June 15, 2006

By Tara Miller

At the June 8 meeting of the Yellow Springs Board of Education, three parents of Mills Lawn students stated that they will pull their children out of the school because it is not meeting their children’s needs.

“We feel she needs a positive social experience. She hasn’t had that for years,” said Karen Denman of her rising fifth-grade daughter. Denman said her second child, a first-grader, will stay in Mills Lawn.

Parent Jill Skwerski, who has three children at the school, said that Mills Lawn “wasn’t a good fit socially or academically for our fifth grader,” although her other children will stay at the school.

Both of the children will be fifth-graders at Mills Lawn, and are part of a class in which some parents have joined together to form the Parents of 2014. About 12 parents from the group attended the board’s April 13 board meeting to express their concerns about their children’s educational and social experiences, and about eight attended the meeting last week. Their concerns revolve around the unusually large number of children in the class who are identified as special needs children, the parents said, creating a class which is sometimes disruptive and in which parents feel all of their children don’t have their needs met. Some parents said they have been trying to get administrators’ attention for years about the situation.

In the past two months several of the parents have met with School Superintendent Tony Armocida, who has worked with teachers to create strategies to try to address the challenges. However, those strategies, which Armocida identified to board members at the June 8 meeting, seemed to some parents to be insufficient.

The new strategies are “largely smoke and mirrors,” according to parent Cheryl Meyer, who stated at the meeting that she is also removing her fifth-grader, Rachel, from the school. As well as being dissatisfied with the school’s attempts to address the situation, she also felt that she had been disrespected as a parent, “treated like an entity to be dealt with as opposed to a collaborator in my child’s education,” she said.

In response, board members Angela Wright and Richard Lapedes said that the parents seemed to be making the right decision for their children. They also said it would take time to discover if the school’s new strategies will work.

“My impression is that things are happening, things will happen,” Lapedes said. “Will they be adequate enough? We don’t know.”

Wright asked other parents in the room to “have patience. Give the process time to develop. It’s a good beginning. Until you actually see how the teachers and students perform you cannot judge before that time. Give it a chance; have trust.”

At the April 13 meeting, the parent group presented a letter signed by 26 parents of the 40 children in the Mills Lawn fourth grade who raised concerns about the “frequency and intensity” of class disruptions. One out of three of last year’s fourth-graders were identified as children with special needs, a much higher percentage than most classes, and the group sought additional qualified personnel to provide support for the teachers. According to group members, they had volunteered many hours in class to offer support and had tried to communicate their concerns to administrators, but felt they were not heard.

At last week’s meeting Armocida stated that after April 13 he had met several times with key members of the parent group, along with the fifth grade teachers who will have the children this coming year. He and the teachers developed a variety of strategies designed to meet the needs of the children, he said, including regrouping the children in a variety of cross-curricular activities, offering the children contact with the five to six team teachers, assigning book lists over summer vacation, using volunteers to help with math, holding reading circles, and holding each child accountable for homework.

Strategies developed to build community include treating all the children in the fifth and sixth grade as one group, starting the year with team building activities and continuing those throughout the year, and offering homework intervention for children who need extra help.

Along with the intervention strategies, Armocida also proposed to the board that in the future, groups of parents with concerns about their children’s education should take those concerns to the Mills Lawn Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) rather than come to the board. Since the PTO has as its mission meeting the needs of all students, the group is the appropriate place for parents with concerns, he said.