While the board was clearer about proposals it could not support, it did show consensus around establishing a process by which it would negotiate contracts with troubled districts. The substance of the agreements would include specific expectations from the state and what happens if those targets weren't met within a set period of time.
In some cases, those consequences might allow neighboring districts to run schools within the troubled or establish charter schools. In other cases, the failing district might become unaccredited or shuttered outright.
The board was in agreement about dismissing proposals to establish a statewide district of underperforming schools or a centralized office or governor-appointed board to oversee and manage troubled schools across the state.
"I like the idea of the (state) having oversight, but to set up a district of failing schools doesn't ring well with me at all," Board Member Victor Lenz said. Board Member Mike Jones called the idea of a statewide district of troubled schools akin to establishing an "educational leper colony."
Department of Elementary and Secondary Education staff listened carefully to the board's feedback and plans to develop a draft plan to introduce at the Feb. 18 board meeting.
The specifics of how and between whom the contracts would be negotiated remained unclear, but the board and staff were eyeing plans that allowed the department to study the district and tailor deals with that specific community. The agreements would seek to provide the districts with support for improvement, while also maintaining significant leverage if they could not improve.
"While I think you can negotiate individual deals, I don't think if we are going to get there we can afford to give up any leverage," Jones said. "You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word... I think we need to keep the gun."
Board Member Joe Driskill raised questions about whom exactly the state would be negotiating with. "Who do you negotiate with if you have a failed board, failed administrators? Do you negotiate with the same people that caused the failure?" he asked. "It sounds really great to do locally negotiated agreements ... but we have to keep those things in mind as well."
Board Member Charlie Shields said he thinks the contracts are about lending a helping hand while still letting the districts know expectations are high and improvements are necessary.
"We provide the opportunity to improve, saying these are the expectations, we provide the support, we will provide any level of expertise that you want," Shields said. "But if you fail to improve, then you have to provide the students in your district other educational opportunities."
Those other educational opportunities would include letting neighboring districts run schools in the failed district or establishing charter schools that had strict accountability targets.
Looking at individual schools
With the new MSIP-5 state assessments, the department now collects performance data for all individual schools in Missouri. Board members showed interest in looking more carefully at underperforming schools in fully-accredited districts, but did not commit to how strongly they would intervene in those schools.
"It's a very positive move to stop the failure as early as we can," Lenz said. "We need to start intervening in failing schools as early as possible ... inside any failed school in any districts; we need to start looking at it before it goes to the whole district."
Board President Peter Herschend said it was a shift in how and where the department expressed its authority over troubled schools toward school campuses as opposed to the district. But he also said while dealing with the immediate problem of unaccredited districts, the board should not get hung up on a policy that would look at all schools across the state.
"I think we should have voice into a failed school within a performing district, but I would not start there, I would get there, but I wouldn't start there," he said.
There was also discussion between the board and department staff about whether it was possible to waive the board's rule on determining accreditation based on multiple years of data, creating an easier route to remove the unaccredited label from districts and bypass the transfer law altogether.
"If we wanted to say these districts are no longer unaccredited, we are changing our rules on that... is there a statute that prohibits us from doing that?" Board Member Russell Still asked.
But Herschend and other members said they could not support a change to classification standards that aimed to remove unaccredited districts from that status.
"Normandy is a failed district; I am unwilling to change the classification just to get around it... In my opinion, we would be out of line," Herschend said.
Jones said the notion of doing something like that embodied the essence of the debate about how to deal with the transfer issue.
"This is the heart of the entire conversation ... This board has done the right thing by raising performance standards, and we are now here; so if we are going to redefine our way out of the transfer law then we at least ought to have the courage and say that's what we are doing rather than trying to make it look like we are doing something else."