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Twenty-six of the lowest-performing
schools in Minnesota have filed their turnaround plans with the
state Department of Education, which will distribute grant money to
pay for them in August.


      Thursday was the deadline for the schools identified as
persistently low-performing by the state to send in their
applications for federal grant money. On Friday, the Minnesota
Department of Education released a summary of what the schools will
do.


      To receive the money, all the schools had to agree to one of
four federal blueprints for overhauling their operations and
implement them by this fall. All the schools picked models in which
they had to replace their principals, but none of them decided to
shut down or convert to a charter school.


      Four schools - two in Minneapolis and two in St. Paul - selected
turnaround plans that required them to also replace at least half
of their teachers. However, the schools got credit if they had
already turned over their staff in the past few years.


      That's what happened at Edison Senior High and Lucy Laney
Elementary in the Minneapolis school district, said Eric Molho,
director of strategic planning for the district. He said both
schools got new principals and at least 50 percent new teachers
during overhauls in 2008 prompted by the federal No Child Left
Behind law.


      "We believe that these are turnarounds already in progress,"
he said.


      It was a similar situation at Humboldt Senior High in St. Paul,
said district spokesman Howie Padilla.


      Under the $3.5 billion federal School Improvement Grant program,
the state will have about $32 million to spend on the schools over
three years. The grant will pay for a new principal, assistant
principal and turnaround supervisor, comprehensive curriculum
reforms, more teacher training and extending the school day by at
least an hour. The grants will be awarded Aug. 1.


      The Education Department said four of the eligible schools opted
out of the program, so they won't have to make the changes but also
won't get the money. They are the secondary schools in Butterfield
and Greenbush-Middle River, the Four Directions Charter School in
Minneapolis and the Cityview Performing Arts Magnet school in
Minneapolis, although that school plans to apply for the grant next
year.


      Butterfield Superintendent Lisa Shellum, who criticized the
methodology that landed her secondary school on the low-achieving
list in the first place, said the program didn't work for her tiny
district in southern Minnesota.


      She worried it wouldn't pay the extra costs of its mandates,
including building office space in the district's only building for
new administrators and paying for extra bus routes after the school
hours for elementary and secondary students no longer matched up.


      Those rural bus routes, she said, were about 100 miles long.
"If we had to continually run all of the extra bus routes it would
impact us to where we would have to take money out of the general
fund," she said.


      The plans for the individual schools are available at the 

Minnesota Department of Education's Web site

Gallery

Education News

Twenty-six of the lowest-performing
schools in Minnesota have filed their turnaround plans with the
state Department of Education, which will distribute grant money to
pay for them in August.


26 struggling Minn. schools file turnaround plans

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