School Technical Ideas

The Palm Beach County School District reported thousands more incidents of bullying and harassment of students between 2007 and 2010 than any other school district in Florida.

But district officials say the numbers are not indicative of a growing bullying problem here. Rather, that they show district officials are taking the issue seriously.

“We’re knee deep in it and we’re trying our best,” said Kim Mazauskas, a resource teacher with the district’s office of safe schools. “The numbers will go up when you address something.”

Palm Beach County schools, which teach about 172,000 students, reported more than 5,600 incidents of bullying between 2007 and 2010, according to data provided by the state Department of Education.

David Benson, the assistant director for safe schools for the district, said one of the reasons the number of incidents are high is that the district is following the state’s guidelines, including reporting all incidents of bullying even if the claim is unsubstantiated.

State Department of Education spokeswoman Cheryl Etters said the state sends schools guidance, but how the numbers are reported varies greatly. She said some districts might be reporting bullying as other crimes, such as battery or fighting.

For example Miami-Dade County Public Schools, which has about 345,000 students, only reported one bullying incident in the 2007-2008 school year and seven incidents in the 2008-2009 school year before increasing to more than 800 incidents in 2009-2010.

Calls to the Miami-Dade County Public Schools Office of Safe Schools were referred to School Police Chief Charles Hurley, who did not return calls seeking comment.

Etters said that when the state office of safe schools sees statistics that seem incorrect, they point out the issue and give the district a chance to change the numbers. But she said districts do not face any penalty for incorrect reporting.

Benson said there are nearly 200 schools, including all the charter schools in Palm Beach County, and there were about 2,000 incidents in 2009-2010 which works out to about 100 incidents of bullying per school.

“Our numbers seem much more realistic,” Benson said.

Mazauskas said the district has a Website full of resources for students and teachers, such as scripts that guide teachers through how to respond to various incidents like cyber bullying.

Craig Goldenfarb is a West Palm Beach attorney who represents the parents of two students who are threatening to sue the Palm Beach County School District alleging they didn’t do enough to stop bullying those students endured at Jeaga Middle School and Seminole Trails Elementary School.

“At least they are reporting it here, which is good,” Goldenfarb said.

Jeaga Principal Kevin Gatlin said the district has made it easier for students to report bullying, such as creating “bullying boxes” where students can drop off anonymous complaints as well as separate hotlines for each school.

Among Palm Beach County Schools Boca Raton Middle School consistently was among the schools with the highest number of incidents. Benson, who used to be an assistant principal at Boca Raton Middle, said what that shows is that teachers and administrators had a good pulse of what was happening in the school and document every incident.

Benson said the unofficial numbers being reported by schools for the 2010-2011 school year that just ended show a drop to 1,849 incidents

“We are making progress,” Benson said.

The state has flagged more than 400 students’ FCAT test scores in Palm Beach County for irregularities that could point to the possibility of cheating, according to data the district released Thursday.

That total included both students who took the FCAT this spring as well as students who did not pass the standardized tests last year and had to retake them again during this past school year.

Palm Beach County also was one of 14 districts the state said had schools with suspicious patterns of wrong-to-right erasure marks on tests.

Only one school in Palm Beach County was flagged for erasure marks, said Marc Baron, chief of performance accountability. Baron did not specify the school. The state cited confidentiality until investigations have been concluded.

However, state Department of Education spokesman Tom Butler said a total of 21 schools in the 14 districts were flagged under this analysis.

The state has asked the 14 districts to investigate the matter.

This year, the state contracted with Utah-based Caveon Test Security to do two systematic analyses of FCAT test results. This year, the test security firm looked two issues – an unusual number of erased answers and for exam answers that were nearly identical from students at the same school.

Out of more than 4 million tests, Caveon flagged 6,967 test results for similarity and another 864 for erasures. It was unclear Thursday whether these totals included those students who did not pass the FCAT last year and who had to take it again this year.

This is considerably higher than in past years, “but expected, due to the use of a more systematic and sophisticated analysis,” Butler said in an email.

In spring 2010, only 90 tests of more than 4 million were invalidated by the department.

Of course, last year, test results were delivered late by the test contractor Pearson. Butler noted that not much time was given for cheating analyses.

Still, in spring 2009, 227 tests were invalidated, and in spring 2008, that number was 445.

Florida and Caveon Test Security officials have said the goal is not only to catch instances of cheating, but also to prevent cheating by students and teachers and school administrators.

The report cards are out for Florida schools, and for the seventh year in a row, the Palm Beach County School District has retained its coveted A grade.

The number of elementary and middle schools in the county earning an A increased from last year and the number of schools earning an F decreased.

The Florida Department of Education on Thursday released the 2011 school grades for elementary and middle schools.

About two-thirds of the district’s elementary and middle schools scored an A.

Only one school, Joseph Littles-Nguzo Saba charter school in West Palm Beach, received an F, falling from a C last year. In 2010, three elementary or middle schools in the district received F’s.

This is a huge success for our entire community, Palm Beach County Schools Superintendent Bill Malone said in a message to district employees Thursday. You should all be proud of your hard work and dedication at every level.

School grades are based on FCAT scores, including students’ current-year performance and their year-to-year progress.

High school grades are expected in December. Those grades include other factors, such as graduation rates and student participation in accelerated course work.

School grades are highly anticipated and watched closely by parents each year when deciding where they want their children to go to school. The grades have taken on such importance that they have been known to affect property values in neighborhoods that feed into a certain school. And a good grade means more money flowing into the school.

Schools that receive an A or improve at least one letter grade from the previous year are eligible to earn an additional $70 per student .

The increase in A schools in Palm Beach County comes after the state raised the proficiency expectations on the writing exam this year.

Statewide, 58 percent of 2,547 elementary and middle schools earned an A, an increase of 82 schools.

Thirty-one schools, or 1 percent, earned an F, a decrease of 13 schools. Overall, the number of schools with a B or C fell, while the number of D schools rose.

Palm Beach County had the highest percentage of A schools of the largest seven urban districts, said Marc Baron, the district’s chief of performance accountability.

When I look at individual schools, it’s pleasing to see some schools make really dramatic changes, Baron said.

Pleasant City Elementary in West Palm Beach rebounded to an A after falling to an F last year.

In 2010, then-Superintendent Art Johnson suggested the school’s small enrollment could have been a factor in its plunge.

Christa McAuliffe Middle in Boynton Beach was one of two county schools this year to receive an I for incomplete.

Principal Faith Ann Cheek is confident the I will turn into an A.

She said boxes containing finished math and reading FCATs from the school’s eighth-graders mistakenly were sent to the wrong place to be graded – a Texas facility instead of Illinois.

They’ve been rerouted and are being graded now, she said.

Also Wednesday, the state released information on how many schools had made the yearly progress required by the federal No Child Left Behind law.

That measure focuses on how different groups of students perform, including English language learners, poor students, minorities and those with disabilities.

To meet adequate progress this year, 79 percent of Florida students in each subgroup must be proficient in reading and 80 percent proficient in math up from 72 percent and 74 percent last year, respectively.

Including high schools, less than one in 10 Palm Beach County schools met those requirements this year, down from 14 percent last year, the Palm Beach County School District said in a memo.

Statewide, the percentage of schools making adequate yearly progress fell from 14 percent to 10 percent this year.

In Florida the adequate progress benchmarks will rise sharply each year until 2013-2014, by which time 100 percent proficiency will be the target, state and county officials said.

Parents could someday see nearly identical arts or technology magnet schools in every region of Palm Beach County.

The duplication would make it easier for parents to get their children into the school of their choice, and lower the Palm Beach County School District’s costs to bus kids to those schools.

That was among the dozens of suggestions bantered about last week by parents and school officials at a summit to suggest changes to the choice and career options programs.

We’re too big to only have one of what is popular, said Superintendent Bill Malone of his idea to duplicate and regionalize choice programs.

Choice and career options include magnet schools such as Alexander W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts, which allow students to leave their neighborhood school and attend specialized programs anywhere in the county.

Choice and Career Options Director Barbara Terembes said the point of the summit was to re-examine everything about school choice, from the lottery system that awards seats to students to how the district provides transportation and pays for choice programs. Parents, chamber of commerce members and officials from both the school district and local universities split into discussion groups and spent most of Thursday discussing issues faced by choice programs and offering suggested policy changes.

A frequent suggestion brought up at the summit was the idea of regionalizing or duplicating popular programs across the county.

The same thing should be available at different locations, so you don’t have to ship your kids across the county, said Delray Beach resident Ingrid Lee, the mother of two children attending choice programs at S.D. Spady Elementary School in Delray Beach.

Malone is also a proponent of regionalizing choice programs. Now, the main option for middle school arts students going to high school is just Dreyfoos in West Palm Beach. He suggested the district could create another arts magnet at a high school in southern Palm Beach County and draw a dividing line. Students who lived north of the line would be eligible to apply for Dreyfoos and students who lived south would be eligible to apply for the new program.

Other programs such as science or architecture could also be duplicated in the north, south and western regions so children in each region would have a nearby school of their choice for any field of study, Terembes said.

Regionalization could help reduce transportation costs, Terembes said.

We’re in hard budget times and it is expensive, she said.

Transportation Department General Manager Pete DiDonato estimated that a third of his buses are dedicated to taking choice kids to schools far from their homes.

Summit members also suggested that duplicating choice programs could alleviate some of the complaints from parents caused by a shortage of spots in popular programs. Terembes said roughly 18,000 students applied to get into choice programs for next year but there were only 8,800 available seats. At Don Estridge High Tech Middle School in Boca Raton alone about 1,300 incoming 6th graders applied for only about 400 open spots.

Lee suggested developing more in-house programs open only to students who would normally attend that school if they were not in a choice program. That would give students reasons to stay in their neighborhood schools.

I think it is awful that we have to resort to choice, Lee said. I wish we were more satisfied with our local schools.

Malone said he did not know how much the regionalized school choice idea would cost, but it would not be likely to happen anytime soon.

Most of the ideas on my wish list are not going to happen during my time here, said Malone, who is only serving as superintendent until August 2012. But we can get them moving along.

All of the suggestions from the summit and e-mails sent to the district will be given to district officials who will use them to propose changes to district choice policies. Policy changes could be put in place by the 2012-2013 school year, Terembes said, but the creation of any new programs at schools would probably take longer.