A former Harford County principal and school system administrator is speaking out against the controversial high school reform program panned by teachers last month.
William Ekey, a former principal at Bel Air and C. Milton Wright high schools, wrote to Superintendent Jacqueline Haas and the Board of Education on Monday urging them to scrap the Comprehensive Secondary School Reform Plan, which got a mediocre report last month in a survey of parents, teachers, students and school staff.
“The board would be wise to assume that the current reform effort cannot be repaired and it should start over,” Ekey wrote.
Ekey recommended that a panel of teachers, parents and administrators be assembled by the end of the month to decide the next direction for the reform plan.
“But I?m confident, given the track record ofthe Board and Superintendent, that there?s not a prayer of that happening,” he told The Examiner.
Earlier this year, a school-financed survey found little confidence below the administrator level in how the plan was actually implemented. The study recommended that administrators meet with teachers and staff to determine how to improve the plan, but Ekey had doubts.
“That it hasn?t been done in the two years since its inception makes me doubt it will be done or done right from this point,” he said.
After being implicated by school board President Tom Fidler in the apparent “communications breakdown” that was revealed by the gap between teachers? and administrators? confidence in the program, school principals met with Haas and then attended the April 28 board meeting to reiterate their support for the program.
The doubts about the program apparent in the study stemmed from the anonymous nature of the survey, said Chris Battaglia, a former assistant principal at C. Milton Wright.
“Speaking generally, if I were to speak ill of my employer I would be disciplined,” he said.
Fidler told The Examiner that the board was working behind the scenes to change or re-examine the most controversial aspects of the program, including the “Living in a Contemporary World” class that most teachers and students said was poorly planned, and the four-period “block” schedule that had no measurable effect on student performance, according to the study.
But the board would not throw out the reform plan, he said.
