cyber charter is something many districts are facing. Some districts have even higher charter costs than we have.

Veno: We don’t have a large number of charter buildings in brick and mortar. Ours is in cyber. So, that’s what we focus on, and we’ll do the best to compete. Again, what parents decide is their choice, but we’re going to try to give them a good choice in the Harrisburg City School District.

TheBurg: The accumulated deficit in the district is almost half-a-billion dollars. For a community this size, that number seems daunting. Do you really think that kind of debt can ever really be retired?

Veno: Yes. The number is $437 million. At one of the meetings, I asked our financial team, “What is our total outstanding debt? And if we were to pay it down over a period of time, what is that period of time?” Our total debt load right now is about $265 million. But I asked a question, “Well, when would it be paid?” And, if you look at it and amortize it over 25 years, it comes to the $437 million. And I put that number out there because that was kind of the benchmark for where we have to stop on our debt and have to reduce that.

I also looked at other districts, and we’re running about 12.5 percentage of debt to budget. And I’m looking at most universities and most other high schools and districts, and they’re running about pretty much from 9 to 12 percent, as well. Now, the thing I feel good about, in this respect, finding this, is that the money was not wasted. It was spent on refurbishing and reforming all of these schools—actual structural buildings. So, we have good schools. So, that part is done.

We have now set the stage for the next five years. That (debt payment) will grow another $6 million this year, from $14 million to $20 million, and then flatten out for five years. So, once I saw those numbers trending, I felt more comfortable knowing that I know what my fixed is for the next five years. And that’s predicated in the five-year plan, as well. That being said: $20 million a year is a lot of money. Our goal is to try to trend that down. How do we do that?

We’d like to place three of our buildings into the marketing of the KOZ (Keystone Opportunity Zone): Hamilton, William Penn and Shimmel. We already had some interest in William Penn through the State Museum Archive Society. We had a few medical facilities taking a look at it. But our biggest challenge the last month was looking at the property at 1901 Wayne Ave., which is not in the city. It’s in Susquehanna Township—42 acres. We would not receive all of that money because that money would have to be in context with the state because they’re the ones that gave it to the city school district to build a public education facility. If it should move forward, we would generate a net, at this point, of almost $1.8 million, which would have to go back to the state. Then the state would have to determine how much we would receive.

So, we’ll put these other buildings into the same kind of a process. We’re not going to sell them immediately, but we’ll do our best to market them so they become a viable source of revenue not just for the district but for the city.

Hamilton, for example: we had one interested party coming to rent it. I saw him, and it’s just not going to work out. We don’t want to be in the lease business; we want to sell it. We had another developer taking a look at it to make it into an apartment complex. We don’t base a dollar value on this. Any of that dollar that comes in will go right into the general fund.

TheBurg: You received significant interest in William Penn? Any potential action?

Veno: We gave some tours of the building. Again, we haven’t marketed any of the buildings. The property needs to be rezoned, and we met with City Council and the mayor and that will take place. I just think it’s a beautiful facility of 25-plus acres that could be turned into just about anything. I’d like to see it tax-driven too. So it would be a revenue-producer for the city, as well as the school district.

TheBurg: How is the search for the proposed CFO (chief financial officer) going?

Veno: We just finalized the job description. It’ll be posted on our website in the next day or two.

We’ve been in deep negotiations with the labor unions. On May 17, the plan was approved. Once it was approved, one item on my list was to get to the bargaining table with all the labor unions, and we did, and they’re completed. We will have hopefully this checked off our list very soon that two bargaining units (AFSCME and HEA) and the meeting group, which is for administrators. I was looking for a sign-off by all three groups. HEA signed off on it. They agreed to the 5 percent wage and benefit [cut]. All administrators and principals have signed off on it. And AFSCME—the non-certification employees—will sign off on it hopefully. If they do not sign off on it, we do not go into receivership, but we will go into furloughing employees. We do not want to see that happen. [Ed. Note: Days after the interview, AFSCME negotiators rejected the district’s offer, but then reversed and accepted it.]

Knight-Burney: Over the years, after closing five buildings, after furloughing over 300-some-odd people, we were out of ideas. Every year, we were able at the minute to balance the budget. But the point has come that we can’t close any more buildings. We’d have kids sitting on top of each other. We won’t have teachers to teach them. We’d have 40 to 50 kids in a classroom. In an urban school district, where we have kids with so many needs, that’s crazy. We already are looking at downsizing more with our psychologists and our counselors and, in an urban school district, they are vital to the academic environment. So we will do everything we can to hold our district together and to make it the high-performing, high-achieving district that it once was. I know we can do that.

Veno: We will make this turnaround. This is not in a receivership mode. It is an actual recovery plan . . . this a five-year forecasted model. This will be the key to the recovery of the district. We will stick to it. In the out years, the revenues increase, the costs go down, no tax increases in the fourth or fifth year, plus increases back to the teachers, employees, non-certification. And, if we can get there sooner, we will. One thing I keep saying: this is a five-year plan, but we really have three years. We can’t miss a mark in the next 36 months.

TheBurg: Have you gotten a lot of pushback from the teachers?

Veno: Yes, and they should. I don’t feel this is a win to ask anybody to accept any reduction in salary or benefits. They’ve been asked to take a lot of hits in the past three years. They have been invested in this district to stay and teach at wage freezes. They have not had a signed wage agreement in two years. They have not received a cost-of-living. They have not received a step increase. I’m very saddened this has to be the case for the next two years [5 percent salary cuts] and a freeze in the third year, but, if you work with us and you continue to stay with us, we’re going to try to resolve this quickly before the third year.

Knight-Burney: It beats the alternative, and the alternative is that we don’t have a district. We don’t have any place for our kids.

Veno: I’m trying to save the district. We all need to save the district. I would not go for charterization of the district. That’s one thing I said: I’d like to keep a traditional program. I’d like to keep the Cougar pride. But more importantly, I didn’t want to see anyone furloughed. We did not furlough an educator. I did not want to see us closing schools. I did not want to see tax increases at 10 percent. And the only way we can get to that was to get to some of the tougher decisions on wage cuts and benefit cuts.

Knight-Burney: One of the good things about having an outsider come in, they also bring in resources, and we’ve had a good relationship with the Department of Education, but it’s even better now. One of the things Gene was able to do was to bring in some experts to look and assess what we’re doing. One of the things we had started doing is building that academic piece, which is important because, if the academics don’t approve, we’re not going to have a district. It doesn’t matter what the finances are. If you’re failing, you can’t justify pouring any more money into it. So we’ve been able to be a part of pilot programs on teacher effectiveness, principal effectiveness. Gene has been able to go in and negotiate classes for our principals.

The only thing that’s going to make a difference is the instruction in the classroom: what the teachers are teaching and how the kids are learning and how they perform.

Tag Archives: Sybil Knight-Burney

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