This morning The Portland Tribune published an article about my concerns over how homeless children are educated in Multnomah County. I’ve argued recently in a sermon commemorating the life and ministry of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and on my blog that Multnomah County should pull their funding from the Community Transitional School and use that tax-payer money to support efforts that integrate homeless students into the public school system. Let me recap my concerns:
Federal law states that the use of federal dollars on separate schools is illegal and advocates for the homeless – like the National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth – argue correctly that separate schools do not offer the full range of services that public schools do...
Multnomah County, however, funds such a separate school instead of working to integrate students into the public system. The Community Transitional School receives over $52,000 from Multnomah County each year. Students at this private facility are not subject to the same testing as public school students and the Multnomah County contract provides no real measurable outcomes for the program to achieve. The Portland and Parkrose school districts, both with high numbers of homeless students, operate under-funded programs without county support…
When students at separate schools are tested the results are discouraging. Results released in December from the Pappas School in Arizona, the granddaddy of all separate schools and the model for the Community Transitional School, showed that homeless kids in that program fared worse than homeless kids in public schools in both math and reading in every grade level…
Multnomah County should pull their funding from the Community Transitional School immediately and invest that money in public school programs. The public schools could use the support and we know their programs actually work. If the Multnomah County Board of County Commissioners is unwilling to take this important step then I challenge them to re-write the contract and require that students at the Community Transitional School be tested along side public school students. I'm confident the test scores will be as low as those shown by the Papas School.
The article today quotes the director of the Community Transitional School as saying that she is unwilling to have students in her program tested.
Since her (Cheryl Bickle) school is private it does not need to participate in standardized tests, and she doesn’t think it should have to. She says tests can’t measure everything a child learns in school, anyway — like the character-building she says her teachers instill in the small learning environment.
Because the Community Transitional School receives tax-payer money it is no run of the mill private school and tax-payers have every right to demand accountability. If, like the Papas School, the Community Transitional School is failing in their primary obligation to educate students county leaders need to know that.
Arguing that homeless students should not be held to the same standards as other children is tantamount to advocating that their lives are not as vital. I reject that.
Homeless children deserve all the same opportunities as housed kids and if the Community Transitional School is unwilling to be accountable to those kids and to the tax-payers it is not a program worthy of support.
