School district inconsistent, inefficient, audit concludes

EOWYN LeMAY IVEY-Frontiersman reporter

MAT-SU -- A rapid turnover of superintendents, a micro-managing school board embroiled in controversy and a lack of districtwide planning or any kind of cohesive approach to curriculum has allowed the Mat-Su Borough School District to unravel into dozens of individual fiefdoms.

This was the conclusion of a curriculum audit team that presented its independent findings to the Mat-Su school board Wednesday night. Rather than operating as a unified district, the auditors concluded, individual teachers and schools are working independently with little direction from the school board or central administration. The result -- inconsistency, duplication of efforts and inefficiency.

To address the many problems plaguing schools, auditors recommended the district and board work to identify clear goals and directions, align curriculum so that there is cohesiveness in what is being taught from one school to another and one grade to another, divvy up resources based on meeting districtwide goals and systematically test the success of these efforts to see what is working and what isn't.

As school district officials had warned when they entered into the process nearly two months ago, the $75,000 grant-funded audit was designed to find problems and weaknesses and so did not highlight successful aspects of the district.

In her presentation to the board, however, audit team leader Sue Shidaker Greene painted a less bleak picture, describing the school board, administrators and teaching staff as dedicated and hardworking.

"The assumption is everybody is doing the best they can … given where everyone is at that point in time," Greene said. She said the audit is not an analysis of individual employees, but rather a systems report -- is the district as a whole working as efficiently as it can?

The answer -- no.

In October, Greene and six other auditors with Phi Delta Kappa conducted an intense review of the district, touring all of its 33 schools, visiting all classrooms except those with short-term substitute teachers, interviewing principals, teachers, administrators and school board members, and sifting through a dozen boxes of documents that included budgets, policies and curriculum guides. During the following six weeks, the auditors developed 20 findings and nine recommendations that Greene presented to the school board and district in a nearly 200-page report.

In the report, the auditors describe a diverse, geographically large school district with a growing number of new teachers and a tendency for students to move from one school to another. In this setting, the auditors concluded, it is especially important to provide consistency in curriculum so that even new teachers know what to teach and students can move from one classroom to another without losing ground.

Does this mean all classrooms have to look the same? Definitely not, Greene said. She said aligning curriculum means ensuring that the content of what is being taught matches up across the board. How that information is conveyed to the students is still best left to the individual schools and teachers, who can modify their approaches to meet the specific needs of their students, she said.

Greene said part of the problem in the district is some of the staff has assumed that recently developed state standards somehow take the place of curriculum. Instead, the auditors advised, state standards should provide a foundation for curriculum and assessment. They define what should be taught and what should be tested, but they do not provide all the necessary teaching material or assessments themselves.

Also among the auditors' concerns was the rapid succession of superintendents in recent years. Since 1994, the district has gone through six changes in leaderships, with the longest term of service being three years and the shortest seven months. This kind of turn-over, the auditors concluded, has too often placed the board in the role of interim superintendent, making decisions about individual programs and schools that are more correctly assigned to district administration.

In an interview, one district employee told auditors, "Board members are going to the schools to solve problems. They shouldn't do that."

Another said, "Due to instability at the top, policies have lost their focus."

Rather than the board reacting directly to constituent concerns, and making decisions regarding specific schools, the auditors said the board should instead be focused on setting districtwide policies that can then drive the administration's handling of these specific cases.

This lack of districtwide policy and planning can also lead to what Greene called an unraveling of a district that allows each school to operate as a separate "fiefdom."

"We're independent schools … not really a district now," one employee is quoted in the report.

Whether it was the development of programs to help students do better on state exams or the way in which schools were entering data, the auditors found that many schools were reinventing the wheel. Often two schools would be working through the same process independently instead of pooling their efforts and resources.

"We saw so much duplication of effort," Greene said. "In essence, you're wasting a lot of manpower."

A lack of districtwide planning also created inconsistencies between schools, between grades and sometimes even within the same building. Greene said sometimes at the same school two different programs would be in conflict in terms of educational approach.

When observing classrooms, Greene said auditors came in with a checklist and tried to take a sort data-driven snapshot. " What are the students doing? What are the teachers doing? … What is that learning environment?"

Greene said the auditors found many teachers putting a great deal of time and energy into their work, but too often they were not using teaching strategies that aligned with district and state expectations.

All told, the nearly 200-page report calls for a complete overhaul of the district, from how teachers are teaching in the classroom to how principals are implementing policies to how the school board and superintendent interact. But in the end, Greene said, the auditors left the school district with a sense of optimism.

"This school system has the capability to produce much more … because there are a lot of good things already going on," Greene said.