SFPS superintendent: ‘We are moving forward’
School board meeting focuses on response after mostly D, F grades assigned by state
Santa Fe Public Schools Superintendent Veronica García had a message for the community during Tuesday night’s school board meeting.
“We are not stagnating,” she said, reacting to recent criticism from the state Public Education Department. “We are moving forward.”
She also asserted that New Mexico’s A-F grading system doesn’t accurately measure school performance and the results can have a “demoralizing” effect.
Her comments came just days after the state released grades for individual schools in the state’s 89 districts. The report said 56 percent of Santa Fe’s roughly 30 schools received D’s or F’s, leading Public Education Secretary-designate Christopher Ruszkowski to call Santa Fe a “district in
crisis.” He added that when a district is in such trouble, “You have to look at the superintendent.”
García has responded that the state administration targeted her because she sometimes speaks out about educational initiatives and testified on behalf of plaintiffs in a lawsuit that questioned whether the state is investing enough money to provide an “equitable” education for all.
During Tuesday’s meeting, the superintendent and some of her administrative staff played up the positives in test results and grades, saying that the district’s students are improving on a slow but steady rate. García said some recent district initiatives, such as additional professional development programs, reading intervention measures and a realignment of instructional coaches — would pay off within a year.
“I do anticipate we are going to see accelerated growth … some significant jumps … we’re really positioned to have a breakthrough school year,” she said.
García and several of her administrators emphasized the findings of a recent Legislative Finance Committee report that said schools serving high numbers of students enrolled in the free- and reduced-price lunch program — a federal indicator of poverty — generally earn D’s and F’s. Many, but not all, of the Santa Fe schools that netted D’s and F’s fall into that category, she said.
García said she agrees with a comment the Public Education Department made in July that if the district embraces some departmental initiatives and is supported by state funds, it can improve. But, she said funding has been inconsistent over the past few years, with the district getting money for some grant requests but not others.
“You can only embrace them [reforms] to the level that you are funded,” she said.
In terms of taking new actions to address the issue, she reiterated her recently announced plan to restructure her administrative team so that each member can support a certain number of principals to ease their bureaucratic workload so they can spend more time in the classroom and help their teachers improve instruction.
She also said the district will look at schools that are succeeding, based on test scores, and analyze what is working and how that can be replicated at sites that may be struggling.
Though some 60 people attended the meeting, the vast majority identified themselves by a show of hands as district employees, leading board President Steven Carrillo to express disappointment that more members of the public were not on hand to discuss the issue.
“This is the mother of all issues … our schools, our kids and our performance,” he said.
Grace Mayer, head of the National Education Association-Santa Fe teachers union, addressed the board, echoing García’s belief that the state education department was “retaliating” against the district for some of its actions.
Board member Lorraine Price said the state’s school grades are “meaningless” and that García “is putting strong plans in place.”
“Our district is not in crisis,” she said.
But while Carrillo called the school grading system “crap,” he also said the district, despite its gains, cannot take satisfaction in such low proficiency rates.
“Really, we’re gonna be proud of 18 percent math proficiency in the district?” he said. “There have been significant gains, but for me I feel we have plateaued. … For me it’s not where I hoped to be at this time.”
Based on recent test scores, while Santa Fe students saw a slight increase in both reading and math scores, only 29 percent of them are proficient in reading and just 17.6 percent are proficient in math. Statewide those numbers are slightly better: 31.1 percent for reading and 21.6 percent for math.
While the state’s school grades are seen by some as a simple barometer of how a school is faring, other say they are the result of an impossible-tounderstand formula that has little value.
Gov. Susana Martinez and former Public Education Secretary Hanna Skandera implemented the state’s A-F school grading system with the support of the Legislature in 2012. The system uses a complex set of measures including student proficiency rates, attendance, graduation rates and parental involvement to set a grade. It also measures how students in any one school are doing in comparison to similar students in a similar school from another district — a factor that García says is not easy to understand or fact check.