Changing the alignment of the city’s two elementary schools will uproot kids, hurt property values and not necessarily improve academics, parents from the Bradley School said at a forum Monday.
Instead, the focus should be on improving the Irving School, the elementary school on the city’s west side.
In addition, Bradley parents said the proposed redistricting would undercut ongoing improvement efforts by new principals at both schools.
The Proposal
Both the Irving School on Garden Place and the Bradley School on David Humphreys Road house students in pre‑K through fifth grade.
But a subcommittee of the Derby Board of Education has recommended converting Bradley into a pre‑K to second-grade school and converting Irving to third through fifth.
The subcommittee also recommended eventually expanding Bradley so Derby could one day have a single elementary school. The 60-year-old Irving School building would eventually close, according to the proposal.
A Tale Of Two Derbys
Derby currently has a two-tier education system for its youngest students, divided by race and class.
Irving has a high percentage of kids from poverty-stricken minority families while students at Bradley have higher standardized test scores, smaller classes, more instructional time, fewer disciplinary problems and more family support than the students at Irving, according to a 65-page grant application Derby schools submitted to the state last year.
Data from the school district shows that:
Of Irving’s 419 students in 2012 – 2013:
57.8 percent were minority
68.7 percent were low income
Of Bradley’s 343 students in 2012 – 2013:
31.2 percent were minority
38.8 percent were low income
The schools are two miles apart in Connecticut’s smallest city. All the kids in the city become mixed when entering sixth grade at Derby Middle School, but the achievement gap that starts in the lower grades follows them all the way through the school system.
The school board subcommittee recommended the changes as a way to end the disparity.
Parents Say Try Something Else
About 100 parents came to a forum at the Bradley School Monday to oppose the plan.
They pointed out that school officials haven’t provided any concrete data showing how the realignment will help student learning. The school district also hasn’t presented any details as to what the proposal would cost.
Education in general is in upheaval at the moment, with the implementation of common core standards nationwide underway and a new teacher evaluation process in place in Connecticut. Parents said now isn’t a good time to tinker with school alignment in Derby, given all the changes already happening.
Parents with more than one child worried about being stretched thin if one child attends Irving and the other child attends Bradley.
Furthermore, parents said both Irving and Bradley have new principals working to improve the schools. The new principals should be given more time to address issues and a grade realignment would undermine their steps, parents said.
In the video below, parents ask questions about the proposal.
“Let the principals change the curriculum and let our kids show us what they can do,” parent Jamie Drezek said.
Other parents questioned the two-phase approach to redistricting: Why not just expand Bradley sooner rather than later, if Derby wants a single elementary school? Why waste time with the interim step of splitting the grades between two schools?
Parents said forcing kids to transition from school to school isn’t good for learning, especially for younger kids.
Some parents said Irving teachers need to do a better job teaching kids, while others said Irving parents “need to step up.”
Speculation about declining property values was a constant theme during the meeting.
A few parents said they purposefully purchased more valuable homes on the east side of Derby because of Bradley and therefore pay higher taxes, implying their kids deserve to attend a better public school than the kids across town.
Parents also questioned how often police are called to the Irving School.
Parent Chantal Gerckens said the school district tried a similar change in 2006, but went about it in an under-handed way. She credited the school board for being more open this time around, then listed more concerns from Bradley parents.
The discussion spilled over to the Valley Indy Facebook page as well.
Why Is This Happening?
Monday’s forum wasn’t a strict question-and-answer session, nor was it a debate over the merits of the plan.
Instead, Superintendent Matthew Conway said the district will collect all the concerns aired at the forum and answer those concerns through e‑mail.
Irving parents get to go through the same process — listing the strengths and weaknesses of the proposal on sheets of paper — at 6:30 p.m. on Oct. 3 at Irving.
School officials Monday did not elaborate as to why a school board subcommittee recommended the realignment, but distributed copies of a three-page proposal. The report is short on specifics, parents pointed out.
The recommendation to change the grades at Bradley and Irving comes from the school board’s organizational efficiency committee, a group formed two years ago. It includes parents, community members and school board members. The group is tasked with exploring ways to find efficiencies within the district while improving “student outcomes.”
“ …it is essential that we configure our elementary schools in such a way so as to improve educational focus, enhance the effectiveness of professional development and efficiently provide age appropriate instruction and interventions,” the report states. “In addition to improving educational outcomes, such a configuration would promote the support of all Derby schools by all Derby residents. It would promote the general understanding that all of our schools must and will provide a quality education for our students.”
The report states that the subcommittee talked to other school districts that have a K‑2, 3 – 5 configuration “and found that most were quite pleased with the results.”
“Many had not looked formally at the educational impact of the configuration, but believed that it has many advantages,” the report states. Schools in Cromwell reported an increase in CMT scores since that district reconfigured itself.
At the same time, the report acknowledges that “no formal research has been conducted on the K‑2, 3 – 5 configuration.”
Bradley parents repeatedly said they wanted more specific information about how the subcommittee came to its recommendation.
The report is posted below.
Proposal for Elementary School Configuration Change
Struggling District
The realignment proposal has been percolating for about two years, as cash-strapped Derby tries to fund — and reform — a struggling school district.
The Derby Board of Education has pledged to close its widening achievement gap by 2016.
In 2010, parents at Irving actually had the option to transfer kids to Bradley after the school ran afoul of “No Child Left Behind” regulations. Stephen Tracy, then the superintendent, talked about Derby’s increasing achievement gap at the time.
The disparity of the “two Derbys” was also highlighted in the 2010 Derby High School accreditation report by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.
The state’s education department considers Derby to be among the lowest performing school districts in Connecticut.
The designation allowed Derby to receive extra funding from the “Alliance District” program, which was launched two years ago to help fund reform efforts within poor-performing school districts — and close the state’s achievement gap.
While Bradley students in general score better on standardized tests compared to Irving students, both schools still lag behind the rest of Connecticut, as does Derby Public Schools as a whole.
CMT scores released in 2013 show fifth-graders in both schools struggled with the math test. Only 38 percent of the fifth-graders at Irving met “goal” on the math test, according to state data. Only 48 percent met “goal” at Bradley.
The state average — 69 percent.
The chart below shows a comparison between Bradley and Irving test scores. It is from ConnCAN, an advocacy group.
The article continues after the document.
There is research showing that ending the isolation of low-income kids within a given school by mixing them with middle-class kids can benefit students, but those benefits have not been aired in Derby thus far.
Members of the school board and the subcommittee did not make comments Monday.
In appealing to the city’s tax board for more money, school officials in 2011 pointed out they were examining controversial issues, such as regionalizing the school district or restructuring the elementary schools to save money and preserve academic quality.
Connie Condon, a consultant who helped facilitate the work of the subcommittee that recommended the realignment, indicated Monday that efforts to regionalize Derby schools with neighboring districts have not advanced.
