Baltimore schools chief Andres Alonso unveiled last night a huge reorganization plan to close failing schools and expand successful ones, at the same time as he proposed 179 central office job cuts to close a budget shortfall.
The plan, which would affect about three dozen schools and thousands of students, puts aside the reform strategy of downsizing schools that Baltimore and many other cities have embraced in recent years. Instead, it emphasizes student and parent choice: Low-performing schools that no one wants to attend would shut or merge with higher-performing, more popular ones.
"We do not want to have a school system where kids are settling for a third, fourth choice," Alonso said in an interview before his public presentation.
FOR THE RECORD
An article yesterday about city schools chief Andres Alonso's proposed budget erroneously stated that custodians will no longer report to principals. The system's "education building supervisors," who support and evaluate custodians and provide technical expertise about facilities, are the employees who will report to the central office rather than to principals.
The Baltimore Sun regrets the error.
He took his plan to the school board on the same night that he presented his $1.27 billion proposed budget for the 2009-2010 academic year that would reduce the central office staff to help save $55 million.
Highlights of the plan include:
* William H. Lemmel Middle, the school where a boy was fatally stabbed outside last fall, would close, giving a charter school in the building room to expand and creating space for a new alternative school to open.
* Laurence G. Paquin Middle/High, which for more than 40 years has educated pregnant girls and teen mothers but is severely underenrolled, would merge with another alternative school that needs more space.
* Digital Harbor High, which had 1,743 applications this year for 300 seats, and the National Academy Foundation High School, which had a 100 percent college acceptance rate last year, would both expand as NAF moves out of the Digital Harbor building. NAF would absorb the student body of struggling Paul Laurence Dunbar Middle to become a combined middle/high school.
Some of the city's most troubled school buildings would be reinvented entirely. The Walbrook complex, for example, would be empty next academic year, with one of its two high schools closing and the other moving. The complex would be reconfigured for two new middle/high schools to open there in 2010.
Staff at the schools recommended to close - including Harriet Tubman Elementary, Thurgood Marshall High, Samuel L. Banks High and Homeland Security Academy - would be offered jobs elsewhere in the system. The central office employees whose jobs are proposed for elimination would also be able to apply for other jobs. But some have skills that might not be easily transferred.
