August 06, 2008 06:16 PM UTC

Polis-run schools fail students, cheat taxpayers

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• by: mordantliberal

(And only a week before the election–impeccable timing! – promoted by Colorado Pols)

It looks like ‘education reformer’ Jared Polis’s school thinks that if you show up for class 50% of the time, you deserve a Colorado diploma.  Is Jared’s plan to give out diplomas without earning them, setting these kids up for failure all the while taxpayers foot the bill?

Below is an exposé from 9News.

Students miss school but still pass some classes

KUSA – New America Charter schools across the state have been failing to enforce their attendance policies, according to records obtained by 9NEWS. As a result, 504 students at the Lowry campus missed 17,499 full or partial days of school last year. Most of those absences (16,167) were unexcused.

Half of the students missed more than 30 days of school, records show. Fourteen of those students were absent more than 80 days and two students missed 101 days.

“I think you have a choice to do it, to keep going to school or just stay at home and do nothing,” said senior Janeli Gomez who was absent 90 days last year at the Lowry Campus. “They give you that choice.”

Senior Mary Pedroza missed 93 classes last year at Lowry partly because of work and partly because she just didn’t want to go.

“Sometimes I ditching the school, but not much, like maybe one day per week,” said Pedroza. “This year, I don’t want to be missing the class. I want to go to school for reals [sic].”

The students say they never received detention for missing school and ended up passing most of their classes.

New America School founder Jared Polis, a Democrat who is running for Colorado’s second congressional district, said he expects high absentee rates in the schools because they serve troubled students and new immigrants who don’t speak English.

The schools, based in Aurora, Lakewood, Northglenn and Eagle Valley, are often the students’ only chance to earn a high school diploma. Many of the students are parents, full-time workers and the heads of households and don’t have time for education, according to Polis.

“We would have 100 percent absent if the school didn’t exist. We’re serving students who aren’t in school otherwise,” said Polis. “Really, every day any student is coming to our school, it is a win for us.”

New America School’s attendance policy says if students are absent more than 10 days they can be expelled. However, records show that almost never happens. Instead, four former teachers told 9NEWS they were supposed to give students make up work and allow them to pass their classes.

“It was not uncommon for kids to miss 50 days and then expect to be able to make up that work,” said Molly Hetzel, who was fired after teaching science at the Lowry campus of New America School for three years.

“We didn’t fail them because that was frowned upon,” she said. “We were required to give kids the benefit of being in an alternative school. While in theory, it may look OK on paper, in practice, it was a disaster.”

“These students were still getting credit, we were still passing them and I found it to be non-educational,” said a teacher who wants to remain anonymous because he’s looking for work after resigning from the Lowry campus. “I think we’re setting them up for failure, I think we’re setting them up for an environment out of school that doesn’t exist.”

The superintendent of New America School says in order to receive credit, students must demonstrate through testing or work that they successfully pass the requirements set by the state and district.

“If they can make up the extra work they’ve missed, then why wouldn’t we give them credit for it?” said superintendent Dominic DiFelice.

In a statement to 9NEWS, DiFelice said that the information given by the students who claimed to have passed most of their classes even though they were absent is “misleading and inaccurate.” He said credits were earned and obtained by fewer than 5 percent of students who missed more than 16 classes.

The attendance rate on the Lowry campus is 66 percent, according to records.

“You might say that’s atrocious. I would say we are dealing with the most at-risk kids in Colorado all in one building and this is their last chance,” said DiFelice. “We take them here, we nurture them here and we try to give them credit and we certainly give them the language acquisition which is very important.”

The superintendent says the administration left it up to the principals and teachers on each of the four campuses to determine how the absentee policy would be implemented during the last three years.

This year, the absentee policy has been revised. When school starts on August 20th, the schools will use one uniform “pyramid of intervention” policy. That policy says that teachers and the school will intervene when students miss several classes.

Officials in the Aurora Public School district, which holds the charter for the Lowry NAS school, say students need to be in class to learn.

“Nothing really replaces being in a classroom, being with an educator, being with someone who has been taught how to teach students and work with students and interact with them on a daily basis,” said Barbara Cooper, Director of School Services for Aurora Public Schools.

Cooper says students need rules to learn and those rules need to be enforced.

“You have to make sure that what you put in policy is enforceable and that you’re going after it and enforcing it,” said Cooper. “Students learn very quickly whether or not we are serious about having them in school each day.”

The charter schools rank among the lowest in the state for testing scores, according to records.

“We’re willing to wear that as a badge of honor and say, ‘Guess what, we don’t care that we’re going to be at the bottom of the barrel,'” said founder Polis. “We’re actually going to try to teach these kids English and give them a high school education.”

The New America charter schools receive $6,500 to $6,800 per student from state and federal funds. In 2007-2008, the Lowry camps earned $3.1 million, according to Colorado Department of Education records.

The schools encourage students to bring friends during enrollment by offering them $50 gift certificates to places like Target, according to DiFelice.

“We try to recruit kids, it’s a marketing thing just like you have products on the shelves,” said superintendent DiFelice. “We have a very important product, and that product is education and we think we do it better than a lot of other places.”

Half of the students who enrolled at the Adams campus during October 2006-2007 dropped out. Because of that, some teachers say it feels like the school is playing a game to get students enrolled for the funds.

“We’re basically putting bait on a hook, dangling it in front of students and then, after the October count, it was like, well, we’ll just snip the fishing line and we don’t really care anymore because we have our money,” said a three-year teacher who wants to remain anonymous.

While the school has a high drop out rate from October, New America School enrolls new students throughout the year and the school is not paid for those new students. Sometimes the school enrolls nearly as many students as those who dropped out, making it a virtual wash when it comes to public funding, records show.

“The New America School is a non-profit. We’re not squirreling away dollars in the central office,” said DiFelice, school superintendent. “It’s through the generosity of the Jared Polis Foundation that keeps us afloat every year.”

The Adams 14 NAS campus was audited in September 2007 and forced to repay the state $376,775 for over counting students. The superintendent says the problem occurred because some of the student records were lost during a move to another facility. The Lowry NAS campus ranks 66th in state for the most absences.

The school with most missed days is Aurora Central High which in 2006-2007 had 63,701 partial or full days missed, according to CO Dept. of Education records.

http://www.9news.com/news/arti…