2012-13 enrollment declines

Recovery School District sees drop in student population

The nine schools in the greater Baton Rouge area managed by the state-run Recovery School District have collectively lost more than 850 students compared with a year ago, according to preliminary enrollment numbers.

Istrouma High and Crestworth Middle, two Baton Rouge schools that have undergone the biggest changes in the past year, suffered the biggest enrollment declines, 289 and 197 students respectively.

Istrouma High was run during the 2011-12 school year by the East Baton Rouge Parish school system. It was taken over last summer after Louisiana Department of Education officials decided that the low-performing high school was not making improvements at a fast enough pace.

Meanwhile, Crestworth Middle School also was under different management last year, a charter school group connected to Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church in Baton Rouge. The charter school group, after three years in control, handed the school back to the state with unpaid bills and a facility in disrepair.

Consequently, Crestworth’s 166 students — it had 363 in 2011-12 — have spent the past two months 4½ miles away at another RSD-run school, Glen Oaks Middle School.

Glen Oaks Middle, likewise has fewer students, 215, compared with 287 year ago. Crestworth students are scheduled to return home to their Scotlandville campus on Oct. 22.

The RSD schools were at one time low-performing neighborhood schools run by local school districts.

Istrouma, by far, has suffered the greatest enrollment loss of all the RSD-run schools in the area. During 2011-12, Istrouma had 669 students; this year, the school has 380.

Also, last school year, the Istrouma campus housed a separate, independent high school, EBR Lab Academy, which enrolled 228 students but was closed soon after the state takeover was announced.

The space EBR Lab occupied at Istrouma is now filled with students from nearby Prescott Middle, which saw its enrollment drop as well, from 262 to 240 students. The old Prescott campus at 4055 Prescott Road now sits empty, except for some RSD administrative offices.

Robert Webb, who took over as principal of Istrouma High in April and is a graduate of the high school, said he’s not surprised by the decline.

Webb said some parents who were uncertain about Istrouma’s future opted instead for other public high schools in Baton Rouge, particularly Belaire High, and Webb said he understands.

The collective enrollment for the nine RSD schools in the greater Baton Rouge area decreased from 3,392 on Oct. 1, 2011, to 2,539 on Oct. 1 this year. That’s a decline of 853 students.

The latest Oct. 1 numbers, however, are unaudited. Official public school enrollment numbers will not be released until later this year.

The state takes official enrollment snapshots of all public schools on Oct. 1 and Feb. 1 of every school year. The numbers drive state education funding, $8,733 per student in Baton Rouge, during 2012-13.

The state released the unaudited Oct. 1 numbers Friday in response to a request made Oct. 4 by The Advocate.

Earlier in the month, the East Baton Rouge Parish released its unaudited Oct. 1 numbers, showing 42,690 students at 83 campuses. That’s 613 fewer students than the district had enrolled Oct. 1, 2011.

The only RSD-affiliated school that the RSD did not release Oct. 1 enrollment numbers for was Kenilworth Science and Technology School, a middle school in south Baton Rouge that is run as a charter school. That school had 479 students in 2011-12.

The nine schools that RSD released enrollment numbers for are run by state employees. A year ago, Capitol High in Baton Rouge and St. Helena Middle in Greensburg, were run by state employees.

Capitol High is the only one of the nine to actually gain students, 14, while St. Helena lost 32 students.

Five of the nine schools that RSD runs now were charter schools operated by the now defunct nonprofit group, Advance Baton Rouge. Unsatisfied with those schools’ academic progress, the RSD, took those five schools over during the latter half of the 2011-12 school year, replacing much of the faculty.

All five lost students, ranging from 22 students at Prescott Middle to 130 at Dalton Elementary. Four of the five schools are in Baton Rouge. Pointe Coupee Central, which lost 63, students, is in Morganza.

RSD Superintendent Patrick Dobard has said that RSD will not run most of these schools for long.

The plan is to find well-regarded charter management groups to take over at least seven schools as early as next summer so that collectively they form a new Achievement Zone in north Baton Rouge. The state is reviewing charter applications and will make a decision by December. Dobard said the state will wait longer if it fails to find a quality operator for a school on the first try.

Comments

1) Comment by joey.esposito - 17/10/2012

The door swings both ways. My RSD school enrolls students throughout the year who had been attending Broadmoor, Capitol, etal. This is common practice now and has been for the past 4 years. We teach the children who show up, just as teachers do in every school system.

2) Comment by spqr - 16/10/2012

@Joey...I picked up eight students from the RSD in January of last year who were tossed out. Call it "bull" if it makes you feel better, but I am there everyday and I know what goes on in schools outside the pages of a jaundiced newspaper. I am not sure you do.

3) Comment by Noel Hammatt - 16/10/2012

@Traveler: Amen! and to @BacknBR: Amen! Tweet, Repost, Correct. Comment, and when all else fails. Civil Disobedience. If the government wants to hide their work and their data behind walls of highly paid (out of our tax dollars) attorneys and Communication specialists (read, spinners) then we have to get access to truth. And we have to demand it. Force them to show us facts, not their silly "beliefs."

4) Comment by Traveler - 16/10/2012

The national news reporters explained that the "Arab Spring" was a product of "grass roots" communications via social media (Facebook and Twitter, for example). Since the current administration has backers with deep pockets, the best way to spread the truth about what is being done to our public education system is also via social media. To those of you who recognize that our public schools are being "deformed" (rather than "reformed"); to those of you who recognize that those with political ambitions are using our children to further their own self-serving interests; to those of you who deplore the venture vultures sapping our tax dollars to fill their own bank accounts: PLEASE use social media to spread the word! You can repost these articles (with comments) to Facebook and Twitter. If enough people speak out, then we can have an "Education spring" and send those deformers packing.

5) Comment by BacknBR - 16/10/2012

I find it disappointing, yet not surprising, that the Advocate fails to even mention that the same people who ran the now defunct Advance Baton Rouge, are the same folks who are preparing to run the Baton Rouge Achievement Zone. Baton Rouge will never change!

6) Comment by Noel Hammatt - 16/10/2012

Looks like the illustrious (or at least, well illustrated by the "spin" of the high paid "spinners" from the State Department of Education) Recovery School District schools are again showing us just what a mistake the state has made. Empty and half empty schools stand as monuments to the folly of the ideologically driven "school reform" crowd, and leave our local EBR schools overcrowded and hurting for space. What will it take for the citizens of Baton Rouge to wake up and recognize that their schools, paid for out of their hard-earned tax dollars, are being taken over by a state agency (The RSD) with absolutely no accountability) to the taxpayers at all. Insulated by lies and "spin" from highly paid publicists at the Department of Education, BESE, and the lucrative list of local actors vying for money and power, the ones labeled by others as the ABC crowd of profit makers... APEL, ALEC, BRAF, BRAC, and the infamous CABL, always a ready mouthpiece for reforms touted by the Cabal of profit minders at LABI. All on this list are smiling all the way to the bank! Meanwhile, our schools sit empty or nearly so, while the majority of EBR students sit in overcrowded classrooms in order to please the power-makers in this town. Shame on them. Oh, and if you believe that the "Letter Grades" actually say something about the quality of the schools? Well, they are about as accurate a measure as the VAM... that is to say, they are a joke. The DO, however, tell you a lot about the percentage of students in the school living at or near the poverty line. But quality of teaching. Nope, that is not even considered in the "Letter Grades."

7) Comment by Noel Hammatt - 16/10/2012

@joey.esposito calling "bull" on @spqr. Sorry Joey, but @spqr is correct. In order to receive scores from a student, the student has to be in attendance in that school on October 1st, AND on the testing date. If the student is "counseled" out of a charter school or an RSD school prior to testing, then the District receiving the student is held accountable for the score. Not the school, but the district. So when these students leave the charters and RSD schools and return to EBR (to answer @tradewinns question, in part) EBR is held accountable, even if the student was in the RSD right up until testing.

8) Comment by unity - 16/10/2012

Istrouma had made a 9.1 point improvement in the 2011-2012 school year before it was taken over by the RSD. Progress, but not fast enough according to the DOE. RSD takes it over and loses almost half of it's students. Crestworth gets taken over and RSD can't even get its doors open in time for the new school year. It loses over half of its students. The students who leave the RSD opt to reenter EBRPSS which now has fewer facilities to use to educate them. Middle and High schools in EBR have overcrowding issues and RSD continues to threaten to take over more facilities without having enough qualified educators or charter operators to handle what they already have taken over. Once again the taxpayers and EBR students get the short end of the stick, are asked to do more with less and are called failures despite making progress.

9) Comment by tradewinns - 16/10/2012

the remaining questions is "where did they go?".

10) Comment by Concerned_Parent - 16/10/2012

But the RSD is doing soooo good. Just ask Mr. White, he'll tell you all about his "data" and "research" and reports by charter school board members that say so.

11) Comment by gmanderson - 16/10/2012

The charter schools have failed to prove their worth. What is the next "BIG" idea?

12) Comment by joey.esposito - 16/10/2012

I call bull on spqr. Quoting spqr, "When state testing rolls around each spring, many charters take inventory of students who are struggling and release them in advance." The standardized test scores of these students you claim are released are still credited to the school you claim released them. It would benefit their school for these released students to take the test and score unsatisfactory instead of not taking it at all.

13) Comment by lovemykids - 16/10/2012

Just think if Romney is elected Jindal can do for the country what he has done for Louisiana.

14) Comment by Marc - 16/10/2012

Let me see if I've got this right... The Louisiana Department of Education took over these schools several years ago. The state turned them into charter schools. The charter companies ran them into the ground. The state has taken them over again. The schools continue to hemorrhage students and are now almost "ghost" schools. These schools have even lower test scores with significantly fewer students than they had BEFORE the state took them over. This situation would be funny if it weren't such a colossal example of gross incompetence on the part of the Louisiana Department of Education.

15) Comment by spqr - 16/10/2012

Want more about these schools (might as well toss in the Mentor Academy, too)? Teachers? Many not certifed. Turnover of faculty is high. Many classes do not have a teacher and students watch movies or allowed to walk the campus to kill time. When state testing rolls around each spring, many charters take inventory of students who are struggling and release them in advance.Discipline? Not good when even the students complain. Paperwork? A disaster. Common requests for grades are lost. Many students have abandoned the RSD after a six week period produced almost no instruction or grades to transfer to other schools. Let us remember the New Orleans RSD has 47 schools have grades of D or F. And Piyush wants it expanded and "John boy White lies" was hired to promote it all.