Each year as school starts, the newspaper goes out to talk to parents, students, teachers and administrators. The story is forever exciting as it attempts to capture the first-day jitters as little ones settle in and parents turn loose their precious babies for the first time. There are plenty of tears to go around.
All that is just the normal way of the world. What’s not normal, however, is what has been going on at the administrative level at Watson Chapel. Perhaps there should be tears of another kind.
At a board meeting on Monday night, Superintendent Tom Wilson told the board that the district was still working on class makeup, meaning the curriculum was still being put together — five weeks after the start of school. The high school staff was also off on Monday trying to sort out the mess, and that was the fourth day they’ve taken off to tackle it.
Students were to pick up new schedules on Tuesday, with some heading to new classes and some teachers teaching different subjects. If a student is suddenly plopped into a new class, the teacher is supposed to bring them up to speed.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
“The way they’ll do that is give them extra stuff to do, even team-teaching with students,” Wilson said. “We want it to be smooth for the rest of the year.”
There was apparently so much chaos that the district had to call in the state Education Department to help put all of the pieces together.
The unanswered question is why this was allowed to happen. Districts do not just open their doors in late August and not have the curriculum ready to go. Teachers teaching new courses? These pros have been thinking about and planning for their classes for weeks. And five weeks in, students are walking into classes that have been underway? That’s about a third of a semester if you’re counting. And that is a failure at the core of what a district is expected to be.
Watson Chapel passed a millage increase awhile back and is building a new high school with the money. Much of the dialogue circulating around that effort involved the need to be able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with neighboring districts — and, by extension, to stanch the exodus of students from the district. This five-week debacle is hardly the way to get that message across, and it certainly is not the way to instill confidence that the district is adequately preparing students for the future. The patrons in the Watson Chapel School District deserve much more.