Making ends meet: City schools adapt to low-income needs

Second in a three-part series.

Charlottesville’s poverty picture looks bleak from within the walls of its public schools.

The number of students who receive free or reduced-price lunches, an indicator of poverty, has hovered around 50 percent of total enrollment for the past five years. As of last week, nearly 50 percent of the division’s 4,041 students — about 2,016 — were signed up for free or reduced-price lunch. The division expects that number to climb in the coming weeks as more applications are processed.

In 2007-08, nearly 54 percent, or 2,193 students, were eligible. The overwhelming majority of those, 1,846, received free lunch.

In a city where poverty percentages have risen and free and reduced-price lunch numbers have held steady even as enrollment declined, Charlottesville’s public schools are bearing a growing burden to make sure poor students succeed academically.

Patricia Freeman, the former nutrition services coordinator for city schools, said she thinks rough economic times are contributing to the free and reduced-price lunch numbers. The housing market slump, rising gas prices and home foreclosures are making it harder for Charlottesville families, Freeman said.

“I would think all of that would play a part,” she said.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, five of Charlottesville’s nine schools have school-wide Title I programs, which means they receive federal funds to help children in high-poverty areas who are behind academically or at risk of falling behind. Funding is based on the number of low-income children in a school, generally those eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. The five Title I schools are all at the elementary level, with Venable being the only elementary without the designation.

School officials acknowledge that the children and parents who make up Charlottesville’s low-income families present more challenges in and outside the classroom than their better-off counterparts. Poverty estimates for 2005, the most recent data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau for localities with fewer than 65,000 people, show that 25.6 percent of 5- to 17-year olds were in families in poverty — up from 21.5 percent in 2004.

Worrisome numbers

Rosa S. Atkins, superintendent of schools, said poor children often lack certain skills upon entering school and may struggle in math and reading. Issues that manifest early often lead to lower test scores and expand the gap between the highest- and lowest-scoring students.

Atkins said that while acknowledging poverty is important, “that cannot be our focus.”

State test scores show that the achievement gap is still formidable among Charlottesville students. For the 2007-08 academic year, the pass rates for all Charlottesville students in end-of-year reading and writing exams were 85 percent. Pass rates for the same exams were 77 percent and 76 percent, respectively, for students identified as economically disadvantaged.

Other school divisions of comparable size around the state fared better. In Harrisonburg, the pass rates for all students on the same exams were 94 percent and 91 percent; for economically disadvantaged students, pass rates were 87 percent and 84 percent. In Danville, Fredericksburg and Lynchburg, pass rates for all students were almost identical to Harrisonburg’s figures, and economically disadvantaged students’ pass rates varied from 79 percent to 90 percent.

Virginia’s pass rates in 2007-08 for end-of-course reading and writing exams were 94 percent and 92 percent for all students, and 88 percent and 86 percent for the economically disadvantaged.

“When students come in and they are coming from a background in poverty, we try in every way to access resources in the community and access resources within our schools that will respond to the needs of the individual students,” Atkins said.

In light of this, School Board Chairman Ned Michie said the division has increased funding for programs targeting at-risk students, as well as after-school programs — which now exist at every school. For the fiscal 2008 and 2009 budgets, the school division allocated $331,161 per year for remediation, plus other funds for various after-school programs. Title I funding in prevention and intervention programs for neglected, delinquent or at-risk children increased to $378,068 in this year’s budget — a roughly $14,000 increase from last year — but funding for Title I funding to improve basic programs decreased $17,229 from last year to about $1.39 million.

Stepping Stones, an annual report compiled by the Charlottesville-Albemarle Commission on Children and Families, showed that after-school program participation for children between kindergarten and sixth grade in Charlottesville schools has remained steady, between 8 percent and 10 percent between 2003 and 2007. Enrollment in the city schools’ subsidized preschool programs has climbed over the years, to 259 per 1,000 children in 2006.

Gertrude Ivory, the division’s associate superintendent for curriculum and instruction, said if programs were not working, the school system would be mandated to make improvements.

“If they don’t work we have to make modifications in the program based on the needs of the children,” Ivory said. Especially in testing grades, she said, the division is seeing an increase in student participation — either because they need remediation or because they want to prevent themselves from slipping academically — and intervention programs have been allocated more resources.

“Because we made [intervention programs] a little more robust and rigorous, we are seeing a good payoff,” she said.

Attendance in after-school programs has remained steady, but overall enrollment has not. Atkins attributes the decrease to the rising cost of living in Charlottesville and the limited availability of affordable homes.

Projections from the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia suggest that Charlottesville public school enrollment will continue to decline, even though future statewide enrollment projections forecast an average annual increase of 11,500 students through September 2012.

Data from the 2008-09 city schools’ budget expected 3,936 students to enroll in city schools this year, a decline of 494 students since 1989. Weldon Cooper estimates that enrollment will further drop to 3,767 students by 2012.

The enrollment declines, however, have been matched with increased spending per pupil in city schools. In fiscal 2000, the division was spending $8,946 per student. During the last school year, that number had increased to $14,036 per student.

Reaching out

More efforts to increase ties to the community through programs and activities will help fill the support void that often persists for low-income children, School Board member Llezelle Dugger said.

“When can they come for a parent-teacher conference if three paychecks are necessary to pay the rent and make the food? Can you really blame those parents who are absent at parent-teacher conferences? I don’t think you can.”

Regardless of job situation, Gretchen Ellis, director of the area Commission on Children and Families, said she has never met parents who do not want to be involved in their child’s education.

“I can’t say I’ve ever encountered a family who has a lack of interest,” she said. However, she added that past negative experiences with their own education may make some parents reluctant to go to the schools.

“The school building can sometimes be intimidating,” Ellis said.

Dugger said Charlottesville is a small enough city that it could foster more community relationships and increase the number of programs for low-income children. But how soon is anyone’s guess. With the city projecting a $1.8 million budget deficit for the current fiscal year, and the state suffering additional revenue shortages, the likelihood of getting new programs funded is slim at best. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said schools will most likely need to cut their budgets next year.

“It’s no secret we’re in difficult times with our economy,” said Vernon Bock, Johnson Elementary School’s principal.

Existing programs through area nonprofits are also being put on the chopping block. Karen Shepard, executive director for the Monticello Area Community Action Agency, said the organization’s Project Discovery Elementary and Partners in Education programs were scrapped because their local funding sources dried up.

“We’d like to do more, but it takes resources,” Michie, of the School Board, said.

David Oberg, director of the Virginia Education Association’s Blue Ridge Uniserv, which oversees local education associations in Central Virginia, said to really address the needs of low-income students, money needs to be put back into the classrooms. Poor children benefit most from classroom resources such as music and art, he said, because school may be the only place where they are exposed to them.

“If you want to save the kids on the bottom end, you’re going to have to pay for it,” he said.

But Virginia as a state has done well in terms of working with what it has, Oberg said. Public school students in the state consistently test in the top 10 percentile nationwide even though the schools are in the bottom third of funding.

“I think our schools really are addressing the needs of all children,” Michie said. “The areas where children are struggling, we’re working hard to get them over the hump.”

Making the grade

Though the division still faces challenges, increased community collaboration has paid off in terms of student achievement. Last year at Johnson Elementary, 86 percent of students were on free or reduced-price lunch but test scores made a turnaround.

For the 2007-08 academic year on competency tests, Johnson’s third- and fourth-graders achieved pass rates between 84 percent and 98 percent on reading and math exams, respectively. Third-graders also had 93 percent pass rates in science and social studies exams. The percentages shot up from scores during the 2005-06 school year, when they ranged from the 50s to 80s.

Bock said “we view it as our responsibility” to address what’s going on in the community. Johnson employs 33 programs for intervention and enrichment, one of which — through a $200,000 grant in collaboration with Charlottesville’s Abundant Life Ministries — helps the school’s 100 most at-risk children by holding after-school programs and providing tutoring in reading and math.

“We’re fortunate in that we’re in a community that cares about education,” Bock said.

Officials agree that difficulty in certain areas can be gauged early on, and addressing issues that stem from socio-economic differences when students are young can set the stage for success as they continue their education.

There have been sizeable increases in Charlottesville’s pass rates across the board, despite the fact that those gaps persist. In 2004-05, students identified as disadvantaged had a 50 percent pass rate in end-of-course reading exams, 27 percentage points lower than scores for 2007-08. The pass rate for all students jumped as well — during the 2004-05 year, it was 72 percent, 13 percentage points lower than in 2007-08.

“I think that education is the key to combating poverty in many ways,” Michie said, adding that a person with a high-school degree will earn hundreds of thousands dollars more in a lifetime than someone without one. Though Michie said the school division is not in a position to work on poverty levels for adults or change workers’ earning patterns, providing education to children gives them the tools to end the cycle of poverty.

“We want every child to succeed,” Michie said. “That’s the bottom line.”

But as with anything else, Bock said, there is no guarantee that every student will get the same opportunities or take advantage of them.

“There’s a lot of time between now and high school,” Bock said.