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by Joe Sullivan

There ought to be a law against huge high schools, or at the very least public school students should have good alternatives to being crammed into them.

As reported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a growing body of research shows that, “small schools have higher attendance rates, higher grade-point averages, lower dropout rates, and students and teachers who report being more satisfied with the experience.”

Knox County Schools’ newly appointed assistant superintendent for instruction Donna Wright concurs. “The larger our schools get, the more impersonal they become, and the more youngsters we are losing,” Wright says. “Some kids can cope with it quite well, but then I see what I refer to as non-traditional students who have a lot of ability, but when we start creating these masses they just get lost.”

Yet Farragut High School already has well over 2,000 students and two other West Knox high schools, Bearden and Karns, are rapidly approaching the 2,000 mark. To make things worse, as matters stand, the school board is planning additions to Farragut and Karns that would increase their enrollments rather than building a new high school that would reduce them.

In his state of the community speech last week, County Mayor Mike Ragsdale insisted that the county’s five-year capital improvement plan provided enough funding to solve what he characterized as an overcrowding problem. “Whether the solution is additions to current schools or a new school is up to the school board. Whichever they decide, they have the resources in the capital plan to do it... even if it means shifting some priorities,” Ragsdale said.

But school board members dispute his claim. “That’s a bald-faced lie,” asserts one of them, Robert Bratton, who is seldom given to understatement. Bratton and others explain that the Ragsdale administration has imposed new budgeting constraints that preclude a commitment to the $35 million to $40 million cost of a new high school. That’s because the largest allowable commitment in any one year is $30 million. Heretofore, the school board had been able to spread the cost of a new building over the three or more years it would take to design and build it. But under the Ragsdale standard, the entire cost of a project is assessed against the year when a new commitment is made rather than over the years in which the money is spent.

School board members and at least some county commissioners had understood the new commitment standard would be applicable to all Knox County undertakings. But such is not the case. In Ragsdale’s budget, the estimated $45 million cost of a downtown library is spread over three years and $15 million for jail expansion is spread over five years.

“Budgeting differently for schools than for jail expansion and a library is wrong,” says County Commissioner Wanda Moody, who is a strong proponent of a new West Knox high school. “Adding at Farragut is ridiculous, and Bearden and Karns are getting too large as well,” she says.

Reducing their enrollments is only part of the solution to the problems Wright addressed. Indeed, her observations were made in context of one of the elements of Ragsdale’s ballyhooed Great Schools plan. As set forth on a Great Schools website, “The strategy would create small (400 students maximum) theme-based high schools. These small schools could be co-located within existing comprehensive high schools.... This strategy would also offer all high school students the opportunity to enroll in a high school of their choice, based on their interests and aspirations. Students can pursue more individualized courses of study through the theme-based schools than many of the current comprehensive schools are able to offer.”

Wright, who was director of high schools before assuming her new post, has extensively canvassed models for such a program in cities ranging from Charlotte, Miami, and Milwaukee to New York City. “These smaller learning communities do a beautiful job of recapturing these kids who’ve gotten lost in a large school setting. It’s really exciting to be at one of them and listen to the excitement of the kids’ voices,” Wright says. But she cautions, “So many times we have the enthusiasm and the energy to get there, but we simply haven’t had the resources in Knox County. When you start breaking your schools down, you’ve got a lot of training and restructuring to do. You’ve got to get complete buy-in by people who are well-prepared and understand what we’re trying to achieve.”

The only concrete step the school system has taken to date is to plan for the opening next year of a Finance Academy at Austin-East High School, drawing upon a specialized curriculum and training provided by the National Academy Foundation; but per NAF stipulations, it will be limited to between 30 and 60 students. Beyond that, Wright envisions a Technical Academy at Fulton High School but, as yet, nothing specific for the larger schools out west. “We’re still in the discussion stage,” she says.

The discussions about which Wright gets most enthusiastic involve partnering with UT on a free-standing school patterned after a collaboration between Bard College and the New York City School System. “The kids have the ability to parlay college credits with their high school curriculum, and these were kids who weren’t even dreaming of college before they went there. They were potential dropouts, but now they are being guided and coaxed, and the results have been very dramatic.”

The UT College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences is studying the feasibility of its participation, but interim dean John Koontz stresses the university’s budgetary constraints and lack of space on campus. So where would the school go? The president of the Cornerstone Foundation, Laurens Tullock, who has been a behind-the-scenes architect of the entire Great Schools initiative, says “space is our least burdensome constraint. He suggests the new academy could go in Old City Hall, which the Knoxville Area Chamber Partnership is vacating, or in the city’s old convention center or other existing downtown buildings at least for starters. The tougher issues, Tullock says, are setting curriculum and admissions policy and covering up-front and operating costs.

Unlike other elements of the Great Schools plan, such as teacher performance pay, for which Ragsdale has designated initial funding, none has been identified for new academies. At the same time, the county mayor has cut $10 million from the school board’s recommended operating budget—the kind of funding that would be needed to staff and maintain a new academy or a new high school.

“I never heard of cutting your way to greatness,” says disconcerted school board member Dan Murphy.

May 13, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 20 © 2004 Metro Pulse