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by Joe Sullivan

When the Knox County public school year starts next week, every youngster entering kindergarten will get a literary assessment. For those who can’t even recognize many letters of the alphabet, experience in prior years has shown that their prospects of ever becoming proficient in reading are highly problematic.

But this was due to be the year in which Knox County Schools launched an early intervention program to address the problem. Under County Mayor Mike Ragsdale’s heralded Great Schools initiative, the first element was to extend school hours for kindergartners who are unprepared, during which teachers would offer them special tutoring in a small group setting. Ragsdale’s budget provided more than $700,000 for this initiative, primarily for hiring teaching assistants to help carry the extra instructional load.

As it turns out, though, funding for the extended hours program has yet to reach the school system; nor have plans been made for offering it this school year on more than a pilot basis in just six of the county’s 50 elementary schools.

That slippage is symptomatic of a disconnect between Ragsdale and School Superintendent Charles Lindsey. Indeed, lack of collaboration—or should I say ill will—between these two strong-willed men impinges on planning for the betterment of public education in Knox County in a variety of ways. Implementation of Ragsdale’s multi-faceted Great Schools initiative, for which funding is due to rise to $6.8 million next year, is a prime example. Plans for building a new West Knox high school to relieve overcrowding at existing ones could prove to be another. Lindsey was conspicuous by his absence from the meeting at Farragut High School last week, at which Ragsdale unveiled plans for a $36 million new high school at a location yet to be determined.

The very fact that Ragsdale has taken the lead in all these matters connotes his dissatisfaction with what he considers to be the school superintendent’s lack of leadership. If Ragsdale had his druthers, he’d get rid of Lindsey in a heartbeat, but the county mayor doesn’t have the authority to do so. That’s because the superintendent is appointed by and accountable to an elected school board, a majority of whose members remain supportive of Lindsey. “Ragsdale wants to run the school system, and Lindsey won’t let him,” says one school board member on condition of anonymity.

Under state law, it’s the school board’s prerogative to decide how school funds are spent, subject only to County Commission’s approval of its overall budget. But Ragsdale has sought to circumvent this prerogative where Great Schools funding is concerned by directing it to a new foundation that would then specify how it’s spent. School board members privately chafe at this circumvention but aren’t prepared to publicly protest any usurpation of their authority.

One reason, or excuse, for slippage in the kindergarten intervention program is that it’s taken longer than expected to get the new foundation formed. The Great Schools Foundation, as it will be known, is now due to be in place by the end of August with a board of directors that includes the county mayor, the city mayor, the County Commission chair, the school board chair, the superintendent and representatives of business, teacher and parent organizations, among others.

Ragsdale’s chief of staff, Mike Arms, who was dismayed to learn that the kindergarten program won’t be fully implemented this year, insists that, “There’s never been any doubt about the funding, and as soon as the foundation is in place it will be there.” Arms chaired a working group that formulated all elements of the Great Schools initiative last winter and then placed Lindsey in charge of their implementation. He goes on to say that “Mayor Ragsdale met with Dr. Lindsey this week [last week, by the time you read this] and was assured that everything was on track.”

Lindsey couldn’t be reached for comment. But according to school system spokesman Russ Oaks what the superintendent meant by “on track” was that the entire Great Schools program would be presented to the school board this week for its approval. “He felt uncomfortable moving forward with any of the individual pieces until the school board had approved the program as a whole,” Oaks says. Why it’s taken since April, when the program was unveiled, until now for Lindsey to present it to his board was left unclear.

Meanwhile, planning for a pilot program that will provide an extra hour a day of instruction for unprepared kindergarten students at six schools has been proceeding on a seemingly separate track. With $30,000 in funding from a federal grant, kindergarten teachers from these schools have been getting special training and materials for working with their least prepared students in very small groups of two or three, “Before we invest big bucks in going systemwide with a new program, we want to make sure it’s effective,” says Fran Thomforde, the school system’s director of academics, who’s been overseeing plans for the pilot.

That relegates broadening the program’s reach until the 2005-06 school year, when several other elements of the Great Schools initiative are also due to be implemented. Those include: 1) a birth-to-kindergarten program for disadvantaged children and their parents, for which $1.2 million has been committed; 2) an additional $800,000 for a preschool program targeting the same set of kids when they reach age four; and 3) $2 million in performance pay supplements for teachers at targeted inner city schools where student test score improvement exceeds the norm.

All of those are worthy undertakings, and one can only hope that friction between the county mayor and the school superintendent won’t impede their progress.

August 5, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 32 © 2004 Metro Pulse