Recently, I worked with Durango Herald reporter Chuck Slothower to roll out an article on our new teaching staff. After providing Chuck with heaping piles of info on our incredible faculty, the article copied below ran on Sunday. Notice there's not one mention of our teachers.
Many emails have poured in over the week with parents, policy makers and invested community members wondering why AHS continues to be on the negative end of all this Herald press. Not to worry, the goal of the Durango Herald is to sell papers and feel good stories do not sell as well as conflict and half-truths. Dividing our community is a great way to cultivate drama for future stories...
To everyone who has contacted me and voiced their support for AHS and their outrage over this article, I say "thank you!" We have been well served by maintaining a positive approach to negative press and public attacks and this incident is no different. We are focused solely on opening the best high school possible and anything that distracts us from our goal (like this most recent article)is not worth a response. At least by me....I've included some recent letters to Chuck regarding the "Class Half Full" piece so as not to disappoint those looking for an AHS rebutle. Enjoy and remember, Together We Are Accomplishing Great Things!
Class half empty
Charter school drains funding, students from DHS
by Chuck Slothower
Herald Staff Writer Article Last Updated; Sunday, June 07, 2009
When Animas High School opens in the fall, parents, students and organizers will celebrate the successful founding of the independent charter school that they have worked for years to build.
Yet the school also stands to cost Durango School District 9-R more than $400,000 in its first year as Animas High School drains critical student enrollment and state funding from Southwest Colorado's largest school district.
The math of this migration is straightforward: When a student leaves 9-R for Animas High School, about $7,000 in taxpayer money follows. If, as expected, about 60 of the charter school's 100 students come from 9-R, that will result in more than $400,000 flowing from the school district to AHS during 2009-10.
Partly as a consequence, DHS laid off 16 teachers this spring and is expected to cut a school administration position within weeks. Staff positions also have been cut.
"It has some impact on 9-R, and that's evident in the way that we staffed for next year and some of the cuts we've been making at the high school level," said Superintendent Keith Owen.
Animas High School supporters acknowledge the school's impact, but they say it provides a much-needed alternative with its project-based curriculum, emphasis on technology and internships and a more personal environment. And while jobs may be disappearing at DHS, new ones are being created at AHS, where the charter school employs 10 and its board plans to hire two more.
The shift means DHS, long the town's only high school and one taxpayers have supported for more than 90 years, will have fewer students, fewer teachers and fewer staff members next year.
In some ways, the charter system is working exactly as its supporters had hoped.
"That's life," said Randy DeHoff, executive director of the Colorado Charter School Institute, which oversees AHS. "When you don't have a monopoly, you deal with the market."
DHS enrollment, budget to drop
Animas High School currently enrolls 83 students, and organizers expect enrollment to increase to about 100 by the time the school opens in August. The charter school at 3206 Main Ave. will serve only ninth-grade students in its initial year. It then will add a grade each year until it becomes a four-year, 400-student high school.
Of the 83 enrolled, 72 come from Durango. That includes 9-R students, home-schooled students and a few who are moving to Durango from elsewhere this summer. An additional seven students come from Bayfield, three from Ignacio and one from Mancos.
AHS was not able to provide an exact number of how many of its students will come from 9-R schools, specifically Miller and Escalante middle schools. But Michael Ackerman, head of the school, estimated it at 60. District 9-R's budget projects the system will lose 70 students to AHS.
"It's going to cost the district some dollars," said Laine Gibson, 9-R's chief financial officer.
When AHS opens its doors, enrollment at Durango High School is projected to drop from 1,512 last fall to 1,301 this year, the lowest in a decade.
Animas accounts for only a portion of that decline. Enrollment projections estimate DHS will lose 60 students to 9-R's own alternative program, Durango Big Picture High School, 69 to an adult education program and 72 to demographic trends. The incoming DHS freshman class would be smaller than the graduating senior class even without Animas High School.
Jim Judge, president of AHS' board, said although the new school is drawing from the same pool of students, it is not to blame for the high school's enrollment projections.
"If you removed Animas High from the scene, there would still be a drop in enrollment probably, and that would have to be addressed," he said.
Durango High School's budget is expected to fall from $8.3 million in the 2008-09 school year to $6.3 million next school year, according to preliminary figures. An additional $457,000 will fund the Big Picture school. Some other dollars are being shifted from DHS to the district's facilities budget.
Animas on its own
Animas High School is the first Durango charter school to operate independently of 9-R, whose enrollment makes it the largest school district in the region by a wide margin.
Durango's two previous charter schools, Community of Learners and Excel Charter School, were uneasy presences within 9-R. Both schools experienced low enrollment and high turnover, eventually causing them to fold.
With Durango's previous charter school failures in mind, AHS organizers went another route, obtaining the school's charter through the Charter School Institute. The state body acts as a school district for charter schools that aren't always welcomed by the public school system.
Owen said 9-R does not view Animas High School as an adversary.
"We wish them the best of luck," he said. "We're not trying to stand in their way."
Tension between AHS and DHS occasionally has surfaced. DHS Principal Diane Lashinsky sent a letter to parents last month saying the school was delaying creation of a master schedule for 2009-10 because AHS organizers would not tell the school which students were enrolled.
Judge responded with a public letter saying the school could not identify the students because of educational privacy law.
District officials and charter school supporters will have to learn to get along, DeHoff said.
"The better that relationship is, the better it'll be for everybody," he said. "That cooperation may take a couple of years to develop. Down the road, there may be something the district can learn."
Parents seek alternative
In some areas, charter schools are driven by parents fleeing low-performing schools. That's not the case in Durango. In its latest state-issued School Accountability Report, DHS was rated "high" on academic performance, although academic growth was deemed "low."
DHS students substantially outperform their peers statewide on annual reading, writing, math and science tests. By nearly every measure, Durango High School is an above-average school.
Yet some parents were eager to enroll their children in the charter school.
Joel Aguilar, a Durango construction contractor, decided to enroll his daughter, Trinity, 14, who attended Escalante Middle School last year.
"Their model of teaching, their method of project-based learning, more reflects how we end up doing our lives as adults," he said. "We don't do a lot of memorizing. We do a lot of critical thinking."
Aguilar said he did not necessarily see anything lacking at DHS. But, he added: "When there's a better option for some people, you've just got to take it."
Charter schools are popular statewide.
They educated 56,188 students in Colorado in 2007-08, the latest year for which figures are available. That was 6.9 percent of public-school enrollment in the state.
"I know how I was taught in school, and it wasn't effective for me," Aguilar said. "That's still the model in most schools."
9-R, Animas look aheadOfficials for 9-R and Animas High School are eager to pursue cooperation, perhaps realizing neither school system is going anywhere soon.
"Durango High, in the way it has addressed this issue, has treated us as a highly competitive entity," Judge said. "We would like to look at it more as a very cooperative entity. We're dedicated to cooperating with Durango High as much as possible in the future."
Judge acknowledged AHS will affect Durango High School.
"I think there will be an impact," he said. "What we're doing is spending the per-student money in a different way, but I think a much more effective way for some students."
School districts can learn from charter schools, said DeHoff.
"The response I would hope to see, rather than blaming Animas for costing the district teachers and athletic directors, (is) looking at the district and saying, 'What are we not offering?'" he said.
The school district is doing exactly that, Owen said. "We're trying to figure out how we can do what we do even better."
Animas High School expects to also enroll students from Bayfield, Ignacio and Mancos.
Don Magill, superintendent of Bayfield School District, said he welcomed AHS.
"A public school system cannot meet the needs of every kid," Magill said. "If Animas High can meet the needs of a few kids better than we can, more power to them."
Whatever happens, Owen said 9-R will adjust.
"Once Animas is up and going, I think these kinds of issues become less and less," he said. "It's just one of those growing pains of a new school system."
chuck@durangoherald.com
Contents copyright ©, the Durango Herald. All rights reserved.
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Subject: Extreme disapointment with today's coverage
To: Chuck Slothower
From: Chris Strouthopoulos
I'd like to express my extreme disappointment in the quality of news coverage in todays two articles "Class Half Empty" and "Charters Less Diverse". These articles not only represent biased news coverage, their sensational and misleading headlines are downright irresponsible and a disservice to this community.
Let me begin by saying I am not a parent, nor am I affiliated with Animas High. I am a Assistant Professor at San Juan College and am married to an 9-R elementary school teacher and those experiences show me that there is much more to this story than is being represented in these articles.
Charter schools like AHS will not "drain" 9-R. The fact is the money follows the students. If DHS has less students then they don't need as much funding. So, a more accurate and responsible reporting of this story would describe it as a "shift".
Futhermore, there are strong arguments that charter schools such as AHS will improve the quality of education throughout Durango. AHS will be able to serve students whose needs are unmet by a massive facility composing 1,300 students. Furthermore, shifting students away from DHS will reduce overcrowding and probably help the quality of education at that facility. Why are these, and many other potential benefits of AHS either ignored or buried at the end of your article?
In short, I am greatly disappointed by this coverage. I expect more from the Durango Herald. I thought the era of yellow journalism with misleading, sensensational headlines followed by stories only half told was over.
Mr. Strouthopoulos:
Sunday's coverage was just a small part of what we have written about Animas High School, dating back to 2007 before it even had a name. Those articles represent two of at least 29 pieces we have written or published about Animas. There is always more to the story. But what we published Sunday was part of the story, and we would have been remiss to ignore Animas' effects on the existing high school and district. The article did describe the changes as a "shift," and also a "drain." I suppose it's two ways of describing the same phenomenon.
In any case, thanks for reading. I always appreciate having sharp readers keep us on our toes.
Sincerely,
Chuck Slothower
Staff Writer
The Durango Herald
(970) 375-4515
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