A different perspective offers clarity

By Dave Churchill (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Friday, May 4, 2007

Last winter, I met an educator who specializes in literacy programs, working mostly with teachers who have some of the toughest classrooms in America, deep in the poorest regions of New York, Detroit and other big cities.

In many of those schools, children invariably read below grade level. Weak elementary instruction in run-down and under-funded schools, troubled home lives, the constant threat of gang violence and the burden of extreme poverty have left these students without the reading skills to learn at a middle school level.

Their instructors, although prepared to teach middle school-level literature and composition and science, often do not know how to do the remedial work that will help adolescent students read well enough to understand grade-level textbooks and then move forward with their educations.

Given a chance to visit some of the schools where reading is being re-taught to middle-schoolers, I spent most of this week in New York, observing with awe the contrasts — and similarities — to our own community. My high school-age daughter came along so that she could visit New York universities (wherein lies another tale).

Our host lives in East Harlem, a poor neighborhood just a few blocks east of Central Park. Influenced by years of New York-based television shows, Caitlin and I expected to encounter rudeness, hostility and a challenging environment. What we found were people no less friendly than those in Fergus Falls, wonderful and easy-to-use public transportation and no particular feeling of insecurity.

In the schools, I met excellent, dedicated teachers and administrators. Classes were relatively small — the largest I visited had 18 students — because many children miss school on any given day. Indeed, the student-to-teacher ratio was better than what I have often observed in rural Minnesota.

The school buildings themselves are a different story. One that I visited contained a middle school, a high school and an elementary school, each on its own floor or floors. It had also been home to a second middle school until the two were combined a couple of years ago.

There is no library and I saw no computers for student use. Although most had small, blacktopped playground areas, not one of these city schools had a baseball field, a soccer field or a running track.

Minnesotans would be struck by the noise level in the buildings. Because they have no air conditioning, classrooms are warm even on beautiful, temperate early-May mornings and by mid-June will be ovens. Classroom windows are customarily open and a never-ending rattle of trains, roar of diesel trucks, shouts of workmen in the streets, the wail of sirens and the shrill yells of students in the schoolyard. Quiet conversation is difficult and concentration even more difficult.

No matter how good the instruction or students, I can not imagine that these environments are the best place to learn.

Although there are few overt similarities, my visit to inner-city classrooms certainly had me thinking about the opportunity Fergus area residents will have next week to authorize a major renovation of our school buildings.

It is easy to dismiss environment and buildings as a factor in learning. But clearly they play a big role. Libraries and laboratories and computer networks are the stuff of modern education, and unless students have ready and easy access they are not getting the same quality education.

There is one way that poor, inner-city schools are similar to ours in Fergus Falls. Old buildings require tremendous outlays for maintenance. If that money is instead spent on direct education, the maintenance problems become even bigger and soon takes a big bite out of what can be spent on teachers and materials.

In many inner cities, the poor neighborhoods can not generate sufficient tax proceeds to address problems with school buildings. Their reality is that the physical facilities are not likely to ever get better, only worse.

In Fergus Falls, we have a choice. The cost to upgrade our schools is within reach of most residents.

Although I went to New York with no thought that what I saw there would have a bearing on far-off Fergus Falls, I instead found clarity in my own thinking about Tuesday’s school bond referendum.

Once undecided, I am convinced now that we have to invest in our school buildings before it is too late, before their deteriorating quality seriously affects our children’s education.

My own children are near enough to graduation that the proposed project will influence only a tiny part of their K-12 education.

But immediate and personal interests are only part of the story. The quality of our schools is likely to be a cornerstone of our community’s future; best if that cornerstone is solid.

Journal publisher Dave Churchill’s column runs on Fridays.