Posted on 12/05/2002 9:25:26 PM PST by Coleus
Academy thriving a year after Paterson takeover Thursday, December 05, 2002
By SCOTT FALLON Staff Writer
Sixth-grade student Joseph Moore. (DANIELLE P. RICHARDS/THE RECORD)
PATERSON
At a glance, the Alexander Hamilton Innovative Academy looks today much like it did in September 2001 when it was still a charter school.
Classes still have no more than 15 students. The teachers are still young and inexperienced, but full of energy. And parental involvement remains high.
But only a year ago the school was emerging from a two-year morass that saw financial mismanagement, lack of leadership, abysmal standardized test scores, and even embezzlement charges against one of its directors.
The litany of problems prompted the Paterson school district to take over Alexander Hamilton. The school - conceived to show a failing public system how to educate inner-city children - was itself a failure.
Now a year after the takeover, Alexander Hamilton seems to have stabilized and logged a substantial rise in test scores.
In the last year it was a charter school, only 7 percent of fourth-graders passed the mathematics portion of the state Elementary School Proficiency Assessment, one of the major litmus tests for school performance in New Jersey. Only 27 percent passed the reading or language arts section of the test.
After six months as a public school, 49 percent passed math and 65 percent passed reading.
"It's an improvement and a good sign but it still means a majority did not pass" the math portion, said Principal Scott Rixford, who took the helm shortly after the takeover. "We still have a lot of work to do."
In many ways Alexander Hamilton is a charter school that happens to be run by a public district.
Class sizes at the K-6 school are small, uniforms are required, and discipline is strict (two suspensions and you're expelled). The school still has a foundation composed of regional business leaders who raise money to support it. A $50,000 gift earlier this fall year provided new science lab equipment.
There has been debate over the fairness of having such a school under the public system. "Some of what is offered there represents the high end," said Irene Sterling, executive director of the Paterson Education Fund, a non-profit group that acts as a watchdog. "It's a vision that should be implemented at every Paterson school."
Rixford said his school is just like the several small high school academies that the district offers. And while the district spends an average of just over $10,000 per student, Rixford said $8,300 is spent per pupil at his school.
"With small class sizes and mandatory discipline, you can really teach kids," said Rixford, a former health care consultant who has been in education for only six years. Almost all of the school's 310 students are chosen through a lottery. Interest level is high among parents. Over the summer 200 new students applied to the academy. Eighty were chosen. Siblings of current students get preference.
The school demands that parents become involved. They are given a 30-page handbook for student guidance. A six-hour workshop helps parents refresh themselves with elementary school subjects.
Of the 60 teachers at the school, almost all have less than four years of teaching experience. About 80 percent are in their second year of teaching. The staff was retained and none left as they became members of the Paterson teachers union and were given better benefits.
About 80 computers were purchased. The cramped gym was turned into a library and computer center. Without a gym, the district contracted with the Boys and Girls Club to bus students there for physical education, including swimming instruction.
The curriculum was tweaked a bit to combine certain subjects the school was lagging in.
For math and reading there are sometimes two teachers in the classroom at one time, especially for fourth-graders, the grade level where the ESPA is taken.
'Only get better'
Even critics of the public school system are happy that the school has been taken over.
"I was disappointed [that the school had to be taken over], but I knew something had to be done," said John Hovey, 67, a Wyckoff businessman who started the charter school. "I knew it could only get better."
Hovey and business partner Georgette Hauser had seen children from the nursery school they owned receive what he calls a poor education after matriculating to Paterson's public elementary schools.
Hovey, who made his money in manufacturing and real estate, bought the school's home - the former Paterson News building on Straight Street - for $1.1 million. Then, he tapped his savings and got a mortgage on his home and other properties to help finance a $3 million renovation.
The school opened in September 1999. Like most charter schools, Alexander Hamilton operated independently of the local district but received almost all of its funding from the state.
But within two years, the school was in a mess financially and educationally.
The first headmaster lasted a week and the second resigned after an audit revealed a series of financial blunders. A third was hired on an interim basis but left soon after. The fourth was fired a month after she was hired because she wasn't certified to be headmistress.
The school's board of directors were mostly inexperienced. Some had charged that Hovey treated the school too much like a business. Last fall, the state Department of Education spent performed a fiscal review of the school, trying to make sense of bills stored in boxes, budgets approved months late, and overdue utility bills.
In April, Carol Ann Gauthier, the former director of the school's foundation, was indicted on charges of stealing $600 from the school and trying to cash a $4,500 check to the foundation after she was fired from the post. Court records show that she has entered into a probation program.
State education officials gave the troubled school an ultimatum: either turn control over to the Paterson school district or shut down. The board voted to become a public school.
Curtis James, whose daughter attends first grade, was initially against the takeover but now is convinced that it was the only way to bail out the school. "The Board of Ed brought in a lot more structure," he said. "They gave the school what it needed."
The district is planning on buying the building from Hovey within five years as part of its $734 million school reconstruction project. Hovey and the foundation are already looking at buying the building next to the school, demolishing it, and constructing a gymnasium.
"Hopefully it will get a little bit bigger, a little bit better," said Hovey. "We still need a place like this."
Scott Fallon's e-mail address is fallon@northjersey.com
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