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State Will Not Take Over Long-Struggling Hempstead Schools

The New York State Education Department said Thursday that it would not take control of Hempstead School District on Long Island, which has been troubled for decades by abysmal graduation rates, crumbling school buildings, violence and corruption. The state education commissioner, MaryEllen Elia, had given the district a Feb. 2 deadline to come up with an improvement plan, and on Thursday she said she had accepted it.

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ELIZABETH A. HARRIS
, New York Times

The New York State Education Department said Thursday that it would not take control of Hempstead School District on Long Island, which has been troubled for decades by abysmal graduation rates, crumbling school buildings, violence and corruption. The state education commissioner, MaryEllen Elia, had given the district a Feb. 2 deadline to come up with an improvement plan, and on Thursday she said she had accepted it.

Still, in a letter to the acting district superintendent, Elia was critical of the plan, which was supposed to propose solutions for how the district deals with issues including school safety, special education and high school instruction. She said that “critical issues” were “not adequately addressed” and admonished the district to make changes.

Elia instructed the district to submit monthly progress reports to the education department.

New York has only taken over one school district in the past, the Roosevelt School District, also on Long Island. Like Hempstead, Roosevelt is a poor district in Nassau County that serves almost entirely black and Hispanic students. Among Hempstead’s students, about 70 percent are Hispanic and another 27 percent are black. But state control in Roosevelt is not widely regarded as a success.

“It was an expensive disaster,” said Alan J. Singer, a professor of education at Hofstra University. “They put a lot of money into it and the progress was very incremental.”

Singer said Elia’s letter was “an abdication of New York state’s responsibility.”

Hempstead’s long-standing troubles have been exacerbated by power struggles on the school board, where factions have gone to war with each other. As the district has failed academically, board officials and employees have faced criminal charges — including a board member who stole a principal’s ATM card and withdrew $500 and a high school teacher who is accused of stealing $140,000 worth of computers.

Against that background, 8,000 children go to school in Hempstead — and by at least one important indicator, the situation appears to be getting worse: In 2016, the graduation rate was 48 percent. According to data released by the state last week, in 2017, it fell to just 37 percent.

The district’s plan lays out ambitious goals, like increasing the overall graduation rate and the number of students earning Regents diplomas, which require passing a series of state tests, by 5 to 10 percent annually. But it is short on the specifics of how those might be accomplished.

“High school instruction is a significant area of needed improvement for the district,” Elia notes in her letter. But the plan seems to rely heavily on teacher training, known as professional development, to turn things around. “Professional development does not, in itself, automatically result in changes in practice.”

Additionally the plan doesn’t explain how it will make sure that teachers are taking any new lessons into their classrooms, beyond requiring sign-in sheets for training sessions. “Monitoring implementation should go beyond sign-in sheets to establish measurable milestones,” Elia wrote.

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