Connie and Gary Halkowitz were out of options.
The foster daughter they are adopting was doing poorly in school — so poorly she was getting mostly D’s and F’s. They hired a tutor and took away privileges like sleepovers, the school dance and her iPad.
The Halkowitzes met with Sahuarita Middle School officials several times during the school year. But when nothing seemed to help, they began exploring the option of having their daughter repeat seventh grade.
At first, they said, school officials seemed to offer retention as an option. Until it was clear they weren’t.
Frustrated, Connie took the issue to the state’s schools chief, Diane Douglas, who was hosting a town hall in Tucson.
Douglas’ response? “Local control.”
School boards decide matters such as retention and promotion, she told the mother. There was nothing the Arizona Department of Education could do.
So on Aug. 8, the girl who last year failed almost every class will move on to eighth grade.
“She’s going to have a real tough time in high school if she doesn’t get this right,” Gary said. “I don’t want high school to be so hard that she doesn’t go to college.”
The Sahuarita Unified School District has not retained a middle school student in the past five years, data collected by the Arizona Daily Star show. Tucson-area districts generally retained only a few middle-schoolers, with the exception of the much-larger Tucson Unified School District, which held back more than 80 last year.
Districts have control
Sahuarita retained about 33 students districtwide last year, said Brett Bonner, the district’s assistant superintendent, who is in charge of overseeing retention policy and process. All of those students were in kindergarten through third grade.
The district generally does not retain at the middle or high school level. “We believe it should be an early intervention if retention is considered,” Bonner said.
Factors for a student to be considered for retention include poor academic performance, cognitive disability, low scores on classroom, benchmark and standardized testing and social-emotional needs, he said. But even then, it’s a last resort.
The law is ambiguous when it comes to promotion and retention, said Charles Tack, spokesman for the Arizona Department of Education. It gives local districts, as the state schools chief told Connie Halkowitz, the power to decide what the process should look like.
It names teachers as the ultimate arbiter of student retention, but it also lets parents challenge a district’s decision to promote or retain, he said.
Research shows no proof that retention helps a struggling student, said Shane Jimerson, professor of school psychology at the University of California-Santa Barbara.
“In fact, grade retention has been found to be among the most powerful predictors of future academic failure, including dropping out prior to high school graduation.”
Yet, what researchers call “social promotion,” which means students are promoted based on their age or social group without having mastered the academic material, does not appear to be the answer, either.
“The evidence clearly indicates that we must move beyond grade retention and social promotion,” he said. “Instead, educational professionals must focus on interventions that build upon the strengths of students and target their needs.”
Intervention methods could include targeted tutoring, after-school programs, alternative education and summer school.
Tutor hired
The Halkowitz’s foster daughter came to live with them in 2014.
She said she likes school, but that her grades have always been low.
“I’ve never had to have them good before,” she said. Nobody at home reminded her to do homework or study. Academics also weren’t a priority in the children’s shelter where she and her brother were living before they joined their new family.
The Halkowitzes were determined to make the children’s lives better. They wanted to provide for the siblings, who would soon be their own, in a way they had not been provided for before.
But when their foster daughter’s October 2015 progress report showed a 1.2 grade-point average, they told her there had to be consequences — she couldn’t attend the Halloween dance or take part in a cheerleading competition.
The next progress report, brought home in November, showed that her grades had actually gotten worse. So the Halkowitzes got tutoring for her and enrolled her in an after-school program.
By December, when the girl’s grades showed no improvement, they started talking about retaining her in seventh grade. That’s what they thought they were doing when they met with school officials in December and January.
“We weren’t dead-set that she was going to be retained, but we were dead-set that that had to be an option,” Connie said. She even spent a day in her foster daughter’s classrooms to get to the bottom of what was going wrong.
Three weeks before the school year ended, the girl was moved to an alternative-education program outside her regular classroom, where her foster parents say she was assigned busy work and told to run errands for teachers.
Sahuarita Middle School Principal Stephanie Silman said she could not talk about a specific student, but that teachers in the alternative-education program do not assign busy work or have students do errands. In regard to a move three weeks before the end of the school year, she said placement in an alternative program “could be any time throughout the year, including the end of the year.”
Indivualized plans
The Halkowitzes, feeling like school officials weren’t hearing them, asked to meet with Bonner, the Sahuarita assistant superintendent, and were told that the district would not retain the girl in seventh grade. They then met with Manuel Valenzuela, Sahuarita’s superintendent, who said the same thing.
“If a student is struggling and we all agree that the student needs intervention, that doesn’t necessarily mean holding them back,” Valenzuela said in an interview.
“In a lot of cases, the support and the individualized plan together are really what the student needs.”
Retention is often “misused to address issues that really are not best addressed by retention,” he added. It works best for students who are developmentally not ready to move on, he said.
While he couldn’t speak about any specific student, he said that if a student is promoted to the next grade, then that child is ready to move on.
Child’s Best interest
Five of the nine districts in the Tucson area retained fewer than 10 middle school students last year. Three — Sahuarita, Catalina Foothills and Flowing Wells — retained none, although those three have fewer middle schools than other area districts.
Catalina Foothills, with two middle schools, has not retained a middle school student in the past five years for reasons similar to those of Sahuarita’s.
“It’s not to say that we wouldn’t retain in middle school,” said Denise Bartlett, the district’s assistant superintendent. “We would if it’s in the best interest of the child.”
But Bartlett echoed what Bonner, the Sahuarita assistant superintendent, said: “Typically, retention is best administered early.”
DREAMS AND CONFLICTS
While the Tucson Unified School District agrees that retention is rarely beneficial, in some cases it has worked well, said Michael Konrad, the district’s middle school director.
“Retentions are there to make sure that students move forward through the educational system with skills necessary to be successful,” Konrad said.
TUSD’s relatively large number of middle school students retained in 2015 — 83 — reflects a far-larger middle school population than all other Tucson-area districts, he said.
The Halkowitz’s foster daughter dreams of becoming a cartoonist or a video-game designer. She’s even learning Mandarin so she can work in Asia one day.
She said she understands that in order to achieve her dreams, she has to work hard in school and go to college.
She said she wants to go forward into eighth grade but also understands why her foster parents are so invested in trying to have her retained.
The Halkowitzes will appeal the district’s decision to promote her before Sahuarita school board on Aug. 10 — two days after school starts.
But they feel conflicted. They have fought hard for what they think is best for their daughter, but having her start the year as an eighth-grader and then pulling her down to seventh grade two days later doesn’t feel right to them.
“It’s obviously too late to fix the school year,” Gary Halkowitz said.
