Case Study: Savannah Schools

Like many southern cities, Savannah has seen white residents flee city schools for the suburbs. A strong parochial school base also skims students from public schools, where test scores are well below par. And despite Savannah’s growth rate, several businesses have abandoned the city because public schools are perceived as substandard.

“There’s been a strong feeling that in order to keep growing, we’ve got to do something about schools,” said Dan Suwyn, managing editor of the Savannah Morning News.

That’s just what the newspaper is trying to help the community do.
After months of kicking the problem around in the newsroom, the newspaper decided to use civic journalism to research and set community goals for the schools. It convened a group of community leaders with a single assignment: imagine it was the year 2010 and the Savannah-Chatham County school district had been named one of the best of its size in the country. What characteristics would the schools share?

The group quickly agreed on five:

• Schools were the “leading institutions” in their neighborhoods, where various services – from community education to business partnerships in learning – converged.
• Teachers and principals were rewarded and held accountable as professionals.
• Transitions between “life, school, work and beyond” were seamless.
• Students were active participants in their education, their school’s governing and their community.
• Diversity in learning was universally understood and integrated.

Although the group easily reached consensus on broad goals, the specifics on achieving those goals are still a work in progress. The committee is visiting schools in several U.S. cities with distinctive programs and philosophies to learn from their success. Members of the group have already visited a year-round elementary school in Bluffton, SC, and several Chatham County schools. Upcoming visits include:

• KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) Academy, Houston, TX:
  Grades 5-8. Innovative charter school founded in 1995. Students are low-income, high-risk, 95% African-American or Hispanic. School day runs from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays, and on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

• Stanton College Preparatory School, Jacksonville, FL:
  
  Grades 9-12. A magnet school that focuses on honors and advanced placement courses. Offers a rigorous pre-college curriculum that leads to a diploma recognized by universities in every country.

• Cascade Elementary School, Atlanta GA:
  Grades K-5, with 99% African-American students, 80% from families in an adjacent housing project. In four years, test scores in reading and math have risen dramatically.

• Patterson High School, Baltimore, MD:
  Grades 9-12. Under threat of state takeover five years ago, Patterson reinvented itself with assistance from the state and a Johns Hopkins’ program for large high schools that have serious problems with discipline, test scores and dropout rates.

• Mantua Elementary School, Fairfax, VA:
  Grades K-6. A community grant is helping this state-of-the-art elementary school integrate technology with other disciplines. Students in grades 5-6 use portable laptops.

Committee visits to the various schools are well documented. The Morning News sends a reporter and photographer to cover the visits. In addition, a video crew from the Savannah College of Art and Design accompanies the committee because of plans to produce a documentary on the project. And finally, the traveling committee members write essays about what they have seen and what might work in Savannah schools. These are printed in the newspaper along with news accounts.

In addition, the Morning News has initiated a number of education stories. The newspaper has published everything from math standards by grade to profiles of local schools, including poverty rates and state rankings on math, reading and language arts tests. The newspaper’s web site, with its message boards and e-mail access to the staff, is a highly interactive tool.

“We get lots of feedback,” Suwyn says. “We’re out in the community as much as possible. Reporters have their telephone numbers under their articles. My telephone number is on the front page.”

Taking the pulse of the community on education issues wasn’t hard – the paper conducted a survey, though it hasn’t publicly released the results. Suwyn says there were few surprises, aside from “the fact that education is pretty much right next to crime as the number one issue” in the community.

The leadership committee started with four people chosen by the newspaper to serve as “facilitators:” the head of the local bar association, a university professor, a leader from a homeless mission and a well-respected lawyer.

“We asked these people to nominate educators, parents, business leaders and community volunteers,” Suwyn said. “We took their list, filled in a few gaps and ended up with 60 names.”

Other committee members include a church minister, a Girl Scout director, an environmental activist, students, an engineer, a cultural arts coordinator and a child development specialist. They are, in Suwyn’s words, “people of consequence” who can get things done.

“We’re a small enough community that if the committee decides it wants a kick-butt school system, they’ll do it,” Suwyn says.

School board members, however, were conspicuously absent from the leadership committee. They were allowed to attend meetings, but not to speak. “We wanted the first sessions to focus on the ‘ideal,’ on the possibilities,” Suwyn said. “There was a feeling that the board members would be defensive and drag the first meetings into the mire of bureaucratic decision-making processes.”

The school board “resented the heck out of that,” Suwyn says, but several members attended committee meetings anyway. As the leadership committee congealed, board members were allowed to participate. Even so, there is muted enthusiasm for the project on the part of school board President Diane Cantor.

“It is certainly a positive thing for them to bring together these people to talk about education,” Cantor said. She declined to speculate, however, on what the board would do once the leadership committee issued its recommendations.
“When people make recommendations about education, they’re not thinking at all about what these things cost,” she said. “We’ll be happy to look at any recommendations, but we’re at the same time going to have to balance them with reality.”

Committee member Martha Fay, a former school board president herself, says she hopes the board will “take some of the best of what has been researched by the committee and use it in the school system.” She concedes that the committee may be usurping some of the board’s prerogatives but thinks most board members are “glad someone is interested and is trying to do something.”

Patrick Rossiter, another committee member, said that the leadership group, although diverse, is working together constructively. He notes that some problems students face these days – broken homes, single parents working long days, drugs and violence – do not lend themselves to quick fixes.

“It’s not like Beaver Cleaver’s set-up. We have a lot of work to do, and everybody knows that,” he said. On the plus side, he added, “We’re putting ideas out on the table, and they are getting printed in the newspaper, and it’s good. We’re bringing more people to the table for a common good.”

Plans call for the full committee to reconvene this spring to report on findings and agree on recommendations for the Savannah-Chatham County schools. A moderator is being recruited for the next step, envisioned as a discussion between the committee and the school board.

Suwyn is not sure what will happen after that. He admits to some fascination for the process the newspaper set in motion. “It’s almost like being social scientists. We organize the experiment, then step back and report on what happened.”

He turns aside a question about whether the Morning News walks a thin line between traditional journalism and advocacy.

“For us it’s just a way of casting a wider net on story ideas that are not dependent on the same old suspects and event-driven stuff,” he says. “We’ve just gotten new tools to be the best explainer of local issues. Our job is to explain our community to itself.”