For city schools, a rocky road to recovery

School officials said it is unfair to view these recent problems in isolation.

“We just cleaned house,” said board member Samuel Stringfield, who is leaving the board after more than five years. “To tar the current people with the feathers of the former administration is just not the way to treat [them].”

Stringfield said the new administration is unfairly being blamed for problems that began under previous school leaders, including former Chief Executive Officer Carmen V. Russo, who was in charge while the deficit ballooned.

Copeland, who took over the system 13 months ago, and other school officials point to major reforms that have been undertaken in the past year, including an effort to curb runaway spending by trimming more than 1,000 jobs through layoffs and attrition.

Her turn on the witness stand will be an opportunity for her to defend her administration and challenge the contention by some that it is failing – as past teams have – to provide an adequate education for the city’s children.

“I feel there’s not been attention paid to what we’ve done,” said Copeland, who was hired just as the system was in a financial free fall that led to layoffs and community protests. “I feel we continue to be overshadowed by the past.”

Copeland said she has been working to reinvigorate the school system and to end a practice of moving sub-par employees to different positions rather than firing them. She noted that she has replaced nearly every top administrator over the past year, from the chief academic officer to the human resources director.

Those new officials say their departments have undergone substantial changes, beginning with a directive in November that every office cut its salary expenses in half. By June – after some teachers had been laid off in response to lower-than-expected school enrollments – the system had reduced its payroll by 1,076 employees, or 8.5 percent.

The cuts were meant to reduce administrative staff rather than take teachers out of classrooms, said Bill Boden, the system’s human resources director. “Every effort was made to make [teacher reductions] a last resort,” he said.

Boden could not say how many administrative jobs were eliminated at the school system’s headquarters on North Avenue because some employees – such as maintenance staff and computer technicians – are based at the central office but not considered administrators.

More Top Picks Best Air Fryer Toaster Ovens

For Carlton G. Epps, the system’s chief operating officer since October, staff cuts have meant that remaining employees have had to absorb new duties.

“This is not ideal,” Epps said. “It’s not a situation that we could endure for an indefinite period of time.”

In the past year, Epps’ office has delayed repairs at schools and improvements to the transportation system because of belt-tightening.

Epps said his staff is further stretched attending meetings and producing accountability reports demanded by the city – conditions of a $42 million city loan that rescued the system from financial disaster this year.

“That’s been in addition to [the fact that] we still have to serve breakfast, we still have to secure the buildings, we still have to clean the buildings,” Epps said. “The fact that we have had a 30 percent staff cut is not to [principals, teachers and parents] an acceptable excuse for those things not to be done.”

On the upside, some department heads say, staff cuts have forced the school system to become more efficient and rely more on technology.

The financial crisis also was an opportunity to jettison inefficient employees and keep the best and hardest workers, some said.

“I can’t say the cuts were a bad thing,” Epps said. They “allowed us to identify those staff members who are high achievers.”

But critics of the school system are skeptical about the long-term effects of staff reductions, which are expected to save the system $30 million a year.

“Simply cutting positions doesn’t make the organization more efficient or more responsible or more accountable,” said Sanford V. Teplitzky, a member of the state-appointed panel. “If the cuts aren’t in the right place, it may exacerbate the problem.”

Although Copeland says most of the cuts were made far from the classroom, some teachers and principals say they are feeling the squeeze.

In the spring, teachers who wanted to retire said they had trouble getting questions answered and paperwork processed by a shrunken human resources department.

Edna Greer, principal of Leith Walk Elementary School, said she’s still pleased with the support she gets from the administration, but the loss of part-time employees at the school has left her office sorely understaffed.

“I’m staying here [this summer] because there’s nobody else here” to help the secretary, Greer said. “I’ve got to do payroll, ordering of supplies, registering [new pupils] when the secretary is gone, recruiting for new teachers.”

For parents, the staff cuts at North Avenue have translated into a hard time getting information.

“People just tell you, ‘Well, you know we’re understaffed. We can’t do it,'” said Kevin Slayton, president of the Parent and Community Advisory Board.

But many in the community and on Copeland’s staff said they do not blame the school leader for the system’s shortcomings. They noted the city and the state, which both have some oversight responsibility for the system, also should be held accountable.

“How strong a leader [Copeland] is has a lot to do with the resources” the school system receives from the state, said Ken Morgan, education director for the Baltimore chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. “You can’t argue that somehow it’s the schools’ sole responsibility for these management issues, if the state was supposed to be part of resolving them in the first place.”

<!– CUTLINE TEXTCopeland

CUTLINE TEXT–>