Kalamazoo Public Schools will take the state to court to prevent the potential closure of two elementary schools. The district announced Thursday that it plans to file a lawsuit against the School Reform Office next week in the Michigan Court of Claims.
KPS Superintendent Michael Rice says that Saginaw’s public schools have joined the lawsuit, which also includes several KPS parents.
The state’s School Reform Office can close schools that fall short of its performance standards. That includes the Washington Writers’ Academy and the Woodward School for Technology and Research in Kalamazoo, which have spent several years on the state’s list of worst-performing schools in Michigan.
While the district acknowledges that the Writers’ Academy and Woodward “have considerable improvement still to make,” it says they have made progress on their performance in the last few years. And Rice says the test results do not measure the schools’ true quality and value.
On Thursday, several parents who have joined the lawsuit agreed. Tammy Pawlowski is a Woodward parent.
“My son excels, he gets A’s, he’s a leader, he’s confident, and all the teachers and all the staff take great pride into helping him each year,” she said.
Briana Wolverton has a child at the Writers’ Academy. She said she was “heartbroken” when she read the state’s letter announcing that the school might close.
“I had to have constant conversations with my son and we still are having conversations about how he’s not a failure and how the school that he attends is not a failure at all,” she said.
Poverty runs high at both schools. In the last 10 years, an average of 95 percent of Washington students qualified for free or reduced lunch. Woodward has seen an average of 89 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunch in the last eight years.
Rice says studies have shown that it costs more to educate impoverished students and to boost their performance to level of their more privileged peers. Closing the schools, he says, will scatter students without solving the problem.
The School Reform Office did not respond to an emailed request for comment on KPS’ planned lawsuit. But it has argued that it has to close “failing” schools to protect quality in education.
Rice has declined to lay out the district’s legal arguments before the lawsuit is filed. But he said that KPS believes the School Reform Office has misused the power the state has granted it.
“We do not believe that the SRO has acted legally. We don’t believe that it’s acted collegially or properly, and we most assuredly don’t believe that it has acted in the best interests of children and families,” he said.
State Senator Phil Pavlov, who chairs the Senate's education committee, recently introduceda billthat would put an end to the School Reform Office.
