Graduation Rate Up, Communications Down
by Thaddeus Flint
With the new school year set to begin September 8, the Berlin School Board at the August 18 monthly Board meeting heard, “some good news for a change” from High School Principal Dr. Cathie Allain about last year’s graduating class.
[private]According to the State Education Department, the graduation rate for the 2015 senior class was 87.5%, with 95% of eligible seniors walking the stage in June and 63 students graduating on time.
“I said three years ago this would take three years or so,” said Dr. Allain of initiatives to increase District graduation rates.
Of that rate, ten students—the entire student body of the School Within A School program—graduated on time. The program was formed two years ago to help some students get back on track to graduate on time.
While the State Education Dept. has not publicly reported the graduation data on all schools in the Capital District as of yet, when compared to 2014 graduation classes, BCS would jump from #33 of 38 school districts in the area to #20 if all other numbers remained the same.
The results are even more impressive when looked at over the past seven years. In 2008 the graduation rate at BCS was 63%, with only the Albany City and Schenectady City school districts performing worse in the Capital District at that time.
“This is a wonderful improvement,” said District Superintendent Dr. Stephen Young. “And it is not just the High School making these changes, but the Middle School and Elementary School as well.”
That 87.5% might even get better. With a few students graduating in August, the rate might climb to as much as 89%.
The Board, and especially School Board President Frank Zwack, have at times mentioned in past years how important it is to increase communication with the people who make up the Berlin School District. With only three weeks left before the doors open for Fall 2015, several parents came to speak to the Board about how that communication seemed to be, in their eyes, failing.
Before, however, any parents could communicate with the Board, the parents had to wait for the Board to finish communicating with them. This, as it turns out, is very tedious. Opportunity for public comment comes at the end of the night and so parents and families have to sit through all that Board stuff that nobody wants to sit through on a beautiful summer’s night. And it being a summer’s night made it even worse. The auditorium is not air-conditioned and the temperature grows by the minute. This would probably have been somewhat acceptable if those minutes hadn’t been prolonged by double when the Board moved a proposed executive session from the end of the agenda to the beginning.
“Great,” said one attendee, “I hope they aren’t going to make us sit here for an hour again.”
This happened before at the June meeting. The hope that it wouldn’t happen again, as it turned out, was in vain. The Board returned to the sultry theatre just over an hour later.
Say What?
The next step, if one wishes to fail at communicating with their audience, is to make it impossible for the audience to understand pretty much anything being said to them. The auditorium is a big room cooled with the whirring of many loud standing fans that do very little but whirr loudly while moving moist hot air from one fan to the other. Still, if someone could somehow get the PA system to function there might be a chance people could catch a stray word here or there and maybe make some sense of it. The PA has yet to function correctly at a meeting for years now. All the Board members are provided with wireless microphones, but they work poorly if they work at all. Some of the mics create strange feedback blasts for no apparent reason. Others turn Board member’s voices into robot voices, or sometimes it’s like listening to AM radio in the car with a mountain top in the way. Most of the gadgets do nothing at all. Now and then a Board member will pick up the mic assigned to them and stare at it, or fiddle with a knob or something but nothing ever comes out of these adjustments. The microphone at the podium sometimes works, but not, usually, when anyone wants to say something into it. It will however pick up the odd noise now and then like something from a TV program on the paranormal. Most speakers bravely make some attempt at getting the podium mic to turn on before giving up the job as hopeless and proceeding instead to speak very loudly which is still better than those at the Board’s table who speak to each other in dinner table tones.
So these perspiring parents who have been promised better communication have to suffer all that before they can communicate to the Board how they feel communication is not working out for them.
The first parent spoke about her problems with a Special Education program in which her child was enrolled. The word “was” is important here because she seemed to feel he had somehow become unenrolled from the program, she wasn’t sure. She said she had tried talking to [deleted]—no, it turns out you can’t communicate the name of the person you tried to communicate with. New rules of Public Comment, or maybe old rules that weren’t enforced for a while, state that you can’t name names of employees or students. Well, you can if you are saying something complimentary, but you can’t if it’s not, which this was.
“I spoke with the person in charge of Special Education,” the parent said, shaking her head. Everyone knows who that is, it’s public information, but you can’t say it out loud in public, apparently.
“I have been trying to get information all summer,” she added. “I wish I had better communication. I feel I have the right to it.”
She does indeed, and Dr. Young asked that she contact him so they could all set up a meeting to sort the matter out. And all it took was several months of phone calls and a few hours of sitting in a hot room listening to either nothing or static. Or both.
The next parent was worried about transportation for students, one of them hers, to Tech Valley this Fall. She said she has been trying to find out since June if the transportation was going to happen or if she had to make arrangements to do it herself. She said every month she was being told that she would find out next month. “It’s just so frustrating,” she said.
“We are still working on it,” said Dr. Young, who explained that other Districts between BCS and Tech Valley are still being contacted to see if a transportation plan can be put into place. “It really came down to the last minute.”
The next scheduled monthly Board meeting will be September 15 at 7:15 pm.[/private]