KALAMAZOO (WKZO-AM) — The parents of the students at the Woodward School of Technology and Research and Washington Writers Academy are angry that a state agency is calling their kids failures, and that the School Reform Office is threatening to close the two schools.
They are working with local school district officials to make sure it doesn’t happen.
350 community members turned out for a forum on the issue Wednesday night at Chenery Auditorium and not a single person, of the dozens who spoke thought the School Reform Office was right and that closure should be an option. In fact they didn’t find any of the options offered by the SRO to be all that attractive.
Parents sang the praises of the staff, the teachers and the administrators. They say they had watched their own children improve and that forcing them to move to another school wouldn’t just be a waste of time but may actually cause a lot more harm than good.
Supt. Michael Rice questions whether the SRO has the legal authority to close schools under the statute that created it, and he doesn’t quite understand how they could think that closing a perfectly good building and forcing students on to buses would be good for the children in any way.
He says students at the two schools have shown improvement in a number of other ways and on their scores on a range of other tests.
State Senator Margaret O’Brien says she is already working with Senate Education Committee Chair Phil Pavlov on a bill that would disband the SRO, because nothing they have done has worked.
She says she thinks with this kind of community support it would be impossible to close those two schools.
A Facebook page is being created to keep the community updated, Dr. Rice says everyone should express their opposition to the lawmaker of their choice and a petition is being circulated and is available at on-line at Change.org. Just search for “Woodward”.
A thousand people have signed it already.
School Officials say the SRO only judges schools by their performance on the state’s flawed assessment test, and officials from the agency have never actually visited the targeted 38 schools.
They finally will visit the two Elementary Schools in Kalamazoo next week.
