For the sixth consecutive year, the Syracuse City School District remains on the state’s list of low-performing districts.
All four Syracuse high schools are designated as “schools requiring academic progress,” according to the list released on March 25 by the New York State Education Department. The list identifies schools that did not meet the standards of the federal “No Child Left Behind” law in the academic year of 2006-07.
The sixth year of low-performing status is no surprise to the district, said Christine Vogelsang, the deputy superintendent for curriculum at the Syracuse City School District. “We knew we would remain in the list,” she said.
The district, she said, has too few resources and faces other challenges like a large population of students, a high percentage of special-needs children and a high percentage of students for whom English is not the first language. The district also has a challenge to meet a deficit of $7.5 million in its $343.44-million budget. The budget was proposed by Superintendent Daniel G. Lowengard in February, and awaits approval by the city council.
Given all that, said Vogelsang, the deputy superintendent, the Syracuse district is doing as well as other large districts in the state.
Continuous poor performance for two years has brought these districts and schools the “in need of improvement” label. But Vogelsang dismisses the need for special attention and proposes to continue the efforts that the district has already been taking to improve its performance.
The state list identifies the following local schools as “schools requiring academic progress” :
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Corcoran High School and Henninger High School in the Syracuse City School District require progress in the secondary-level English Language Arts.
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George Fowler High School and Nottingham High School in the Syracuse City School District need to improve performance in the secondary-level English Language Arts and the secondary-level mathematics.
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Liverpool High School in the Liverpool Central School District needs improvement in secondary-level English Language Arts.
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North Syracuse Junior High School in the North Syracuse Central School District needs improvement in elementary-middle level English Language Arts.
Vogelsang, the deputy superintendent, maintained that there is no need to press the panic button. But, she said, the district is still trying to improve its performance by introducing summer schools, arranging new books for mathematics and after-school tutorials. “It’s no time to panic. It’s time to continue to do what we have been doing,” she said.
(Trina Joshi is a graduate student in magazine-newspaper-online journalism.)
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