Education

Judge Stands with Order: Gardendale Can Take Steps Toward Separate School System

A federal district judge has declined to reconsider her ruling two weeks ago that allows Gardendale to break away from the Jefferson County Schools on a limited basis, even though she found that Gardendale’s motives for forming its own municipal school system were racially motivated. In a 49-page supplemental memorandum opinion issued Tuesday morning, U.S. District Judge Madeline Haikala turned down the request by attorneys for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, representing the original plaintiffs in the landmark Stout v. Jefferson County Board of Education case. That case resulted in the forced desegregation of county schools nearly half a century ago. The attorneys contended Haikala’s finding of racial motivation did not match up with allowing Gardendale to proceed with its separation. Read more Read Haikala’s May 9 order Earlier Stories NAACP Asks Judge to Reconsider Allowing Gardendale to Start Its Own School System Read Hiakala’s initial ruling. NAACP Plans to Ask Judge to Reconsider Gardendale School Order; Ruling in Case Defies Conventional Procedure Judge Haikala Is No Stranger to the Spotlight Federal Judge Gives Gardendale Control Over City’s Elementary Schools, Lets JeffCo Keep Middle and High Schools for Now. What They’re Saying Whites Only: School Segregation Is Back, From Birmingham to San Francisco (Newsweek) Judge: Mostly White Southern City May Secede From School District Despite Racial Motive (Washington Post) Judge Lets White Alabama Town Secede From School District Despite ‘Race’ Being a Factor (NBC News) A Federal Judge Is Letting an Alabama School District Return to Segregation (Salon) A Southern City Wants to Secede From Its School District, Raising Concerns About Segregation (Washington Post)

by Robert Carter, BirminghamWatch

NAACP Asks Judge to Reconsider Allowing Gardendale to Start Its Own School System

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has filed a motion that asks U.S. District Judge Madeline Haikala to reverse her decision allowing the city of Gardendale to form its own municipal school district. The motion, which was filed Monday, agrees with Haikala’s finding that the motivation for Gardendale to break away from the Jefferson County Schools is primarily racial. But it argues that the finding contradicts her order to allow the city to take control of two elementary schools in the 2017-18 school year, with the goal of taking over Gardendale High and Bragg Middle schools after three years if racial balance issues are achieved. Jefferson County school officials have fought Gardendale’s bid to break away and form its own system in part because they feared it would endanger their own efforts to be declared effectively desegregated and to be released from federal court supervision. Read more Earlier Stories Read Hiakala’s full ruling. NAACP Plans to Ask Judge to Reconsider Gardendale School Order; Ruling in Case Defies Conventional Procedure Judge Haikala Is No Stranger to the Spotlight Federal Judge Gives Gardendale Control Over City’s Elementary Schools, Lets JeffCo Keep Middle and High Schools for Now. What They’re Saying Whites Only: School Segregation Is Back, From Birmingham to San Francisco (Newsweek) Judge: Mostly White Southern City May Secede From School District Despite Racial Motive (Washington Post) Judge Lets White Alabama Town Secede From School District Despite ‘Race’ Being a Factor (NBC News) A Federal Judge Is Letting an Alabama School District Return to Segregation (Salon) A Southern City Wants to Secede From Its School District, Raising Concerns About Segregation (Washington Post)

by Robert Carter, BirminghamWatch

NAACP Plans to Ask Judge to Reconsider Gardendale School Order; Ruling in Case Defies Conventional Procedure

U.S. District Judge Madeline Hughes Haikala has given Gardendale residents the keys to some of the schools in their city even though she asserted that their effort to withdraw from the Jefferson County Schools system is racially motivated. It’s a contradiction that raised an eyebrow for former federal judge U.W. Clemon, and it’s why he and his colleagues on the legal team for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund plan to file a motion asking Haikala to change her order and halt Gardendale’s takeover. “It’s called a motion to alter,” Clemon said Wednesday. “In light of her more important finding that the Gardendale school board did not carry its burden of proof that the new school system would not impede the desegregation of the Jefferson County Schools, then there is no legal basis on which to approve the formation of the new system.” Clemon’s planned motion would be a step short of a formal application to the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. Read more

by Robert Carter, BirminghamWatch

Federal Judge Gives Gardendale Control Over City’s Elementary Schools, Lets JeffCo Keep Middle and High Schools for Now.

The City of Gardendale has tried for more than three years to break away from the Jefferson County Schools to form its own municipal system. The county system has tried equally hard to keep that from happening. On Monday, a federal judge gave each side some of what they wanted, but maybe not enough to satisfy either. U.S. District Judge Madeline Haikala ruled that the Gardendale City Schools – a system that has existed as only a legal entity for three years, without any schools to operate – may take over Snow Rogers and Gardendale Elementary schools for the 2017-2018 academic year. But Gardendale High and Bragg Middle schools will stay in the Jefferson County system, for at least the next year “and until this Court orders otherwise,” in the judge’s words. Read more.

by Robert Carter, BirminghamWatch

A+, the ACT and Poverty: Can Program Help Poor Schools Too?

A first look at the list of 81 Alabama high schools whose students scored best on the 2016 ACT exam shows an encouraging intersection: Fifty-four of those schools are participants in the A+ College Ready Initiative, a program that helps schools implement Advanced Placement programs and aims to raise education aspirations across the state. But another view of the data, reported by the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama, reveals that 51 of the 54, about 94 percent, of top-performing A+ College Ready schools share another advantage. The schools are working with more affluent student bodies, those with less poverty than the state average. Read more.

by Keysha Drexel

More and More Alabama Students Take Advanced Placement Courses. Will That Raise Achievement in the State’s Public Schools?

A growing number of Alabama high schoolers this spring took year-end exams for their Advanced Placement classes, hoping to make passing scores, earn college credits and ease their paths in higher education. They are part of a steady expansion and emphasis on Advanced Placement classes in Alabama since 2008. The change has been led by A+ College Ready Initiative, a public-private partnership between A+ Education Partnership and the Alabama State Department of Education. Read more.

by Trisha Powell Crain, Alabama School Connection

An Alabama Pioneer: This Jefferson County School Offers a Diverse Mix of Students a “Most Challenging” Education  

For the ninth straight year, a Jefferson County school has earned a seat near the head of the class of the nation’s high schools, according to annual rankings by The Washington Post. The Jefferson County International Baccalaureate School (JCIBS) ranked ninth in the newspaper’s annual list of “America’s Most Challenging High Schools”. JCIBS is a “school within a school,” part of Shades Valley High School.

by Maggie Andrews

Springville High School:  Test Scores, Parents’ Questions Lead To a New Advanced Placement Program   

Amanda Umphrey describes a careful start to the relationship between Springville High School and its new Advanced Placement program. Umphrey, now AP coordinator at Springville and in her 10th year at the school, said timing hadn’t been right earlier for introducing AP. A step in that direction was teachers taking note that ACT scores of students at their school were higher than at other St. Clair County High Schools.

by Trisha Powell Crain, Alabama School Connection

Court Documents Describe Longstanding Turmoil in Hoover’s Trace Crossings Elementary, at least among Teachers and Staff

Court documents and testimony in a federal sexual discrimination lawsuit are now providing an inside, public look at the dysfunction inside Hoover’s Trace Crossings elementary school during the years parents were leaving in droves for private-and home-school opportunities. Those parents’ decisions changed the school’s demographic mix, emptied out the school, and ultimately led district officials to propose geographically rezoning much of the 13,800-student district. The Hoover school community is not unlike most in buying the idea that if a school has more poor kids, more kids of color, that school is more likely to have low test scores. “The notion of blaming the kids is unfortunately very, very common,” Dr. James Spillane, Olin Professor of Learning and Organizational Change at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University in Illinois, said in a recent interview. Read more.

by Trisha Powell Crain, Alabama School Connection

An Alabama Teacher of the Year left. Birmingham’s Oliver Elementary School made national headlines. What happened? What does that say about a path to better schools?

As the last day of school approached at Birmingham’s Oliver Elementary this week, 44-year-old teacher Ann Marie Corgill found herself reflecting on what, for her and many others, was a devastating year. When she decided to walk away from the school after teaching only nine weeks last October, she was in a low place, she said. Not only did the 21-year teaching veteran question her methods, but the Birmingham City Schools system informed her that, although she was nationally board certified and a former Alabama Teacher of the Year, she was not “highly-qualified.” Her story was picked up in local and national news with stories in The Washington Post, CBS News, USA Today, National Public Radio and Huffington Post. Read more.

by Marie A. Sutton