Lakewood Elementary principal Karen Rogers should be concerned with things other than the number of fourth-grade dropouts at her school, which borders the affluent Lakewood neighborhood just west of White Rock Lake.

Truthfully, Lakewood is one of DISD’s most prosperous schools, with concerned parents and corporate sponsors logging the second-most volunteer hours district-wide in 1990-91.

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Lakewood even has a 175-member Pre-School PTA for parents of young children who are looking forward to attending school there.

And yet, Rogers says, when kids turn 8 or 9, almost fourth-grade age, their parents begin assessing the quality of education at DISD and seriously examining alternatives.

“A lot of parents look very closely at third grade. That’s when many ask: ‘Do I stick with public school or put my kids in private school?” Rogers says.

“Our goal is to retain the people who reside in our community and whose children should go to school here. We want them to be satisfied with the public school system.”

Blazing a New Trail

Community input plays a key role at Lakewood and in the School-Centered Education (SCE) model adopted by DISD in 1991.

Lakewood and Woodrow Wilson are among 30 new SCE schools this year, while J.L. Long Middle School was one of 10 in last year’s pilot program.

By 1995, according to TEA mandate, all school districts will initiate some for of site-based management. DISD has selected the SCE plan developed by Dr. James Comer, associate dean of the School of Medicine at Yale University.

With the early involvement of Lakewood, Long and Woodrow, many East Dallas schoolchildren now have a head start on an SCE track from kindergarten through 12th grade.

SCE returns power to individual schools, where administrators, parents, teachers, students and members of the community govern through a School-Community Council, several committees and four guiding principles:
• No fault
• Decisions by Consensus
• Collaborative Participation
• Maximum Utilization of Resources

Freeing Teachers to Teach

While education standards remain unchanged, gone are the rigid TEA mandates regarding the specific amounts of time teachers must devote to subject matter.

Administrators who in the name of discipline discouraged free discussion of policy now must learn a management style that emphasizes consensus.

The old school system will become a “system of schools,” according to SCE literature. Parallels exist in business, where companies embrace “Total Quality Management,” and among the new generation of social critics who seek alternatives to the “patriarchal” tradition.

In short, they’re saying, people aren’t going to participate in the system unless they own a piece of it.

Why Now for SCE?

What led Texas schools to part with tradition?

Hard times, mostly.

General Motors ignored demand for fuel-efficient cars until awakened by the success of Japanese imports. Businesses preferred adversarial relationships with employees until a recession formed them to look for alternatives.

And DISD has found it can no longer accept a system that graduates only 25 percent of its high-school freshmen.

Some schools have depended more on internal resources than others. Woodrow Wilson principal Robert Giesler expects to make use of those old skills as his school begins to explore outside links though SCE.

“We tease when we say we are Woodrow Wilson ISD,” Giesler says.

“Nobody knows our kids like we do. Because of that, we’ve been able to get a steady growth over the last four to five years. Now we see it getting better.”

Woodrow Takes the Plunge

Woodrow enacted its School-Community Council in January and began planning for the next five to seven years. The 35 council members include faculty, students and parents from each of Woodrow’s eight feeder schools.

Since then, the SCE process has produced numerous proposals and initiatives, such as peer counseling, advocate classes to assist students with course and college selection and personal problems, community service credits that return students to their elementary and middle schools, and a restructured science program.

Giesler is pleased with the results, but he admits that consensus is much more difficult to achieve than a yes-or-no vote that favors the majority, or even more simply, a command decision.

(Vivian Johnson, DISD project manager for SCE, says it typically takes about three years before people grow comfortable with the process and really begin to work on the “nuts and bolts” of education).

“With SCE,” Giesler says, “council members have to understand the purpose, the philosophy behind the program.

“People understand the idea behind peer mediation right away. But other things, such as the advocate class, are not so simply understood. Some people will need a lot of reassurance.

“I can’t step in and do that because that’s no longer my role. My role is to teach others and then trust them. I very seldom get disappointed because I trust people.

“But my role has changed from being the manager to being the facilitator, giving people room to grow.”

SCE’s Guiding Light

Similarly, at Lakewood, the school theme this year is, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Rogers says.

That is true of the SCE process, also. We can accomplish a great deal more together than what we can as individuals.

“The main piece is the consensus-building (SCE Guiding Principle No. 2),” Rogers says. “We don’t blame anybody for failure, and we don’t waste a lot of time telling people what was wrong in the past (“No fault,” Guiding Principle No. 1).

“We assess the present and work on how we want things to be in the future (“Collaborative Participation,” Guiding Principal No. 3).

Lakewood’s council (carefully balanced among men and women and selected to reflect the school’s ethnic mix, Rogers says) has turned the committees loose on a long list of projects.

“Most of them surveyed staff and parents to try to see what issues they needed to address. As they find an issue – for example, how the school program is organized or how me might improve our facilities – the chairmen bring recommendations back to the council,” Rogers says.

Since January, Lakewood has:

• Reorganized its laureate program to include all students, not just those labeled as talented and gifted.
• Expanded the single language arts grade on students’ report cards to include grades for reading, writing and grammar. Lakewood received approval to change this procedure after submitting a waiver to DISD.
• Added parent education workshops at Fannin Elementary, which sends half its fourth-grade students to Lakewood, and the federally subsidized Town Park Apartments, which also sends children to Lakewood.
• Designed its own staff development program as an alternative to a similar program planned by DISD.

The Parent Trap

“It’s a scary thing being a parent” and sending kids off to school “when they’ve been in a protected environment,” says Lakewood School-Community Council president Chet Boortz, who has a fifth-grade student at Lakewood and two at Woodrow Wilson.

“Anything that gets parents involved and gives them a voice in their schools helps them to see these obstacles are not as great as perceived and that they can be overcome.”

The school councils at East Dallas’ SCE schools have met twice, discussing issues of common interest. Safety and security, neighborhood concerns and continuity of instruction are high on the list.

J.L. Long Leads the Way

The others also want to know more about the popular peer counseling program (known as Peer Ears) that began last year at J.L. Long.

Students with comments and complaints may discuss them with other students assigned to occupy a booth in the school cafeteria. Council members at Lakewood and Woodrow hope to begin similar programs.

Other SCE initiatives at Long include cultural-based electives such as folklorico, mariachi band and sign language, and weekly home-room classes where students work on “identity affirming” exercises.

In addition, the School-Community Council has arranged for deaf education students at Stonewall Jackson Elementary on Mockingbird at Matilda to follow their classmates to J.L. Long. Previously, many of those students attended another middle school.

The Trouble with Democracy

Twice a week, Long computer teacher Javier Garcia conducts English classes for Spanish-speaking parents. He hopes to offer more computer-based courses if he can attract funding.

With 10 to 15 parents enrolled in his classes, Garcia has seen the benefits of SCE. But he also wonders if DISD isn’t reaching too far in its effort to include everyone in the educational process.

“It’s not so much a problem with SCE – it’s our system: We’re too democratic,” he says.

“A good private school sets certain standards and then holds the students to them. Public schools try to satisfy everybody. They try to provide everybody with everything.

“By doing that, you dilute the system.”

But Garcia will wait and see. And if DISD is sincere in its adherence to the principles of School-Centered Education, nobody will mind his criticism of the program.

That’s Guiding Principle No. 2: No Fault.