“This whole process is being done This from the Glasgow Daily Times, photo at WKU:
Caverna School District officials say they have yet to learn the results of the academic audit Caverna High School recently had and the district’s superintendent is becoming irritated and distrustful toward the process.
CHS was recently identified as a persistently low achieving school, along with nine other schools, by the Kentucky Department of Education in the state’s Race to the Top federal grant application.“They have not let us know anything as to what the results are. They said it can take up to 30 days,” said Sam Dick, superintendent, who addressed the Caverna Board of Education Thursday night.
The audit was conducted in March and Dick said the team that did the audit was very “congenial, helpful and very thorough.”
Since the audit was conducted, state education officials have learned Kentucky did not receive any Race to the Top funding in the first round.
The 10 schools that did appear on the list, however, still qualify for school improvement grants.
Caverna is set to receive $500,000 over three years in school improvement grant funding.Dick visited Frankfort last week and met with state education commissioner Terry Holliday, state senators and state representatives to make sure “this process is done in a way that we get what’s coming to us — just to ensure that we are still on the radar.”
“I received an e-mail last night from a team at KDE, which wants to come down and meet with us. They gave me four or five dates. I was kind of upset about that today,” Dick said, adding the district now has to complete an application. “They are going to offer technical assistance [to complete the application] in the form of a two-hour meeting.”
Some of the information that would be included in the application is how the school district plans to assess CHS, what intervention model was to be used at the school and a three-year budget on how the district is going to spend the $500,000.
Dick responded to the KDE team informing them the district has not learned the outcome of the academic audit and cannot answer the additional questions.
Dick said he was told that when the second team wants to meet with district officials, they anticipate having the results of the academic audit.“This whole process is being done in the dark of the night and changes from one minute to the next,” he said.
One of the questions Dick had for the academic team was who chooses the intervention model.
“The team, when it was here, said it did. The commissioner, when I talked to him, said he did. The legislators, when I talked to them, said the statute said I did and somebody else said it was the site-based council,” Dick said. “So we really don’t know who gets to pick the intervention model.”
He continued that in speaking to state legislators there were some things that have transpired that were not in the Race to the Top legislation.
“For example, the concept of removing the school principal, which is in every one of the models. When I brought it up to [state representative] Johnny Bell, he said, ‘That wasn’t our intent. Our intent was to do the audit, find out where you were wrong and give you a year or two to get it straightened back up,’” Dick said, adding he told Bell that was not what Caverna officials have been told...
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