York Academy update on WHP-TV

WHP-TV, the CBS affiliate in Harrisburg, reported March 30 on the latest news about the York Academy Regional Charter School. WHP Reporter Christina Butler interviewed Dennis Baughman, the president of the charter school's Board of Trustees. The public charter school, which will offer an International Baccalaureate program of study, emerged from work done by YorkCounts' Metro-York Educational Opportunities Committee from 2007 to 2009. Baughman, a former school administrator in Northeastern and York City school districts, co-chaired the committee, along with community volunteer Sue Krebs.

The school was chartered by York City, York Suburban and Central York School Districts. It is hoped that the school will improve educational outcomes for city students by breaking up the concentrated poverty that proves such a challenge to urban schools. The school could also prove to have appeal for families with children looking for a high-quality education options in the city.

Baughman will provide a lengthier update to the community on April 14 as part of YorkCounts' "State of the Schools: A Countywide Education Summit." Click here for details on the summit.

Watch the WHP clip below.

We need new thinking on technology in the classroom

by Jared Mader

Unlike many other specific instructional programs, educational technology is not at all about the technology. Quite honestly, it is about how our efforts in the classroom can make the technology invisible, centering more on relevant and authentic learning experiences. The focus should remain on what we want students to be able to know and do rather than the technology. Founded in the National Educational Technology Standards for Students (the NETS-S), our students need to be provided digital-age learning experiences that allow them to create, collaborate and solve problems. Our system of education, too often, asks skilled educators to dilute their talents by assuming the role of an information disseminator.

A mission that focuses on global preparedness is one without the baggage of viewing technology as another thing to “cover.” While there are technology skills that must be a part of the curriculum, such as using productivity software or learning keyboard touch-typing, the technology must be a tool for instruction that allows students to either work more efficiently or at higher levels of learning. This requires a curriculum make-over, and this will cost money. We need to pay it forward, and in the economic times that we are all facing, we have to ask ourselves, “Can we afford to not do this?”

No longer can the use of technology in classroom instruction be limited to those teachers who are comfortable with it or have been able to see its benefits. This is among the greatest of inequities that we see in today’s schools. We still see a digital divide among students who have access to tools at home and those who do not.



However, the divide that must be addressed urgently is the large number of students who can go through an entire school year and never once be exposed to higher-order thinking using powerful technology tools. That divide is not one of socioeconomic status but of the systemic failure to support all teachers in their efforts to foster environments for students to develop and use digital-age skills.

Critics would argue that this is not sustainable. Even with the introduction of low-cost netbooks, iPads and iPods, and thin client-computing devices, the expense is still too much to bear if schools are expected to provide these tools for teachers to change.

But who says that schools must provide these tools? We must grow tired of the conflicting environment created by our budgets and our policies. While we say that our budgets cannot support the purchase of these tools, our policies tell our staff and students that students are not able to use the tools they have. Imagine the audacity of telling a student they couldn’t use their own calculator or pencil or notebook, yet we do that every day when our policies restrict cell phones, personal laptops and other powerful tools of connectivity.

Networks still must be secured – agreed. But it’s not about adding more strain onto our budgets; it’s about repurposing some of the monies that we use for the replacement of computers for the purpose of improving infrastructures that allow for this personal connectivity. Our district has worked over the past year to install a wireless network across all buildings that has this ability.

So, what do our educators need to learn to be effective in integrating technology?

First, there must be a compelling argument for the need to change our system. Next, we need take a grassroots approach to train teachers to integrate the tools that will engage students. This is not about specific technology tools, software, or web-based products, but rather it is about what types of tools are available to elicit specific types of digital-age skills. Once teachers begin to see how their lessons are revolutionized by the systemic introduction of digital-age learning experiences, they will be able to see how programmatic change can occur through a complete curriculum revision process.

Our leaders must recognize that technology is not a thing, it is an evolution. Our hope is that technology, as a tool for teaching and learning, will one day be no more regarded than the ball-point-pen or colored pencils. Instead, the change to digital-age learning, as described by the NETS, will be the highly regarded focus and change agent that will help us to guide educational reform in the 21st century.

Jared Mader is the Director of Technology for the Red Lion Area School District. He has served in this position for four years, after teaching Chemistry for nine years. In that time, he has led technology integration professional development initiatives. He is a member of the Discovery Educator Network and has been identified as a PDE State Keystone Technology Integrator. He also serves as a partner in an educational technology consultancy, EdTechInnovators, providing professional development to districts across the United States and abroad. Jared lives in York with his wife Janell and 7-year-old daughter Emma. You can contact him at maderj@rlasd.k12.pa.us or jared@edtechinnovators.com.

Education Summit preview: Dayna Laur

We asked participants in "State of the Schools: A Countywide Education Summit" to respond to three questions about our schools, and we're sharing their responses on Mondays through the week of the summit on April 14. These are the questions we posed:

• What’s the biggest challenge confronting public education in York County today?
• What can the community in York County realistically expect to achieve to deal with that challenge?
• What would your first priority for action be?

Today, we hear from Dayna Laur, an award-winning and nationally recognized teacher at Central York High School.

*

When I entered the teaching profession 13 years ago, realizing the impact I would have on the lives of students was both exciting and challenging. The same holds true today. However, the way in which I educate students has changed.



Dayna Laur, a teacher at Central York and
an authority on technology in the classroom,
says districts should collaborate on professional
development to share costs, generate savings
and reach more teachers.



While the teaching methodologies I employed in the classroom more than a decade ago were adequate and are still relevant today, the students themselves require something more. The rapid pace at which technology is shifting and becoming an ever-increasing presence in our daily lives requires a classroom that reflects this fact. Engaging students, creating authentic learning environments and providing technology-infused opportunities for students to learn, design, and collaborate are paramount to education today.

Unfortunately, with these needs also comes a high price tag in order to equip a staff of teachers well trained to provide these prospects to students. In an economy suffering from the effects of a recession, it has become increasingly difficult to provide teachers with these opportunities. It is imperative that districts work together in order to find viable solutions to this stark reality.

York County school districts have been afforded top-quality teachers. However, veteran teachers and those newest to the profession require ongoing professional development in order to provide our students with the best opportunities for enhancing their 21st-century skills. As the technology changes and opens a wide variety of prospects for student and teacher collaboration on a global scale, teachers must be made aware of how to employ these innovative and engaging techniques in the curriculum.

In order to make this professional development economically feasible and equitable across districts, it is time for all districts across the county to work collaboratively to provide professional development opportunities. Sharing the costs and resources will offer districts the ability to grant teachers continuing education in a “train-the-trainer” model. Each district would provide several teachers for a countywide training and, in turn, the teachers would return to their respective districts to provide on-site training for their staffs. In doing so, costs would be diminished and trainings would be extended to reach more teachers across York County.

While it may be impossible to overcome the disparity in local tax dollars that are allotted to each district, through the use of this model, districts would be in a position to decrease professional development expenditures, while increasing professional development opportunities.

Dayna Laur is a 13-year veteran social studies teacher at Central York High School and is a National Faculty Member for the Buck Institute for Education. She has her National Board Certification, a bachelor’s degree in history from Virginia Tech, a Master of Arts degree in education in curriculum and instruction from the University of Pittsburgh, and a Master of Science degree in 21st-century teaching and learning from Wilkes University.Over the past four years, she has worked closely with the Classrooms for the Future initiative in Pennsylvania, presenting to teachers, instructional technology coaches, administrators, and higher education faculty members on ways in integrate project-based learning in a technology-rich classroom environment. She has been featured as the model teacher for Authentic Based Classroom Instruction as produced by the National Institute for Professional Practice and as a model teacher for the Schools that Work Series as produced by Edutopia.

Geoffrey Canada: Inspiration for difficult times

by Isiah Anderson

We are at a crucial crossroads when it comes to education. The governor has proposed devastating cuts. The York City School District is struggling with a staggering deficit. As a community and as a state, we are failing our students.

Yet amidst this turmoil, I still believe that York and other communities possess the ingenuity and passion to pull ourselves out of this educational quagmire and create an environment that supports the success of all of its young people.

Recently on this blog, Dan Fink wrote about a theme that is consistent with what we do at 3Cord Inc. Dan wrote about the need for alignment of services among York County organizations to generate collective impact and success in areas of education and human services. This is an idea that we champion. We have the resources here in York County, but we need to work together to leverage existing dollars and align our services so that our children do not fall through the cracks.



Geoffrey Canada, center, surrounded

by students from the Harlem Children's

Zone, the organization he founded

in New York City. Canada will visit

York April 2 to talk about his work

and to offer lessons for York County's

efforts to improve educational

outcomes in the city.

Geoffrey Canada, the founder and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, has created this kind of network in his community. HCZ covers a 97-block area in Harlem that provides services from birth through college to more than 10,000 children. Mr. Canada has worked tirelessly to ensure that children receive the services they need consistently throughout their youth by providing programs for each stage of development including parenting classes, early childhood education, charter schools, health services and college tutoring.

Here is a true hero. Someone who saw a problem, came up with a solution, and pledged to do whatever it takes to ensure that kids are successful. When I began my company and applied for our first charter here in York City, I was charged to research programs that were working and find out how they could be replicated in York. HCZ was one of my first stops. I realized that the same was possible in York, but we do not have access to the same kind of dollars that HCZ does considering their proximity to Wall Street.

Instead, I knew we would need to be creative, that we would need to forge innovative partnerships because we already have many similar services; they are just not connected in a way that reaches all of the youth we serve. We can not only learn from Geoffrey Canada and HCZ, but we can improve upon their model.

I believe in this program so much that 3Cord Inc. has partnered with the YWCA to bring Geoffrey Canada to York on April 2. It is my hope that York’s brightest minds will be in attendance to learn from Mr. Canada and reflect on how we can transform York the way he has changed Harlem. We can do it; in fact, we have to do it. There needs to be a sense of urgency in this town when it comes to education, and I know that we can harness our passion, do the hard work, and make York a place where children not only survive, but thrive.



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Today is the last day to buy tickets for the April 2 event. Please visit http://www.uicfund.org/legacy-series or call Rijelle Kraft at 717-845-4046, ext. 1405, for details.

Isiah Anderson is the founder and managing officer of 3Cord Inc., an education management organization in York. Founded in 2005, 3Cord’s mission is three-fold: to create and manage charter, alternative-education and private schools that serve urban youth; to deliver cutting-edge solutions to the urban attitude problem rampant in today’s hip-hop culture; and to train professionals to effectively relate to and educate this generation of students. 3Cord oversees three schools in York: New Hope Academy, Challenge Academy, and Impact Academy.

Little-known PEDYC about to unleash Creativity

The Creativity Unleashed logo.

by Caitlyn Meyer

Big change is coming to a little-known arm of the York County Economic Development Corp. The Partnership for Economic Development of York County, or PEDYC, recently reorganized to broaden its focus. Part of this reorganization places PEDYC as the implementing body for the York County Economic Development Plan. And that means it will be tasked with, among other things, getting the Creativity Unleashed branding effort into high gear.

The Creativity Unleashed committee, originally set up under the direction of Downtown Inc., signed a Memorandum of Understanding in February with PEDYC to bring the branding effort under PEDYC oversight in order to help spread the brand countywide. The Creativity Unleashed tagline was recommended by consultant Roger Brooks, who suggested branding York as America’s Industrial Art and Design Capital to capitalize on the success of many innovative and creative York County companies. PEDYC will provide administrative support to and work closely with the Creativity Unleashed committee.

PEDYC will also be in charge of the Municipal Outreach Program, a collaborative effort between the EDC and the York County Planning Commission. The program provides economic development and planning services to local municipalities. Many services can be accessed by York County municipalities for no or low cost, including municipal profiles, site evaluation, economic impact analysis, plan reviews, funding information, and other services based on community requests.

By working with local communities and organizations, PEDYC recognized an opportunity as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization to serve as a fiscal sponsor to community and economic development projects across the county. Organizations without nonprofit status can save time and money by using PEDYC for fiscal sponsorship. Groups interested in fiscal sponsorship must submit an application to PEDYC and relate their project to the York County Economic Development Plan’s goals and strategies.

The Partnership for Economic Development of York County seeks to act as a public tool to facilitate industrial and economic development throughout our communities. For more information about PEDYC activities, please contact Wilda Alessi, Manager, Business Development at the EDC (walessi@ycedc.org).

Caitlyn Meyer is the business development coordinator for the York County Economic Development Corp. She coordinates YCEDC activities related to the York County Economic Development Plan, seeks to work with local governments through the Municipal Outreach Program and works on business retention. Caitlyn earned her bachelor’s degree in history from York College of Pennsylvania in 2009 and has been with YCEDC since that time. Caitlyn lives and works in York City. She can be reached at cmeyer@ycedc.org or 717-846-8879, ext. 3053.

“Ready Freddy” helps kids, families prepare for kindergarten

by Christy Renjilian

For the past two weeks, nearly 50 children and their parents have filled the cafeteria at Conewago Elementary School in Northeastern School District. As they arrive, the children greet old friends, shyly reach out to new ones and take their first steps on the path to kindergarten. After a story about the first day of school, and an activity with their parents, they go off with their new friends and an early childhood education teacher. For some this is an exciting time, for others, they aren’t so sure they want to leave the comfort of Mom and Dad. And truth be told, some parents aren’t quite certain they are ready for them to spread their wings.

These families are participating in the “Ready Freddy” school readiness program, sponsored by the United Way of York County with funds from the Rehmeyer Trust and the Pennsylvania Office of Child Development and Early Learning. The six-week curriculum was developed by Ken Smythe Leistico from the Office of Child Development at the University of Pittsburgh. The purpose of the program is to help children and families feel comfortable with the transition to kindergarten.

The sessions are led by kindergarten and early childhood education teachers with the support of Northeastern principals and United Way staff. Families have a chance to learn about the expectations and procedures of the district, ask questions, tour the facilities and meet school personnel and other parents. The children get an opportunity to meet new friends, learn how to function in a group of their peers and see first hand what a great place kindergarten is. The curriculum is broken into six sessions that cover topics including identifying your child’s strengths, social skills, literacy and numeracy skills. Each week, every child gets a free book, corresponding to the weekly topic, to take home and keep. Families also have home activities to extend the skills they learned while at “Ready Freddy.” The kindergarten teachers have seen amazing progress in the children’s skills and comfort level over the course of the six-week program.

This is the second year the United Way has offered “Ready Freddy” to area school districts. Last year, it served approximately 180 families in Dover, Eastern, Red Lion, Spring Grove and York City. This year, the program will be held at Eastern, Northeastern and York City. Officials in some of the school districts that participated in last year’s program said it was so beneficial they are offering it again this year with district funding. The goal over the next several years is to offer it at every district in York County.

School staff said the children and families who participated in the program last year were better prepared to handle the first day of school. They also pointed out that families are better connected to the school, participate in more activities, and are involved and active partners in their child’s learning.

So what can you do to help your child prepare for kindergarten?

The best thing you can do is free – get a library card and read to your child every day. Research shows there is nothing more important than reading with your child. You don’t need to purchase expensive educational toys. Children can learn colors by sorting laundry, picking out produce at the grocery store, and looking at the world around them. Math skills can be learned by counting every day items. Point out letters, numbers, and shapes as you are driving. Encourage your child to develop self-help skills. Provide opportunities for them to interact with children their own age. Remember children learn best when they are playing – through active, hands-on experiences with the world around them. All of this will help lay the foundation for success in school and life. Parents are a child’s first teacher, and children’s brains are growing at an astonishing rate during the first five years of life. Don’t wait till they get to kindergarten to begin their education.

As the families left Conewago Elementary School after their first night of “Ready Freddy,” there was a sense of excitement and accomplishment. The children had a great time at school and with the teachers. The parents appreciated the warmth and expertise of the staff. Questions had been answered. Partnerships between families and school personnel are forming. Northeastern School District’s class of 2024 is well on its way to a successful future.

If your child will enter kindergarten next fall in Eastern or York City and you would like to enroll in the program please go to http://www.unitedway-york.org/ and click on “Register for Ready Freddy.” If you are not in these districts, but would like more information about how to prepare your child for school, contact Christy Renjilian at the United Way of York County.

Christy Renjilian is the director of Focus on our Future for the United Way of York County. She has a Masters degree in Social Policy Analysis from the University of Chicago. Christy has more than 20 years of experience administering early childhood education programs and has been with the United Way of York County for more than five years. She lives in Springettsbury Township with her husband and two children. Christy can be reached at renjilianc@unitedway-york.org or 717-771-3808.

Assorted thoughts on education

A few things have popped up on my screen in the past couple days that I thought were worth passing along. All of them tie into education. And don't forget: 23 days until State of the Schools 2011.

Forum takes stock of Corbett's proposed education budget: I'll be sitting in on a Pennsylvania Education Policy Forum tomorrow morning in Harrisburg. These forums are organized by the Education Policy and Leadership Center, an advocacy organization that provides training and research on education issues. (Full disclosure: I'm participating in the EPLC's 2011 fellows program).

Tomorrow's session will provide an analysis of Gov. Tom Corbett's proposed education budget. Ron Cowell of EPLC will provide an overview of the proposed budget, and Sharon Ward from the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center will provide some of the fiscal context that shaped this year's state budget decisions. After that, there will be a panel discussion of the impact of the governor's proposals and the key issues that will be considered during budget talks.

It should be an informative morning, and I plan to do some live Tweeting throughout.

Thoughts on 'collective impact': A colleague passed along an opinion piece from the New York Times on a concept termed "collective impact."

From the article:

The idea is to create a network that links numerous organizations — including those in government, civil society and the business sector — and helps them to systematically align and coordinate their efforts around a clearly defined goal, like improving education, combating childhood obesity, or cleaning up a river.

York County, which has many organization doing lots of great work, has sometimes struggled to get its efforts aligned and coordinated. YorkCounts has tried to help with that, by spotlighting different issues and bringing people together to work on those issues collaboratively, as we did during the Metro-York process. The York County Community Foundation has taken similar steps recently, through its work in facilitating strategic mergers of nonprofits and more recently in putting more resources into community action.

These are worthwhile efforts, but the article suggests we have a ways to go to do the kind of high-level work that produces measurable change.

What distinguishes collective impact from run-of-the-mill collaboration is the quality of the partnership and the nature of the problem being addressed. Mark Kramer and John Kania, managing directors of a nonprofit consulting organization called FSG, which coined the term “collective impact,” identified five conditions for “collective success” in a recent essay in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Above all, they say, partners must come together and agree not just on common goals, but shared ways to measure success towards those goals. They must communicate on a regular basis. And there must be a “backbone” organization that is focused full-time on managing the partnership.

Read the whole article, and then think about how we might achieve "collective success" in efforts to reduce obesity or poverty or keep more kids in school.

Building a Grad Nation - the report and the summit: A new report says the number of so-called "dropout factories" in the U.S. declined between 2008 and 2009. The report was released March 22, in conjunction with the Building a Grad Nation Summit, running through March 23 in Washington, D.C. This post from Caralee Adams at Education Week's College Bound blog offers some details on the report and live blogging from the summit

The report, an update of a multi-year report first released in November, offers national and regional data on low-performing schools, the "dropout factories" that show large numbers of dropouts and low graduation rates. The report also includes federal policy recommendations "to help ensure that the national goal of a 90 perecent high school graduation rate by the class of 2020 is met," Adams wrote.

Those recommendations include, from the blog:

• Develop high standards to graduate all students college- or career-ready.
• Focus investment on the lowest-performing middle and high schools though expansion of federal School Improvement Grants and greater emphasis on secondary schools in existing federal programs.
• Hold states, districts, and schools accountable for graduating all students from high school.
• Shift away from a one-size-fits-all school improvement system to one with flexibility and data-driven decisionmaking.
• Address the factors that influence student achievement with wraparound services.
• Provide federal support for district, community, and statewide efforts to raise high school graduation rates.
• Strengthen schools by funding national-service efforts, such as the Education Corps.

 Click here to read the entire report, and here to see a state-by-state breakdown of progress and challenges.

- Dan Fink

Education Summit preview: Joel Sears

We asked participants in "State of the Schools: A Countywide Education Summit" to respond to three questions about our schools, and we're sharing their responses on Mondays through the week of the summit on April 14. These are the questions we posed:

• What’s the biggest challenge confronting public education in York County today?
• What can the community in York County realistically expect to achieve to deal with that challenge?
• What would your first priority for action be? 

Today, we hear from Joel Sears, president of the York County Taxpayers Council.

Joel Sears

What's the biggest challenge confronting public education in York County today?

In a word: Financing. Pennsylvania’s system of public education financing is an unconstitutional mishmash that reinforces the disparity among districts and significantly limits choices and opportunity for parents, students and teachers alike. The basic allocation formula still depends heavily on enrollment during the 1990-91 school year in the face of dramatically shifting population and enrollment trends.

As a result, districts such as Pittsburgh receive more state aid today, in constant dollars, than they did 20 years ago when their enrollment was 10,000 students greater than it is today. Most York County districts, on the other hand, have experienced enrollment growth unmatched by increases in their state subsidies, forcing school boards to balance budgets with property tax increases two to three times the rate of inflation with a significantly higher share coming from the residential sector.

For a homeowner with a reasonably structured 30-year mortgage, school property taxes add between 30 and 80 cents to every dollar spent on principle and interest – and it never ends.

The Band-aid provided by Act 1 of 2006 places a cap on tax increases with no consideration for the consequences to either the district or the taxpayer. It completely sidesteps the constitutional requirements for: (1) a state-provided “thorough and efficient system of public education” and (2) taxes that must be “uniform, upon the same class of subjects, within the territorial limits of the authority levying the tax.” The “tax relief” provided by Act 1 averages $200 or so per homestead/farmstead in the face of taxes that average $3,500 per year.

This year, virtually every district in York County is scrambling to balance its budget after years of unchallenged spending and tax increases. By artificially limiting tax increases, Act 1 has exposed administrators and school boards to unprecedented criticism from taxpayers for their wasteful spending, from teachers at war with their colleagues over pay freezes versus furloughs, and from parents faced with cuts to cherished programs, such as foreign languages in middle school and free transportation to day care centers.

What can the community in York County realistically expect to achieve to deal with that challenge, and what would your first priority for action be?

In the long term (3-5 years), our goal should be to completely overhaul the K-12 funding system. Dollars from broad-based taxes, such as sales and income taxes, should be pooled into a statewide educational operating fund and allocated to schools based primarily on their current enrollment and demographic challenges. Public funds should be used to pay for the constitutionally-mandated thorough and efficient system of public education and no more. Taxpayers should be protected from unnecessary construction projects, “investments” in unproven curricula and technology, and increases in staff cost that far outstrip inflation.

In the short term, our first priority should be consolidation and formalized cost sharing in some form. There are millions of dollars spent every year on redundant services that could be provided as well or better by regional or countywide entities, including transportation, food service, and curriculum development.

Ideally, we should continue to explore academic consolidation as well to provide real choice within the existing framework. The growing patchwork of charter schools only serves to create more islands of education while adding to the total cost of education.

Joel Sears has been president of the York County Taxpayers Council since 2007 and this year filed papers to run for school board in York Suburban School District.

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REGISTER FOR THE COUNTYWIDE EDUCATION SUMMITWhat: "State of the Schools: A Countywide Education Summit"

When: 9 a.m.-2:30 p.m. April 14
Where: Pullo Center at Penn State York, 1031 Edgecomb Ave., York
How much: Admission is free, but advance registration is requested and box lunches will be available for $5. With your registration, please indicate your preference from the lunch wrap choices: turkey, ham, chicken salad, tuna salad or veggie.
The morning session: Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, will provide the national context, and Brian Jensen from the Pennsylvania Economy League will discuss the state’s looming pension crisis. Other morning speakers include Dennis Baughman, who will provide an update on the York Academy Regional Charter School; and Dayna Laur, an award-winning and nationally recognized Central York teacher, who will talk about new ways districts can collaborate and share resources.
The afternoon session: A panel discussion will focus on school district budgets and the looming pension crisis. Panelists include: 

• Thomas Gentzel, executive director for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association
• James Testerman, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association
• Republican State Sen. Lloyd Smucker, who represents parts of York and Lancaster counties and serves on the Senate Education and Appropriations committees
• Republican State Rep. Ron Miller, who represents southwestern York County, including York, Springfield, Shrewsbury, Codorus, Manheim and West Manheim townships
• Democratic State Rep. Eugene DePasquale, who represents York and parts of Spring Garden and West Manchester townships
• Robert Krantz, superintendent from Dover Area School District
• George Ioannidis, business manager from Spring Grove Area School District
• Judith Higgins, school board member from Eastern York School District and board president of Lincoln Intermediate Unit 12
• Joel Sears, president of the York County Taxpayers Council
• Stephen Herzenberg, executive director of the Keystone Research Center

To register: Send an e-mail with your name, school district and phone number to events@yorkcounts.org, and if you plan to purchase one of the $5 box lunches, please indicate your lunch preference from these wrap choices: turkey, ham, chicken salad, tuna salad or veggie.
For details: Contact Dan Fink at YorkCounts at 717-650-1460 or at dfink@yorkcounts.org.

New charter school could be a game-changer for York

When the York Academy Regional Charter School opens

in August, it will make living in downtown a more appealing

residential choice for families with children. The school sits

between Central Market and Sovereign Bank Stadium in the

heart of the Northwest Triangle redevelopment project. 

By Eric Menzer

Last week the news hit the City of York like a ton of bricks – Governor Corbett’s proposed education cuts could add another $10 million on top of the $15 million deficit that the York City School District was already facing. And while every school district in York County faces financial challenges to one degree or another, there is no question that the city district is in the deepest hole. Whether your perspective is one of taxpayer, parent or simply concerned citizen, it is hard to fathom what we do next when it seemed the situation was already so dire both financially and in terms of outcomes for city kids.

We also heard news recently that only three candidates had filed for five city school board seats. These used to be hotly-contested races – campaigns got almost bitter at times. Do three candidates for five seats mean that city residents are so dispirited when it comes to our school district that they can’t even fight anymore? There’s an old saying – “the night is always darkest just before the dawn.” Let’s hope that dawn is around the corner on this one, because it’s hard to imagine a darker night.

In my last few posts I have been hopeful. I have written about the cultural and demographic forces that are creating the best market and most positive outlook for cities in 50 years. So how do we square that hopefulness with the grim outlook for our school district?

In the short run, it seems hard. But there are a couple things we need to keep in mind that are more subtle than a simple “gloom versus optimism” formula.

First, there are enormous numbers of potential city residents at any given time who are not consumers of our school system – both singles and couples without kids, and those whose children are done with their primary school years. At any given time, something along the lines of 75 percent of the U.S. population does not have kids in school.

Second, the charter school movement – regardless of your political philosophy or issues of funding or achievement – has matured enough in our city to offer real alternatives for those who do have kids in school. And while many of the charter schools we’ve seen open to this point draw most of their population from their local service area, a new one will open next fall that could be a real game-changer for the city in the long run.

The York Academy Regional Charter School will offer the International Baccalaureate curriculum not only to city residents, but to those of York Suburban and Central York school districts and possibly other suburban districts. Enough has been written about how remarkable it is that these three districts came together to create this school. Less has been written about how this school can take the experience of “walkable urbanity” to a whole new level.

Imagine that you are already attracted to the lifestyle provided by downtown or city neighborhood living. Now imagine from that home, you can walk or ride a bicycle to the most unique school in all of York County – one that offers not only the social, economic and racial diversity that many of us value in our city, but a world-class education, as well. Game on for competitiveness for the city of York as a viable residential option for parents with choices about where to live.

Eric Menzer is president of the York Revolution professional baseball team and manages the Codo Development Group, a real estate development company working in downtown York. Eric is active in community affairs and civic leadership at both the local and state level. He chairs the York County Community Foundation and serves on the boards of Downtown Inc, Better York, YorkCounts and the Crispus Attucks Association. He just concluded several years as Chairman of 10,000 Friends of Pennsylvania, a statewide policy-research and advocacy organization that promotes smart growth and urban revitalization, and he remains active on that board. Eric was previously the senior vice president of Wagman Construction in York. Prior to that, he served for eight years as York’s director of economic development and previously as the executive director of the York County Transportation Authority. He is a passionate baseball fan and lives in York with his wife and daughter.

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REGISTER FOR THE COUNTYWIDE EDUCATION SUMMIT

Part of the program for the YorkCounts 2011 countywide education summit will include an update on the York Academy Regional Charter School. Here's more information on the summit.

What: "State of the Schools: A Countywide Education Summit"
When: 9 a.m.-2:30 p.m. April 14
Where: Pullo Center at Penn State York, 1031 Edgecomb Ave., York
How much: Admission is free, but advance registration is requested and box lunches will be available for $5. With your registration, please indicate your preference from the lunch wrap choices: turkey, ham, chicken salad, tuna salad or veggie.
The morning session: Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, will provide the national context, and Brian Jensen from the Pennsylvania Economy League will discuss the state’s looming pension crisis. Other morning speakers include Dennis Baughman, who will provide an update on the York Academy Regional Charter School; and Dayna Laur, an award-winning and nationally recognized Central York teacher, who will talk about new ways districts can collaborate and share resources.
The afternoon session: A panel discussion will focus on school district budgets and the looming pension crisis. Panelists include:

• Thomas Gentzel, executive director for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association
• James Testerman, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association
• Republican State Sen. Lloyd Smucker, who represents parts of York and Lancaster counties and serves on the Senate Education and Appropriations committees
• Republican State Rep. Ron Miller, who represents southwestern York County, including York, Springfield, Shrewsbury, Codorus, Manheim and West Manheim townships
• Democratic State Rep. Eugene DePasquale, who represents York and parts of Spring Garden and West Manchester townships
• Robert Krantz, superintendent from Dover Area School District
• George Ioannidis, business manager from Spring Grove Area School District
• Judith Higgins, school board member from Eastern York School District and board president of Lincoln Intermediate Unit 12
• Joel Sears, president of the York County Taxpayers Council
• Stephen Herzenberg, executive director of the Keystone Research Center

To register: Send an e-mail with your name, school district and phone number to events@yorkcounts.org, and if you plan to purchase one of the $5 box lunches, please indicate your lunch preference from these wrap choices: turkey, ham, chicken salad, tuna salad or veggie.

For details: Contact Dan Fink at YorkCounts at 717-650-1460 or at dfink@yorkcounts.org.

Municipal cooperation a no-brainer

By Shanna Wiest

Who doesn’t think that it’s a good idea for multiple municipalities to work together to achieve cost savings, improved services, better efficiencies and better land use planning? Due to our multiplicity of municipalities in Pennsylvania (72 in York County alone!), it’s a concept frequently discussed and it seems to be a no-brainer that such cooperation is a good practice for York County. The York/Adams Regional Smart Growth Coalition advocates for it and YorkCounts made regional municipal land-use planning one of its 30 Ready Solutions.

There is, however, a perception in our community that our municipalities are not cooperating. I have heard time and again from citizens who either write letters to the editor or ask in casual conversation why municipalities are not working with one another and can’t they do more to save tax payer dollars.

As part of the Smart Growth Coalition’s advocacy efforts for regional planning, we held town hall discussions across York County with our elected municipal officials. One item that became very clear from all of our municipal representatives is municipalities are cooperating with one another in many ways that most taxpayers do not see. For every high-profile collaboration, like the merger between fire departments in Spring Garden and Springettsbury townships to create the York Area United Fire and Rescue, many go unnoticed. Here are some of the other success stories of municipal cooperation in our community:

• Red Lion, Yoe and Dallastown Boroughs began the process of developing a tri-borough joint comprehensive plan in the spring of 2010.
• Windsor Township and Windsor Borough have also recently completed a joint comprehensive plan.
• Lower Windsor Township and Windsor Township’s highway department help each other out with road work in the summer. They both have small crews so when there is a big job they work with one another to save the costs of hiring additional employees.
• Dover Township and Dover Borough have a joint comprehensive plan, bulk sale of water, cooperative street sweeping, joint recreational programming and joint paving and materials bidding with Dover Area School District.
• Springettsbury Township is taking the lead this year on a large consortium of municipalities for line painting bids.
• North Codorus Township, Jackson Township, Manheim Township, Penn Township and New Freedom Borough have a verbal agreement to share equipment and manpower. For example, Manheim Township owns a paver, North Codorus Township owns the trailer to pull the paver to different job sites.

The list has grown so much I had to place additional examples of municipal cooperation on our Web site. Is there more our municipalities can do?

Absolutely.

But what was clear in the feedback I received from municipalities is they are always looking for new and creative ways to work with one another.

That’s where you come in. You need to be actively involved in your community by attending municipal meetings. Have an idea? Share it with your municipal officials. If we all work together and brainstorm new concepts we can have a win-win situation. While you sharing those thoughts, take the time to thank your municipalities for what they are already doing for the betterment of our communities.

And here's a video of York Area United Fire Chairman Bill Schenck talking about the merger.


YAUFR Chairman William Schenck as the Keynote Speaker from YAUFR on Vimeo.

Shanna Wiest is the government affairs director for the Realtors Association of York & Adams Counties and has been with the association since 2005. In her position, she advocates for homeownership, economic development and smart growth planning. Shanna also serves as the secretary/treasurer for the York/Adams Regional Smart Growth Coalition and the president elect of the Economics Club for the York County Chamber of Commerce. Shanna earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Dickinson College and her Master’s of Public Administration from Penn State University. Shanna lives in Springettsbury Township with her fiancé Joe.

Education Summit preview: Brian Jensen

We asked participants in "State of the Schools: A Countywide Education Summit" to respond to three questions about our schools, and we're sharing their responses on Mondays through the week of the summit on April 14. These are the questions we posed:

• What’s the biggest challenge confronting public education in York County today?
• What can the community in York County realistically expect to achieve to deal with that challenge?
• What would your first priority for action be?

Today, we hear from Brian Jensen, senior vice president at the Allegheny Conference on Community Development and the executive director for the Pennsylvania Economy League of Southwestern Pennsylvania.

By Brian Jensen

I have spent the last 23 years of my life in the Pittsburgh region, and while no expert on the state of public education specifically in York County, I would venture to say that school districts across the Commonwealth face the same basic set of challenges.

School district healthcare and other benefit costs continue to rise. Pension contributions, in particular, will escalate for decades to come (see chart above). In the 2010-2011 fiscal year, the local share of public school pension contributions were $277 million. In the 2035-2036 fiscal year, they are projected to reach $3.8 billion.

My daughter, now in fifth grade, will be nearing middle age before pension obligations begin to decline, and it is likely that her children will be starting to put their own children through school by the time the unfunded accrued obligations of the Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System are made whole.

I wonder how we would feel about our great grandparents if they had left such legacy costs for us to pay. How can we Pennsylvanians in 2011 continue to justify such generational theft?

Is there a way to at least lessen the burden on our great grandchildren?

We shouldn’t expect much financial help from the Commonwealth: Its share of school district pension costs will mirror those of the local districts. At the same time, the Pennsylvania State Employees’ Retirement System is also severely underfunded and will need to be restored. And it doesn’t appear likely that general state support for public education will increase any time soon. With increased state support unlikely and local sources in the form of property taxes nearing the tipping point or already tapped out, revenue solutions are at best limited.

It seems clear that benefits will need to be restructured. A law passed late last year took some rather modest steps in this direction. Much more aggressive action, such as implementation of defined contribution or hybrid systems, will need to be taken, if Pennsylvania is to continue to prepare its young people to compete in the global marketplace.

It is too late to protect our children from this pernicious fate. We need to demand prompt and fearless action from our state government if we are to protect our grand children and great grandchildren from the mistakes of their ancestors.

Brian Jensen is a senior vice president at the Allegheny Conference on Community Development and the executive director for the Pennsylvania Economy League of Southwestern Pennsylvania. He manages the civic policy portion of the competitiveness program. One of his primary responsibilities over the past several years has been to develop a strategy in support of municipal pension reform and service sharing between the City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. Brian led PEL’s participation in the joint efforts that resulted in the 2008 passage of legislation to consolidate earned income tax collection and in the 2010 passage of legislation to make municipal merger and consolidation more straightforward.

Municipal government issues have been a theme of Brian’s 24-year career with PEL. He played a major role in the development of ComPAC 21, the process that led to the reengineering Allegheny County government. He facilitated the extensive multi-year effort to implement the ComPAC 21 recommendations, including drafting enabling legislation to expedite Allegheny County home rule, coordinating the home rule charter drafting process, drafting the county administrative and ethics codes, training the new County Council, and staffing transition committees. Brian has a Ph.D . in History and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University and was a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia in the mid-1980s. He lives in the borough of Ben Avon and is active in the Community Presbyterian Church of Ben Avon as an elder, deacon and a tenor in the chancel choir.

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IF YOU GO

What: "State of the Schools: A Countywide Education Summit"
When: 9 a.m.-2:30 p.m. April 14
Where: Pullo Center at Penn State York, 1031 Edgecomb Ave., York
How much: Admission is free, but advance registration is requested and box lunches will be available for $5.
Confirmed participants: Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, will provide the national context. An afternoon panel discussion will focus on school district budgets and the looming pension crisis. Presenters and panel discussion participants include:

• Brian Jensen, executive director of the Pennsylvania Economy League of Southwestern PA and senior vice president of civic policy for the Allegheny Conference on Community Development;
• Dennis Baughman, president of the Board of Trustees for the York Academy Regional Charter School;
• Thomas Gentzel, executive director for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association;
• James Testerman, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association;
• Republican State Sen. Lloyd Smucker, who represents parts of York and Lancaster counties and serves on the Senate Education and Appropriations committees
• Republican State Rep. Ron Miller, who represents southwestern York County, including York, Springfield, Shrewsbury, Codorus, Manheim and West Manheim townships;
• Republican State Rep. Will Tallman, who represents York and Adams counties and serves on the House Education Committee;
• Democratic State Rep. Eugene DePasquale, who represents York and parts of Spring Garden and West Manchester townships;
• Dayna Laur, award-winning and nationally recognized teacher from Central York School District;
• Stephen Herzenberg, executive director of the Keystone Research Center;
• Joel Sears, president of the York County Taxpayers Council. 

To register: Send an e-mail with your name, school district and phone number to events@yorkcounts.org, and if you plan to purchase one of the $5 box lunches, please indicate your lunch preference from these wrap choices: turkey, ham, chicken salad, tuna salad or veggie.
For details: Contact Dan Fink at YorkCounts at 717-650-1460 or at dfink@yorkcounts.org.

Truancy group's goals: Define truancy, build common policies

By Leigh Dalton

The York County Truancy Prevention Initiative stakeholders and partners hosted a Truancy Summit in the fall of 2010. More than 200 people attended the Summit. More than 40 were York City School District employees, and at least 20 students and their parents attended. Many legal firms were represented, and a handful of judges were present. And more than half of the school districts were represented by their superintendent.

Using input from that event, the Truancy Prevention Initiative engaged in strategic planning at the end of November 2010. The Truancy Prevention Initiative’s Executive Board matched community and school district input with the five recommendations from the Pennsylvania State Roundtable Truancy Workgroup’s report, “Truancy: A Call to Action.”

One of the most important tasks the York County Truancy Prevention Initiative must undertake in the next year is to work with all the York County school districts to establish one consistent, operational definition of truancy. As a parent it must be confusing. If you move to another school district, many of the rules and attendance policies may change. Not knowing of the change, a parent may follow the protocol from their child’s previous district, and find himself or herself receiving a citation to go to court.

As a doctor, it must be confusing. You serve families and children from multiple school districts. Some school districts require a doctor’s note after five days absence, some require such a note after 10. How are you to keep it straight?

As a judge who sees families and children from multiple school districts, it again must be hard to keep it all straight – one district cites families after three days’ of absence; another district cites after four, another may cite after five.

Wouldn’t it be nice if York County had one policy? Outreach and education about these laws and policies could be countywide. Families, district judges and doctors would know what to expect – and we would all expect the same thing – 100 percent attendance from 100 percent of our students. And that isn’t to say that we don’t expect 100 percent attendance now, but wouldn’t it be so much easier to do this together?

If we had one policy, we could track programs to see if they are working. The York County Truancy Prevention Initiative has a few interventions now and intends to implement a few more in the future. For instance, right now we have a Check and Connect pilot program in three school districts – Northeastern, South Western, and York City. We are collecting data and are trying to learn how to make the program better for each district, but it is hard to compare progress across districts. Comparison across districts matter because we want to learn how the program works in each district, make it as effective as it can be, and then use that data to leverage resources that will expand this program across the county. If there were one operational definition of truancy, with countywide, consistently implemented protocols, the possibilities of how we could improve attendance and increase graduation rates are endless.

Not only do we want to track the efficacy of interventions, but we want to know how the overall Truancy Prevention Initiative is working. It is near impossible to really get a handle on our progress if each school district speaks a slightly different dialect of the same language. In order to assess progress and success of the Truancy Prevention Initiative, all the schools in the county must be collecting the same data and using the same metrics.

To address this issue, an advocacy committee and a data collection committee are being created. The advocacy committee will present to school boards to ask that all the school boards in York County adhere to one operational definition of truancy. The data collection committee will establish progress benchmarks to assess the percentage of districts that approve the protocol, reductions in citations filed, reductions in recidivism, and other vital data points that are necessary to assess progress.

The York County Truancy Prevention Initiative’s strategic plan also addresses outreach to the community, education of and partnership with various stakeholders such as parents, doctors and businesses, and sustainability.

We continue to hold Truancy Task Force meetings, the fourth Thursday every other month, with representatives from schools, courts, the community, service agencies, government agencies, the District Attorney’s Office, York County Office of Children, Youth and Families, Juvenile Probation Office, nonprofits and businesses. About 30 people typically attend, but he meetings are open to the general public – noon to 1:30 p.m. at the York County Judicial Center, Hearing Rooms 1 and 2, Fourth Floor.

Leigh Dalton is the director of the York County Truancy Prevention Initiative (www.yorktruancyprevention.org) and the community mobilizer for York County Communities That Care. After receiving her law degree from the University of Baltimore, School of Law, she managed a truancy intervention program called the Truancy Court Program. She is pursuing her doctorate in education policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She lives in Spring Garden Township with her husband, baby daughter and her two rescued dogs. She can be reached at leigh@yorkbar.com and 717-854-8755, ext. 209.

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REMINDER:
SIGN UP FOR THE YORKCOUNTS ANNUAL SUMMIT

What: "State of the Schools: A Countywide Education Summit"
When: 9 a.m.-2:30 p.m. April 14
Where: Pullo Center at Penn State York, 1031 Edgecomb Ave., York
How much: Admission is free, but advance registration is requested and box lunches will be available for $5.
Confirmed participants: Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, will provide the national context. An afternoon panel discussion will focus on school district budgets and the looming pension crisis. Presenters and panel discussion participants include:

• Brian Jensen, executive director of the Pennsylvania Economy League of Southwestern PA and senior vice president of civic policy for the Allegheny Conference on Community Development;
• Dennis Baughman, president of the Board of Trustees for the York Academy Regional Charter School;
• Thomas Gentzel, executive director for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association;
• James Testerman, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association;
• Republican State Sen. Lloyd Smucker, who represents parts of York and Lancaster counties and serves on the Senate Education and Appropriations committees
• Republican State Rep. Ron Miller, who represents southwestern York County, including York, Springfield, Shrewsbury, Codorus, Manheim and West Manheim townships;
• Republican State Rep. Will Tallman, who represents York and Adams counties and serves on the House Education Committee;
• Democratic State Rep. Eugene DePasquale, who represents York and parts of Spring Garden and West Manchester townships;
• Dayna Laur, award-winning and nationally recognized teacher from Central York School District;
• Joel Sears, president of the York County Taxpayers Council.

To register: Send an e-mail with your name, school district and phone number to events@yorkcounts.org, and if you plan to purchase one of the $5 box lunches, please indicate your lunch preference from these wrap choices: turkey, ham, chicken salad, tuna salad or veggie.

For details: Contact Dan Fink at YorkCounts at 717-650-1460 or at dfink@yorkcounts.org.

One way to attack health care costs: 'Hot spotting'



Innovators are using population data to identify areas
with particularly high health care spending per capita,
known as medical 'hot spots,' to allocate health care
resources more efficiently and bring costs down.  

 By Deron Schriver

I remember a time when my mother would take me to the doctor as a kid. Dr. Herrold would spend a lot of time with us, and you could see his diagnostic “wheels” turning. At the end of the visit, my mother would always ask how much we owed him. He would quote an amount, she would hand him the cash and off we went.

A lot has changed with the health care system since that time. We’ve been facing cost increases that will not be sustainable forever. Our elected officials have passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to address the issue. Whether you agree or disagree with the contents of the bill, I think we can all agree that doing nothing is not an option.

In his New Yorker article “The Hot Spotters,” Atul Gawande discusses what a New Jersey physician and others like him are doing to address the issue of skyrocketing health care costs. The approach involves more intense outpatient management of the small subset of patients that make up a disproportionate share of health care spending. Dr. Gawande illustrates how these innovators are using population data from a variety of sources to identify medical “hot spots,” or areas with particularly high health care spending per capita.

Here’s one excerpt:

If (Dr. Jeffrey Brenner) could find the people whose use of medical care was highest, he figured, he could do something to help them. If he helped them, he would also be lowering their health care costs. And, if the stats approach to crime was right, targeting those with the highest health care costs would help lower the entire city’s healthcare costs. His calculations revealed that just 1 percent of the hundred thousand people who made use of Camden’s medical facilities accounted for 30 per cent of its costs. That’s only a thousand people—about half the size of a typical family physician’s panel of patients.

And the potential benefit?

(Brenner) and his team appear to be having a major impact. The Camden Coalition has been able to measure its long-term effect on its first 36 super-utilizers. They averaged 62 hospital and E.R. visits per month before joining the program and 37 visits after—a 40 percent reduction. Their hospital bills averaged $1.2 million per month before and just over $500,000 after—a 56 percent reduction.

These results don’t take into account Brenner’s personnel costs, or the costs of the medications the patients are now taking as prescribed, or the fact that some of the patients might have improved on their own (or died, reducing their costs permanently). The net savings are undoubtedly lower, but they remain, almost certainly, revolutionary. Brenner and his team are out there on the boulevards of Camden demonstrating the possibilities of a strange new approach to health care: to look for the most expensive patients in the system and then direct resources and brainpower toward helping them.

With chronic illnesses such as diabetes and hypertension making up 75 percent of total health care spending, it makes sense to direct resources to that area. The Pennsylvania Chronic Care Management, Reimbursement and Cost Reduction Commission was created to redesign how care is delivered to better address chronic conditions. This is an important step, since 50 percent of the population has at least one chronic condition, and our current system was designed to treat more acute illnesses. Here in South Central Pennsylvania, Aligning Forces for Quality is working with health care providers and patients to improve care and management of chronic diseases. To achieve its mission of improving health care quality at the local level, the program includes goals of increasing public reporting of quality data and improving health literacy throughout the community. Through greater awareness, AF4Q will be in a better position to improve health care quality.

As an industry insider, I can confidently say that we have the resources in York to make great strides in improving how health care is delivered. I challenge the local health care community, from the largest health system to the solo practitioner, to come together with unprecedented levels of teamwork. I challenge each citizen in our community to commit to leading a healthier lifestyle. In the health care system of the future, providers and patients will have a responsibility to prevent illness as opposed to waiting until it arrives and addressing it reactively. The doctor-patient relationship used to be the center of the health care universe, and it will be in our best interest to get back to that.

Deron Schriver is the executive administrator for The Women's Healthcare Group and a member of the Guiding Committee for Healthy World Café. He has a particular interest in studying and participating in solutions to address health issues affecting our society. Deron earned a bachelor's degree in accounting and a master's in business administration, both from York College. He lives in West Manchester Township with his wife, Lisa.

County Communities That Care group unveils action plan

The York County Communities That Care (CTC) recently presented its 2011 Community Action Plan to the public, and YorkCounts was pleased to play a small role in analyzing the 2009 Pennsylvania Youth Survey responses and to draft a report that made up a piece of the final action plan.

Nearly 12,000 students from 15 of York County's 16 school districts participated in the first countywide CTC PAYS survey. Students in grades 6, 8, 10 and 12 participated, and the next survey will be circulated later this year.

The survey serves as a way to measure student attitudes on an array of issues and to use their responses to identify priorities for community action. As a result of the 2009 survey, York County's CTC has decided to focus the community's attention on a couple of areas.

The data assessment workgroup that I served on identifed two factors that put kids at risk for problems and two factors that protect kids from problems:

Risk factors

• Parental attitudes favorable toward anti-social behavior
• Family conflict

Protective factors

• Community opportunities for pro-social involvement
• Community rewards for pro-social involvement

The data assessment group also identified three problem behaviors that should be addressed:

• Attacking someone with intent to harm
• Being drunk or high at school
• Depression and anxiety

In response, CTC leaders developed a coordinated plan to address these risk and protective factors and problem behaviors. This is really the crux of the action plan, and the work will happen mainly through three organizations: Big Brothers Big Sisters of York County, the Strengthening Families Program, and John Hopkins' Adolescent Depression Awareness Program.

Here's a video about ADAP.


You can find the entire action plan and the results of the 2009 York County PAYS survey on our Web site. This is absolutely some of the most important work happening in York County today, and I'd encourage you to take a look at both documents.

- Dan Fink

Education Summit preview: Interview with Elaine Weiss

Elaine Weiss

On Mondays between now and the YorkCounts York County Education Summit on April 14, we'll take a look at some of the issues surrounding public education today. Most of the posts will be written by participants in the summit. Today, we'll start out with an interview with Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. At the summit, Elaine will talk about the state of American education from the national perspective. Here's an edited version of the phone interview we did recently.

DAN FINK: Tell me about your background and how you ended up at Broader, Bolder Approach.

ELAINE WEISS: Well, I used to be a lawyer. I went into law school wanting to do good stuff. And I was always interested in poverty and finding remedies that worked to get people out of poverty. After I was in it for awhile, I realized that law might not be the best way for me to accomplish that. So I went back to school to get a degree in public policy. I studied urban policy at George Washington for my doctorate. I wanted to find out: What does the evidence say about what helps people out of poverty? And it seemed to all go back to education. K-12 reforms weren’t working, and a lot of problems opened up earlier than that, which is how I got interested in early education.

DF: Here in York County, people have done work around improving early education as a way to avoid later problems like truancy and dropping out, and we've had some blog posts about that recently. So where did that take you?

EW: I focused my doctorate on early education, and that's how I ended up at Pew (Charitable Trust). While I was there, I learned a lot about education and policy reform. I began to see that American education tends to go through these cycles, where people decide, "This reform will work," and then a few years later, "Oh, wait, this reform will work." In the course of doing all this reading, I came across Richard Rothstein's book "Class and Schools." It's a wonderful book that brings together all these factors - early education and poverty and reform. I can remember thinking if this comprehensive approach to education policy ever becomes a campaign, I want to be part of it. (Editor's note: Richard Rothstein is one of the original founders of BBA and a member of the BBA National Advisory Council.) (The book) is not at all an apology for schools, as some would paint it, but it points out all the factors that interfere with a teacher's ability to teach and a student's ability to focus and learn, which are pretty obvious to anyone who has taught or who has been in a poor neighborhood or, frankly, has been a parent. Schools are only part of a child's education experience, and reform traditionally didn't incorporate non-school issues that kids face.

DF: What do you mean by non-school issues?

EW: One example is mobility. In urban schools, families move a lot, for reasons usually associated with financial instability, so the kids are constantly having to adjust to new classrooms, new teachers, and schools and districts spend money trying to deal with administrative hurdles that don't exist in less mobile areas. In Flint, Mich., they looked at this mobility issue, and they decided to offer rent subsidies. If the problem is parents don't have enough money for the rent, let's give them money for that, and the kids won't have that disruption to their learning. And they had a dramatic improvement. In York, if you have an instability problem, find a pot of money to help keep these kids in one place and one school, and you can make a difference.


DF: Talk a little bit about No Child Left Behind and the role the federal government should play in education reform. There's a pretty broad range of views, from President Obama's plan for reauthorizing NCLB, to doing away with the Department of Education.

EW: Dismantling the Education Department would do away with many critical programs. But I think (those that promote that) are right the federal government does not belong in state and local education policy to the extent they have come to be. The idea (among federal policy makers) is that states and localities will mess up and the federal government will not. But we have seen that the federal government standards have not really brought about student improvement, they have not provided realistic mandates, they haven't given the state governments and localities the flexibility they need to make the changes required to improve student performance. We need to get back to broad accountability, not the narrow mandates that are required in these tests. Use the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It's not gamed by the system; it shows good results; and it can be used across states very well. It allows states to disaggregate data to show who is and who isn’t doing well compared to other states and would allow more policy comparisons across states.

DF: Here in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, there's a lot of talk about choice and vouchers. What do you think about free-market competition as a way to improve the performance of public schools?

EW: The Broader, Bolder Approach doesn’t have a specific position on charter schools and vouchers, because the issues facing schools are not, as many suggest today, based on lack of competition. The market is a very important thing, but it's not the right model for every one of our institutions, and it has serious flaws, as recent years have shown us. Schools, like families, work well when they’re collaborative - when teachers work together, when they work with principals and parents, and with students, and when they collaborate with one another. It doesn’t make sense to have a market model where you have “winners” and “losers.”

DF: How we fund public education will come up in policy discussions here and in other states. Talk about the connection between adequate, equitable funding and reducing the achievement gap.


EW: States vary greatly in the way they redistribute funding across districts to make sure schools have the resources they need. Decades of research suggest that what happens within the school walls – classroom, administration, peer effect – accounts for somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of student outcomes by the time they are done with school. If we had total equity and schools were being run perfectly, we’d still only to be able to close about a third of the achievement gap. We definitely need more equity in funding, but it’s the resources outside of school that account for the majority of the gaps we see. Where the community and the people are connected to the school, you will get good outcomes. Some people will say: "You’re giving teachers excuses; you’re letting them off the hook." That’s not what we’re saying. We’re saying, "We know there are things that are outside your control, things that happen outside the schools, and we will support that to help you do your job." That is empowering.
 
- Dan Fink

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IF YOU GO

What: "State of the Schools: A Countywide Education Summit"
When: 9 a.m.-2:30 p.m. April 14
Where: Pullo Center at Penn State York, 1031 Edgecomb Ave., York
How much: Admission is free, but advance registration is requested and box lunches will be available for $5.
Confirmed participants: Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, will provide the national context. Other presenters and panel discussion participants include:

• Brian Jensen, executive director of the Pennsylvania Economy League of Southwestern PA and senior vice president of civic policy for the Allegheny Conference on Community Development;
• Dennis Baughman, president of the Board of Trustees for the York Academy Regional Charter School;
• Thomas Gentzel, executive director for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association;
• James Testerman, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association;
• Republican State Rep. Ron Miller, who represents southwestern York County, including York, Springfield, Shrewsbury, Codorus, Manheim and West Manheim townships;
• Republican State Rep. Will Tallman, who represents York and Adams counties and serves on the House Education Committee;
• Democratic State Rep. Eugene DePasquale, who represents York and parts of Spring Garden and West Manchester townships;
• Joel Sears, president of the York County Taxpayers Council

To register: Send an e-mail with your name, school district and phone number to events@yorkcounts.org, and if you plan to purchase one of the $5 box lunches, please indicate your lunch preference from these wrap choices: turkey, ham, chicken salad, tuna salad or veggie.

For details: Contact Dan Fink at YorkCounts at 717-650-1460 or at dfink@yorkcounts.org.