Syracuse Schools Superintendent Jaime Alicea is working with the state education department to figure out the best path forward for three struggling schools. State officials say Danforth Middle, Dr. King, and Westside Academy at Blodgett middle school face independent receivership or an internal overhaul.
Alicea says they need to help families facing poverty and other challenging circumstances.
"Sometimes families have a hard time making sure they have all the resources to help kids be successful in school. We need to provide more mental health services, continue to look into trauma services. We need a little more time. Sometimes not everybody masters all the concepts at once, so we need a little more time to work with our kids.”
Alicea says the schools fell short last year academically and with family engagement. He prefers to keep them under district control, where they would be phased out and then replaced with different programs, curricula, and even staff. That's what the district did with Fowler High school, which became the Public Service Leadership academy at Fowler. But Alicea says that means re-aligning existing resources to ensure those students succeed in the new environment.
"We had four schools that just came off receivership, so we don't want to reduce the services because they may go back into receivership. We need to balance the resources we have available."
Alicea says they can learn from successes at the four schools that saw improvement last year…Dr. Weeks, Frazer, Henninger High, and Lincoln Middle.
"There are a lot of great things happening. We need to look at the programs we have, the strategies that are working, and to replicate those strategies and programs in the other buildings. I'm still concerned that three of my schools did not make demonstrable improvement.”
Alicea and the state will spend the next two months working on a plan for the struggling schools. The state will make the final decision on whether to phase out and replace the schools, or turn them over to an independent receiver. Thus far, no school has yet to be taken over.
