BEL-NOR • As students across the region embark on winter break, third-grader Kam’ron Williams is about to lose his school.
He’s already said goodbye to his teacher, who was laid off and left for a new job in a different school district. Today, Kam’ron and 332 other students will leave Bel-Nor Elementary School for the last time. They will be folded into two other elementary schools in the Normandy School District, forced to adjust to new teachers, new classrooms, new bus schedules and new friends.
“He deserves to learn,” said Kam’Ron’s mother, Tracey Williams. “If the district has a problem, shutting it down isn’t going to solve it.”
The abrupt closure of Bel-Nor Elementary is unusual. Normally schools close at the end of a school year. Rarely do they close in December.
But this year is far from typical for the unaccredited Normandy School District, where everyone from students to teachers to custodians is trying to cope with the impact of Missouri’s school transfer law. The law had been tied up in the courts for six years until last June. It had not been tested on a significant scale until this fall.
The law allows children in unaccredited school systems to transfer to higher-performing schools at their home district’s expense. That is costing Normandy about $15 million in transportation and tuition expenses this year for about 1,000 of its students who now attend schools elsewhere.
As district officials work through ways to offset these costs, they’re moving children and staff around midyear, and hoping that the disruption won’t negatively affect instruction for the 80 percent of children who remain in their schools.
“It’s a massive impact,” Superintendent Ty McNichols said. “It’s not as simple as closing a school. You move one piece and it sends ripples throughout the organization.”
As a result, hundreds of the 3,000 students in this north St. Louis County district will have different teachers when winter break ends in January. Many classes are being consolidated and enlarged to compensate for the smaller staff. Some middle school teachers are being moved to the high school. Younger teachers are being replaced with more veteran ones in other buildings. The district had to comply with tenure laws when making staff cuts.
Last weekend, Bel-Nor parents received notification of where their child will be enrolled after today. Roughly half will attend Washington Elementary. The rest will go to Lucas Crossing Elementary.
“The hardest part will be finding who my friends might be,” said Montia Evans, a Bel-Nor fifth-grader.
In some ways, it will be like the first day of school all over again, she said. Even if all goes smoothly, there will be a learning curve, time taken away from instruction as the Bel-Nor children learn routines at their new schools.
“I don’t think lawmakers understand how this affects children,” said Ruth Durham, the school librarian who has worked at Bel-Nor for 15 years. Around her were piles of books and stacks of things she plans to give away to the children before they leave this afternoon. “How can you improve education when you’re taking our funding away?”
PACKING UP
Principal Anthony Taylor made his daily rounds inside Bel-Nor earlier this week as teachers and students dismantled their classrooms. The hallway bulletin boards were bare. Inside classrooms, textbooks and manuals were packed into boxes and plastic crates that were stacked and scattered.
In the gym, third-graders stood on risers and rehearsed for their final winter concert, to be held that night.
“This is where our hearts and minds have been,” Taylor said, watching them sing. “Our kids. Making sure this is a smooth transition for them.”
McNichols chose to close Bel-Nor primarily because of its physical condition. Built in 1928, the building lacks central heating and air conditioning. It has a long list of expensive maintenance needs.
Enrollment at the school dropped by more than 100 children this year, in large part because of transfers.
Last week, there were tears from some students as they said goodbye to teachers who needed to depart early.
“It’s been tough on them,” Taylor said of the children. “Kids aren’t used to separating midyear from people they trust and know. It’s been sad.”
NO CERTAINTY
The Normandy School District will use the empty Bel-Nor building for storage — a place for surplus textbooks, computers and other supplies.
There’s no certainty that the closure will be permanent.
Few things are certain in the Normandy School District.
It’s unclear, for example, whether the 1,000 or so transfer students will come back to the district, or if more will leave. Most policy leaders say they would prefer that transfer students be allowed to continue in their new schools through graduation. But it’s less clear who would pay their tuition if Normandy is dissolved, or if other students in the future would be granted the option to transfer.
For Bel-Nor, no one can predict whether the soon-to-be empty classrooms will again be needed, and when.
The lack of predictability has provided both a motivation and a distraction to school officials as they try to focus on improving test scores and attendance rates — two important factors that contribute to any district’s state rating.
Some teachers say this has been their best year yet in Normandy schools. Attendance is up and behavior problems are down, administrators say. But it won’t be until test results are released in August that anyone will know whether the stronger focus on literacy and STEM education — science, technology, engineering and math — has paid off.
“Hopefully we will get our accreditation back,” Taylor said. “We may be back in this building.”
RUNNING OUT OF MONEY
The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is crafting a plan to better address troubled districts across the state. It’s expected to become public in January.
State lawmakers have filed more than a dozen bills aiming to reduce transfer expenses for unaccredited school districts. Some proposals add more educational choices for students closer to home. Among the possibilities is allowing school districts to open charter schools in unaccredited districts.
Yet there seems to be little to no support for sending $6.8 million in state money to help Normandy get to the end of the school year.
Even with the school closure and job cuts, the district could run out of cash before April. The cuts only save about $3 million, when transfer expenses are close to $15 million. The district started the school year with a 17 percent reserve fund, which is close to depleted.
“We love the fact that legislators are talking about long-term fixes to the policy and the law, but there’s no discussion about the short term,” McNichols said. “The only thing I’ve been told consistently is, if we run out of money, they will lapse the district. But lapsing the district will not pay for its bills. What happens to our kids the day after the lapse? The kids are still here. And what are they going to do to pay the $1.3 million in (monthly) transfer bills?”
The district has about 20 percent fewer students this year. But the costs associated with the transfers leave it with 30 percent less money.
The unaccredited Riverview Gardens School District faces a similar predicament. However, it isn’t expected to face insolvency until the 2014-15 school year. Its larger savings account has protected it from a school closure or layoffs.
Tonni Mills, who has four children at Bel-Nor, was at the school volunteering this week. She lives close enough to walk. It will be much harder for her to be active in their new school, Washington Elementary, because it’s farther away.
Proximity to Bel-Nor was one of the reasons she didn’t transfer her children to another district. It would be impossible for her to pick them up from school if they were sick — something that is more important to her than test scores.
“I can walk to their school if something happens,” she said. “I can’t walk all the way out to Francis Howell.”
