Where Are, Where Should We Be, and Where Are We Going

As reported in a study concerning college completion conducted by the College Board, a not-for-profit membership association whose mission is to connect students to college success and opportunity, the United States has dropped to 12th place in college completion for 25-34-year-old citizens from its leadership position of several decades ago. By comparison, within the study group of 36 developed nations, Canada ranks at number one.

The College Board has established 10 guidelines to help the United States stop the trend of decline and reverse it. The first five of those guidelines concern not college education, but pre-kindergarten through high school education.

Do we not see part of the problem right here within the Clay Community Schools Corporation?

In our elementary schools, we are teaching students to read using both the Shurley Method and the traditional method with performance indicators that are comparable; however, we are teaching each method in isolated schools depending on the wishes of the employees of the various elementary schools. That the performance indicators between Jackson Township and Staunton Elementary are comparable shows that specific students within each school would benefit from instruction in the learning method that is not available to them at that school. But we do not have the money, and apparently the employees do not have the inclination, to teach both methods in every one of our elementary schools for the maximum educational benefit of the students.

Another problem comes from the community itself. That is the tendency to resist change or progress and hold the community back by not finding the facts that are relevant in the current situation that have changed since the same type of decision was required in the past. This is evident at every one of our elementary schools at the moment as renovation of buildings to serve less than five hundred students are being completed. The fact is that over half of the new elementary schools built in Indiana from the ground up in have been built to serve more than 600 students and most of the ones that were not are in corporations that do not have 600 elementary students. A person has only to look over the county line to find elementary schools of over 600 students that are as effective as our smaller ones educationally with matching or worse student demographics than we contend with but those schools expend less money as they have consolidated many of the support services by having fewer locations where those services must be delivered. This information was not disclosed to the public by the corporation and that is a failing on the part of the corporation.

Let's correct the problem of the lack of knowledge and improve the flow of information. If you are reading this, you have the Internet and access to more information than the President of the United States had with all of the assets available to him at the time during the 1960s and 1970s

Our administrators, teachers, and students deserve the best support we can give education. That does not mean that they need everything that they wish for or that the community wishes for them to have. Many people wish for Northview to have an auxiliary gymnasium and a swimming pool, yet we have freshmen entering that school that cannot read at the eighth grade level. We have invested in new security measures at the entrance of every building, yet almost every incident of mayhem that has occurred in any workplace, especially educational facilities, in the past was performed by a person who was fully authorized to be on the premises. Truly, even now, there is no way to know if a person entering one of our buildings has the intent to cause harm, yet the money has been spent and the question is how did it improve education? Even if a person with the intent to cause harm didn't bring a weapon into the building, that would not prevent a crisis as injury can be caused with the bare hands.

I'm going to close with a question to every member of the community, every board member and every administrator. What is your goal for the corporation 50 years from now and what steps do you see as being needed to accomplish that goal? My answer is that the goal is to educate the students as fully as possible to prepare them for success in life and that the steps required to be able to accomplish that is to spend money on things that improve education, cut costs in things that do not contribute greatly to education so the money can be invested in education, and never waste a penny!

Leo L. Southworth