Big changes on horizon for 4J schools.

Byline: Anne Williams The Register-Guard

The Eugene School District has a puzzle to solve.

Dwindling enrollment, changing demographics, tight budgets and stepped-up accountability for student achievement have forced the district to take a hard look at how it does business.

Superintendent George Russell and the school board believe change is necessary in order to deliver a high-quality, equitable education that boosts achievement among all students.

The tricky part is figuring out how all the pieces should fit together.

For help, the district has turned to both insiders with the close-up view and outsiders with policy expertise, and next fall will ask the public to weigh in. The process - estimated to last 18 months and cost about $225,000 - is dubbed "Shaping 4J's Future," and it's most likely to lead to significant and controversial changes in the way Eugene's 17,357-some students get an education.

Some of the possibilities under discussion:

Dismantling so-called "regional learning centers" for special education and integrating students with disabilities into regular classrooms - with the individualized support they need - to a far greater extent.

Reconfiguring some or all elementary and middle schools, perhaps through a K-8 model or stand-alone schools serving grades K through three or grades four through eight.

Creating small, career-themed learning environments at every high school, similar to what's been done at North Eugene and Churchill high schools, and opening one or more stand-alone small high schools with a particular focus.

Capping enrollment - thereby curtailing transfers - at the four high schools.

Providing all-day kindergarten and possibly Head Start preschool services at some or all elementary schools.

Closing and consolidating some schools.

Establishing a minimum enrollment of 250 for elementary schools and 350 for middle schools.

Redrawing some school boundaries.

Standardizing the curriculum at all schools receiving federal Title I grants for students in poverty, and targeting those funds to grades K through two.

Clustering English language learners - students whose native language is not English - at particular schools, at least for those students in the largely homogeneous South Eugene High School region.

Many of those ideas came from November's weeklong focus group sessions, which brought together more than five dozen teachers, instructional assistants, administrators and other district employees, as well as a handful of site council parents. Russell tapped two of his former top administrators, David Piercy and Marilyn Clotz, to lead that effort, in which participants came up with a variety of options based on different funding scenarios. (Some of the options probably wouldn't be feasible without a significant increase in state funding.)

The eight groups focused on special education, Title I, English language learners, preschool and kindergarten, high school size, elementary and middle school size, technology and grade configuration.

Spencer Butte Middle School teacher Merri Sue Clark, whose group studied grade configuration, "fell in love" with the notion of regrouping elementary and middle schools by grades K through three and four through eight, believing it would ease transitions and strengthen teacher-student relationships for middle-schoolers and allow the primary grades to focus even more on reading.

"I just really think we kind of want to throw everything up in the air and say, in a best-case world, what is the best way to teach kids," she said of the district's process. "We're going to have to make some changes, so I would hope that we would do it in a real thoughtful, reasonable way."

The effort's second phase kicked off this week with the first meeting of a University of Oregon-led think tank made up of professionals tapped for their expertise in education and public policy, business, social services and other arenas.

Working with professors from the UO's Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management, the 15-member group will study the focus group reports, district data and other materials over the next few months and issue a preliminary report in June. By the fall, the UO and the district hope to have specific options and scenarios to run by the public.

"I think one of the purposes of the think tank is to help the school district get a sense of whether these (focus group) ideas can fly in the community," said Piercy, who retired as deputy superintendent in 2000.

Both the focus groups and the think tank heard a sobering presentation that summed up what's driving the effort. For starters, the district today has 1,100 fewer students than it did a decade ago, a number that is expected to fall for at least another five years. That translates to less per-pupil state funding, excess building capacity and an increasing number of small schools that struggle to give students a full range of offerings.

Over the same period, though, the numbers of special education, low-income, minority and English language learner students have climbed, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. For example, 21.5 percent of students are ethnic or racial minorities now, but by 2015 they'll account for 30.9 percent of the student body, according to district projections. The percentage of students enrolled in the federal subsidized meal program - the standard measure of poverty - will grow from 29.8 to 39.7 over that span.

That demographic shift has strained services and underscored an achievement gap. It also has exaggerated some of the pitfalls of the district's 30-year-old system of open school choice and alternative, or magnet, schools. Some elementary and middle schools have seen growing concentrations of harder-to-teach students, while others - particularly alternative schools, which admit students by lottery, and neighborhood schools in affluent areas - attract mostly advantaged children with well-educated, involved parents.

Transfer patterns, meanwhile, show that large numbers of students are leaving both the North Eugene and Churchill high school regions, particularly at the secondary level. In 2006, for example, the North Eugene region lost 1,142 students to schools in other regions, while the South Eugene region saw a net gain of 253.

Shaping 4J's Future is the latest in a series of planning efforts that began in 1999 with Schools of the Future, which pulled together a large group of district employees and community members to research and provide direction on school choice, school size, facilities needs, public involvement and more.

That effort spawned Closures and Consolidations, which resulted in a spate of elementary school closures; Access and Options, which focused on equity issues related to school choice and alternative schools; and the recent Alternative School Reviews, which have led to some changes affecting alternative schools, including the elimination of grade-level caps and the eventual relocation of those sharing campuses with neighborhood schools.

Think tank member and former State Board of Education member Emilio Hernandez Jr. said he's interested in exploring issues related to equity, diversity and the school choice policy, which he believes has led to Eugene's own version of the "white flight" seen in many large urban districts.

"I'm also interested in seeing how the new (state) graduation requirements fit into all of this," said Hernandez, assistant vice provost in the UO's Office of Institutional Equality and Diversity.

Russell pointed to the relocation of alternative schools that share buildings with neighborhood schools as a good example of how the pieces of Shaping 4J's Future interlock. As it stands now, there's no place to move any of them, but the process will probably dictate any school closures, as well as the content of a proposed 2008 capital bond measure that could earmark funds for new buildings.

SHAPING 4J'S FUTURE

A summary of district trends and the reports from the focus groups, as well an explanation of the process, may be viewed online at www.4j.lane.edu. There's also a feedback form that can be downloaded and submitted.