Let’s talk about Bonner middle school’s problems…

During our hiatus, the crap hit the fan once some teachers started talking about the problems that have been happening at Danville’s Bonner Middle School. The Register & Bee newspaper did an excellent job at investigative reporting in a series of articles, and the school system has been dancing around with the resolution to the disciplinary nightmare. Late this afternoon, the Danville School Board released a statement on this. Let’s take a look at it and get SouthsideCentral’s take on what’s going on…

Let’s start it off by getting the School Board’s statement…

Every member of the Danville School Board became aware of the difficulties at Bonner Middle School very early in this school year. In fact, we discussed disciplinary data at our September 6th planning retreat. That is why Superintendent Newsome, with full support from the Board, implemented an array of changes there over the past three months. There are now three veteran administrators from the Central Office who are housed at Bonner to provide on-site extra assistance to the school as needed. An extra School Resource Officer was moved to Bonner for about six weeks to provide heightened security. Extra teachers were assigned to Bonner to reduce some of the larger class sizes. The discipline process, from the principal’s office to the Discipline Hearing Panel to the School Board, has been refined for more consistency and timeliness in application of the Student Code of Conduct at all levels. A new principal, Mrs. Daphne Wall, is in place and brings with her 28 years of prior experience including 20 years as an administrator. The Scholars Academy, an alternative program for grades 5-8, is up and running on the Langston campus; it received its first assigned students on January 6 and currently has around 20 middle school students enrolled. We continue to watch things at Bonner Middle School very carefully and will provide whatever we can to help keep the atmosphere conducive to learning throughout that building.

Individual Board members have personally been to Bonner, unannounced, on multiple occasions in the past several weeks. On each visit, we have seen good things happening, with no disruptive behavior. The noise level has been lower on each successive visit. These direct observations have led us to believe that Dr. Newsome’s changes have brought this school to a much more acceptable level of behavior and to a much more productive level of academic work.

We are not claiming that everything is smooth at Bonner Middle School right now, but we really believe there have been significant improvements over the past three months. We believe many things have changed for the better, and we pledge to the students, parents, and community that we will continue to monitor things at Bonner and will support further changes as Dr. Newsome deems them necessary.

While Bonner has endured the greatest difficulties so far this year, we also pledge to be mindful of needs at all schools in DPS. This Board will work continuously to improve student learning and to support the employees who work toward that same goal each and every school day in Danville.

The School Board, and Superintendent Newsome, sincerely desire to continue the dialogues with parents, business leaders, ministerial groups and civic organizations for strategies they feel may be helpful in addressing our community’s broader social issues. Those issues have major impact on the students of DPS, so we believe it is in the best interest of the entire community to work together to solve problems.

There you have it. Now let’s go to a Big Board of Random Thoughts about the problems…

• This problem was known at the September 6th school board retreat where changes were implemented. Clearly, those “changes” didn’t have much of an impact as the problems got worse. When the R&B published incident data, Bonner’s principal at the time was amazingly “reassigned” to a new position and a new principal was hired from outside the school system. It’s also clear that there is little transparency in the inner workings of the school board, as it would have been much better to tell the public that A) they knew there was a problem and B) they were attempting to handle it.
• It took a teacher who’ll be retiring this year to be a whistleblower on what was really happening inside Bonner. That’s a damned shame.
• Eliminating the euphemistically-named “Alternative School” was a disastrous idea from the beginning as the school board just put the known troublemakers right back into the general population of Bonner.
• Now that the school board has created the unbelievably euphemistically-named “Scholars Academy” (trust me, that isn’t the gifted students going there, folks), the administration can’t get their story right on what it actually is. Anybody with any sense can see it’s a last-chance school for the kids that are causing the problems.
• Closing Gibson middle school was also a disaster in hindsight, although the school system had became bloated with inefficiency and cost overruns.

Bottom Line: The school board and the administration need to become completely transparent with regular updates on discipline issues on Bonner and all other schools as well. The school board and administration is in full-defensive mode now and they need to be because of their past decision. I’m very concerned about a credible report that I’ve heard about intimidation towards faculty & staff for talking about the problems. If that turns out to be true, I want to know about it. I will have no problem exposing it and naming names directly on SouthsideCentral.  It’s also time to realize where the source of these problems usually come from, and that’s the home. There are too many school children who have lousy parents that don’t get involved one bit on the educational progress of their child. The school board and administration can’t force them to, but it’s time for parents to know exactly what’s happening with their child in the school system.