The child advocate

Prescott Middle School has been crumbling academically for nine years, so it’s easy to point fingers at the public school system, the teachers and the principals. The Baton Rouge community shares some of the blame, says Maria Pitre, assistant superintendent for instructional services with the East Baton Rouge school system, who has been monitoring Prescott for two years as part of the school’s reconstitution plan.

The issues plaguing Prescott, she says, go beyond test scores and report cards.

“Baton Rouge and the state of Louisiana need to come to grips with urban education,” she says. “Urban education is very different from a typical education, and I think the community and the city have really become more urban, and need to recognize that providing the same standard of education is going to get us nowhere.”

Urban, inner-city students have unique needs, so to reach, inspire and teach them require completely different approaches. To succeed, Pitre says, Louisiana has to understand and commit to meeting those unique needs.

“What does that look like?” Pitre asks. “Providing a lot of social and medical support that your average school does not give. Dedicated truancy officers are needed. Social workers providing social and health-related services are critical. We have to have a different delivery model. We can’t just provide them with reading and math skills and expect them to be successful if we don’t address some of the other issues our students are dealing with.”

At Prescott, families routinely move in and out of the district, which disrupts a child’s education. The problem has worsened since Hurricane Katrina, especially truancy. Prescott’s truancy rate is among the worst in the parish, Pitre says. On a given day, 62 of its 551 students are absent. Still, resolving it isn’t easy.

“You cannot remove students who are missing unless you have substantial documentation to support it,” Pitre says. “So the school may have a student on its roster who has not reported to school for six or seven weeks. That child is considered missing. The child welfare and attendance department will go out and do home visits to try and locate the child or the parents, but that is a chore in itself.”

With such transient neighborhoods surrounding Prescott, the school system often isn’t even informed a student has moved until their new school requests their records.

Parents who leave with no notice hurt the school they leave behind. In the case of standardized testing, Prescott’s roster is riddled with now-missing students, so come LEAP testing day those students earn zeroes for Prescott, which weigh down the school performance score. Worse, each student can amass four zeroes, one for each of the test’s four parts: math, language arts, science and social studies.

The child welfare and attendance department started working more closely with juvenile services this past year. The school’s measure of success is calculated by individual instances of students returning to school, with definitive numbers expected at the end of the school year.

Discipline is another chronic problem at Prescott. This year there have been 518 in-school and 64 out-of-school suspensions alone.

Why aren’t Pitre or other school system officials taking those necessary steps to improve Prescott?

Pitre says small improvements have been made since the district instigated reconstitution two years ago at Prescott, but contends it’s hard to address the numerous problems plaguing any given school all at once, and even harder to see immediate results.

Despite having a $78 million surplus, the school district concluded it doesn’t have the money to make system-wide improvements. Instead, the district decided to target its most at-risk group, eighth-grade students who’ve failed or been held back multiple times and are in many cases several years older than their classmates, and are likely to drop out of school.

School system staff presented a plan to the school board April 3 to move these students to a high school setting with truancy officers, career/guidance counselors and social workers on site. The school board asked for more information, and the earliest the program could benefit over-age eighth-graders at schools such as Prescott would be next fall.

“Any district has to be responsible and not overextend itself financially,” Pitre says. “That’s what happened before, and the previous superintendent had to start cutting back on various programs, including curriculum and professional development. When Charlotte Placide took over, she brought back a chief academic officer to focus on curriculum. They didn’t have one before. So changes have been implemented, but it takes time to reap the benefits.”

Until then Prescott will have to find its own solution. More community support is needed in the form of social workers, medical professionals and dedicated truancy officers, Pitre says, as cooperation with community organizations and the juvenile justice system has been limited. And the school system needs to partner with nonprofits to help students and their families.

By working more closely with juvenile justice officials Pitre hopes to locate more truant students and get them back in the classrooms before the court systems get involved.

“In the two years I’ve been monitoring Prescott I truly believe we’re doing good things for kids,” she says. “These children are coming to us with serious social and health issues. Many of the students in reconstituted schools need glasses, hearing aids. I just think as we become more urban we have to commit to delivering education in a new way. Helping parents find jobs, after-school care, etc. These are big issues for the people in these schools.”