Contrary to claims made by Tucson Unified School District Governing Board member Kristel Foster, the District learned on Monday that the Special Master in the district’s desegregation case, has recommended the removal of magnet status for six magnet schools. The news is devastating to those who trusted the District’s administration, and to those who knew the administration was misrepresenting the situation during an election year.
Special Master Dr. Willis Hawley has recommended the removal of magnet status for the following schools:
- Cholla High Magnet School
- Ochoa Community Magnet School
- Pueblo Magnet High School
- Robison Magnet Elementary School
- Safford K-8 Magnet School
- Utterback Middle Magnet School of the Arts
Despite the fact that Hawley and the Court allowed the District an additional year to work on making the schools attractive to diverse populations in order to achieve integration, the District’s administration refused to support the schools. Instead, the administration questioned the value of integrated schools.
In an email to the ADI in response to questions regarding her false claims, Foster wrote: “I am certain we’ll talk about all of this at a board meeting soon enough.”
Governing Board member Mark Stegeman stated, “TUSD has badly under-supported most of the magnet programs in jeopardy. The one-year reprieve that TUSD got from the Special Master should have been used for massive intervention, but instead, for many schools, the year was wasted.”
“How can the magnet status of any of these schools be maintained when there is a severe shortage of highly qualified teachers, or even certified teachers? And you have a high school where the principal is allowed to make up grades so kids graduate. This is a horrific disservice to the students, parents, and taxpayers of this community. Shame on Foster, Juarez, and Sanchez,” stated Kathy Campbell of TUSD Kids First.
“The action of the Special Master in recommending the termination of magnet status for those six schools is very understandable. He is not making a judgment based on the desires or actions of the teachers at those schools or the parents of the students who attend those schools. He is making a judgment based on the current leadership of TUSD…both elected and appointed. The failure of Superintendent Sanchez and his amen choir on the Governing Board to provide the resources needed to attract out of attendance area students to the so-called magnet schools was well known. These schools did not outperform other schools with their demographics nor did they reduce racial or ethnic segregation. In other words, the District failed to turn these schools into true magnets that would have reduced segregation within TUSD or raised student performance,” stated retired teacher and education activist Rich Kronberg.
“The only disappointment is the rush to remove the magnet status from these schools before a changed Governing Board has an opportunity to provide needed resources to make these schools what they should have been all along…leaders in increasing student achievement and reducing segregation,” continued Kronberg. “It is not a question of lack of funding. After all, TUSD taxpayers provide the District with over $60 million a year in desegregation funding to desegregate schools and help raise the achievement levels of ethnic and racial minority students. That money was not intended to be spent on paying for more useless administrators or trips to worthless conferences, and yet TUSD administration has misused the desegregation funding as an all-purpose slush fund to pay for the pet projects of the superintendent and those who formed the majority faction on the Governing Board until Tuesday’s election.”
“What saddens me about this whole thing is that this is like cutting off a child support payments because the parent was misusing the funds. Now there will be even less money for kids that need it the most; however, there is hope. Deseg money will still be there, and hopefully the new board gets its priorities straight and instead of using that money to fight deseg, they will use that $64 million on the students it was intended to help. Spending $1 million on a Phoenix law firm to fight the Special Master is not showing any “good faith” to resolve this decades-old court case,” said David Morales an education activist and publisher of the Three Sonorans website.
“This is a tragedy, but not unexpected if you have been watching the District for a long time. The jig was really up more than a month ago, when parents in the District got a phone call asking them to take a survey identifying where they would like to see magnet schools and what their themes should be. Some will not be surprised if the so-called survey results reveal huge support for magnets in the middle of TUSD in schools that are already largely desegregated,” stated TUSD Governing Board candidate Betts Putnam Hidalgo.
“TUSD’s support for its magnet schools has been failing for at least 6 or 7 years. Sanchez’ new twist, though, was to get principals to publicly claim undying loyalty. However, even as the genuflecting was taking place and a district-generated letter writing campaign was being rolled out in the schools, the plaintiffs, working through the court, were able to force TUSD to put those funds back into the schools. In fact, many of the principals that professed that loyalty will now see how it was paid back: with first neglect and then demagnetization. One of the schools was the hotbed of the “why should brown kids have to sit next to white kids to get an education” movement in TUSD and now THEY will be demagnetized,” continued Putnam Hidalgo. “Let’s hope that a new Board will be able to constructively oversee desegregation spending, and direct a great deal of it to previously neglected magnet schools.”
Special Master Hawley advised the District in a letter:
In January 2015, the Court established a set of criteria for determining whether magnet schools should retain their magnet status and said that all magnet schools should be both integrated by the 2016-17 school year and should meet specific academic criteria (Doc. 1753).
In the Unitary Status Plan, the plaintiffs and the District agreed that criteria for determining whether a school was integrated would include the provision that no school could have more than 70 percent of students of a single race/ethnicity. The Court recognized that it would be very difficult to integrate an entire school that was not integrated–i.e. that was “racially concentrated”–so it required that the criteria that magnet schools needed to meet would only apply to the entry grade in that school (i.e., K, 6 and 9) and that that goal should be sustained as the student cohort moved through the school.
The January, 2015 Order tasked the Special Master with making recommendations to the Court as to whether individual magnet schools and programs should lose their magnet status if they failed to meet their goals. The Special Master deferred in making recommendations in the fall of 2015 thus providing an opportunity for schools that did not meet the integration criteria established by the Court to do so the following year.
The Special Master examined magnet school enrollment data in 2015-16 and 2016-17 to determine whether the racially concentrated magnet schools had enrolled no more than 70 percent Latino in their entering classes. Six schools did not meet the criteria for integration in both 2015-16 and 2016-17: Cholla, Ochoa, Robison, Pueblo, Safford, and Utterback. See Table 1 for relevant data.
Three other schools fell short of reaching 70 percent or less of one race target: Carrillo, Drachman and Roskruge. Carrillo and Drachman have been “A” schools and have experienced some progress in moving toward integration status. Roskruge is a dual language school and dual language is a high priority in the USP.
The Special Master recommends that Cholla, Ochoa, Robison, Pueblo, Safford, and Utterback lose their magnet status this fall of 2016. There is no reasonable way to argue that these six schools met the integration criteria set by the Court.
Magnet funding for the current year may be sustained unless the District proposes otherwise through the established budget reallocation process. Future funding for the six schools will be resolved in the budget process for the 2017-18 school year.