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player ready...The Niles Township District 219 Board of Education voted to institute a weekly late start of 90 minutes at its March 14 meeting to allow teachers and school staff targeted time to work on student learning interventions.
In a district where students speak more than 90 languages at home and issues of racial equity have been front and center at many recent board meetings, staff who had prepared the proposal pitched it as a way for teachers at Niles North and Niles West to make sure all of their students were on track for academic growth.
But the board members of the district, which serves Skokie, Lincolnwood and large portions of Niles and Morton Grove, who voted against the idea said they were concerned with the loss of instructional time that the late starts would produce and that there wasn’t a clear way to measure the success of the late start meetings.
Union Vice President and District Evaluation Committee Member Katie Weston emphasized the plan’s potential to close demographic learning gaps.
“We talk a lot in this district about altering the racial predictability of achievement,” she said. “We talk a lot about equity. We talk a lot about how can we serve all of our students, our most vulnerable students. Teachers and administrators need sustained, weekly time to collaborate on these initiatives and also to make progress for these goals.”
Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources Tom Kim said late starts or early dismissals to facilitate teacher professional development are a common feature of many area school districts from the Glenbrook district to Oak Park-River Forest.
He added that district teachers are currently taken out of class for professional development and told board members that planned, regular professional development and collaboration time would reduce frequency of substitutes and improve the quality of instruction for students in spite of the lost minutes of classroom time.
“We are pulling teachers out because we need them to be part of that training, and so they’re subbed out of class,” he said.
English Teacher and committee member Michael Graham echoed that point: “however good our substitutes are at enacting the plans we leave, it’s not the same,” he said.
Staff also emphasized that the late start time would be geared toward improving students’ learning experiences and outcomes and that those outcomes would be factored into teacher evaluations.
“This is about time spent providing better experiences for students, allowing us to have conversations that we simply don’t have time to have, especially as we take our most struggling students and move them in ways that give them opportunities that they don’t have right now,’ Graham said.
But Board Vice President Joe Nowik, along with two other members of the board, was not convinced. He praised the “student centered” elements of the plan, but in a statement, said he couldn’t support the plan as presented.
As a district parent of a student with an individualized education plan, Nowik said he “cherished every 15 minutes of speech and physical therapy we were able to add to the schedule. I believe every parent would want more teacher-student time, not less.”
The proposal would subtract 45 hours a year of instruction from the school year, he said. He proposed an alternative measure to eliminate the current late start days built into the school calendar and pay teachers for an hour’s worth of meeting time each week, to be scheduled at the end of the school day.
Weston said that plan would not work.
“I think it’s a creative solution and I appreciate you suggesting an alternative… but to be blunt, I don’t want teachers to be able to opt out,” she said.
“Okay, then take that out, make it mandatory,” Nowik said.
“Respectfully, you also have to operate within the confines of the [union contract],” Weston said, noting that another round of contract negotiations will not begin until next year and the district can’t require teachers to take a stipend. “Our students deserve this now and respectfully, we have to be able to start to move the needle now. It’s not just about the outcomes, it’s also how we get there.”
Board Member David Ko said he feared the plan was another temporary solution akin to putting lipstick on a pig.
“We understand why you want to do this, but is there a better approach?” he asked staff. “That’s why I keep asking for the empirical data.”
Member Matthew Flink questioned how effective the meeting time would be, saying that weekly meetings often start off with “great traction” and then lose momentum.
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“I think it went from a want to a need at some point in this discussion,” he said. “We agree you need this time, but I think you’re asking for way too much time.”
President Naema Abraham said she’d back the plan and considered it a matter of working “smarter and not harder,” while member Ignacio Lopez said the proposal would help the district measure its students’ academic growth, not just whether they graduated.
After about 45 minutes of discussion, the board voted 4-3 to approve the motion. Ko, Flink and Nowik voted no. Abraham, Lopez and members Alana Jacobs and Mateo Farzaneh voted yes.