26 struggling Minn. schools file turnaround plans

Twenty-six of the lowest-performing schools in Minnesota have filed their turnaround plans with the state Department of Education, which will distribute grant money to pay for them in August.

Thursday was the deadline for the schools identified as persistently low-performing by the state to send in their applications for federal grant money. On Friday, the Minnesota Department of Education released a summary of what the schools will do.

To receive the money, all the schools had to agree to one of four federal blueprints for overhauling their operations and implement them by this fall. All the schools picked models in which they had to replace their principals, but none of them decided to shut down or convert to a charter school.

Four schools - two in Minneapolis and two in St. Paul - selected turnaround plans that required them to also replace at least half of their teachers. However, the schools got credit if they had already turned over their staff in the past few years.

That's what happened at Edison Senior High and Lucy Laney Elementary in the Minneapolis school district, said Eric Molho, director of strategic planning for the district. He said both schools got new principals and at least 50 percent new teachers during overhauls in 2008 prompted by the federal No Child Left Behind law.

"We believe that these are turnarounds already in progress," he said.

It was a similar situation at Humboldt Senior High in St. Paul, said district spokesman Howie Padilla.

Under the $3.5 billion federal School Improvement Grant program, the state will have about $32 million to spend on the schools over three years. The grant will pay for a new principal, assistant principal and turnaround supervisor, comprehensive curriculum reforms, more teacher training and extending the school day by at least an hour. The grants will be awarded Aug. 1.

The Education Department said four of the eligible schools opted out of the program, so they won't have to make the changes but also won't get the money. They are the secondary schools in Butterfield and Greenbush-Middle River, the Four Directions Charter School in Minneapolis and the Cityview Performing Arts Magnet school in Minneapolis, although that school plans to apply for the grant next year.

Butterfield Superintendent Lisa Shellum, who criticized the methodology that landed her secondary school on the low-achieving list in the first place, said the program didn't work for her tiny district in southern Minnesota.

She worried it wouldn't pay the extra costs of its mandates, including building office space in the district's only building for new administrators and paying for extra bus routes after the school hours for elementary and secondary students no longer matched up.

Those rural bus routes, she said, were about 100 miles long. "If we had to continually run all of the extra bus routes it would impact us to where we would have to take money out of the general fund," she said.

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The plans for the individual schools are available at the Minnesota Department of Education's Web site.

(Copyright 2010 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

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