EDUCATION
Alternative school faces ultimatum from state
Buffalo’s deeply-troubled alternative school should be closed if it doesn’t improve dramatically, the chancellor of the State Board of Regents said Thursday.
“The School Board should put the school on probation, monitor it closely and close it if it doesn’t improve,” Robert
M. Bennett said. “I would take a very close look at it at the end of December.”
Bennett’s comments followed the release of a state Education Department report that contained what he called “very troubling findings” about Academy School 44, 1369 Broadway.
The report said the school fails to meet state standards on instructional time, lacks supplies and equipment, does not offer challenging work for many students, assigns teachers to subjects they are not certified to teach, does not have a library and has a serious attendance problem.
The school, Bennett said, also needs to provide mental health and social services assistance to students, most of whom have had dealings with the legal system and have been designated Persons in Need of Supervision.
The school, for students in grades seven through 12, opened in 2006 to assist at-risk youngsters and reduce violence in other city schools. But last year, just 9 percent of the school’s seventh-graders were proficient in English and 6 percent were proficient in math.
School system officials said they would implement a broad series of recommendations made by a six-person state team that spent two days at the school in June.
“We welcome the recommendations and are eager to put these positive developments in place,” said Will Keresztes, associate superintendent of educational services. “The action plan is effective immediately . . . and will be implemented at the beginning of this school year.”
The school relies heavily on Web-based instruction provided through a contract with ResulTech, a Maryland firm.
The report paints a dim view of that instruction, saying contact between students and teachers is “minimal.”
“Students had headsets on during class,” the report said. “Teachers predominantly gave introductions to the lessons, and then students worked on the computer in isolation.”
When students were asked questions about their Web-based projects, the report said, “knowledge ranged from none to limited.” The projects “lacked rigor and did not address state standards,” it added.
Keresztes said the Web-based program will be supplemented by more conventional teaching methods.
Among other measures, the school system will assign a reading coach to the school, establish a library, beef up professional development and provide stronger administrative assistance he added.
Philip Rumore, president of the Buffalo Teachers Federation, said the more than $6 million in contracts with Resul- Tech have resulted in failure, which he called a “disgrace.”
“The board and the superintendent are accomplices in this,” Rumore said. “They should be ashamed of themselves for what they’ve done to these kids.”
