HEA Members Vote to Reject Silver Hill Renewal, Citing Inequities in Student Assignment

Members of the Haverhill Education Association voted 114 to 246 today to reject the Silver Hill Horace Mann Charter School’s renewal application. By state law, a renewal application can only move forward if it is approved by a majority of the members of the teachers’ collective bargaining unit, the local School Committee and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

“As we understand the law, this means that the school will revert to being under the control of the Haverhill School Committee rather than under a separate board,” said Lisa Begley, president of the HEA. “The School Committee members will have to decide what, if any, parts of the Silver Hill program they want to keep and what they want to change, presumably with input from parents, teachers and other staff both at the school and throughout the district.”

Begley said that the main objection she heard from HEA members and other community residents is that Silver Hill has failed to serve nearly as many high-need students as it did in the past, and not nearly as many as the other two schools in that area, the Tilton and the Consentino. Concentrating more high-need students in those two schools has created disadvantages for their students.

“It was a fairness issue, pure and simple,” said Begley. “In an effort to bring up test scores at Silver Hill, the school was not required to serve nearly as many English language learners and low-income students as it had before. This strategy came with a cost. It put the other schools are greater risk under the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s accountability system.”

Begley said she had asked for a delay in the vote to June 15 so that the HEA could review the renewal application and try to work with Silver Hill and others on strategies to restore balance and equity to the student assignment process. Those efforts were not successful.

In the end, the HEA Executive Board decided not to take a position on the issue, but instead to post extensive information both in favor of the renewal and against.

“The Horace Mann charter school process was designed to be a democratic one so that the teachers along with residents of the community — represented by their School Committee — would have an opportunity every five years to decide if this model was serving the interests of the community,” said Begley. “In this case, we know that many school and city leaders agreed with teachers throughout the district that it’s time for a change.”

STATISTICS AND REVIEW FROM DESE ON DEMOGRAPHIC DIFFERENCES

The current percentage of economically disadvantaged Silver Hill students (24.7%) is less than half that of the nearby Consentino (51.5%) and Tilton (67.2%) schools. Discrepancies in the percentages of English language learners are even larger: Silver Hill (3.9%); Consentino (14.5%) and Tilton (17.2%). What’s more, Silver Hill doesn’t serve any Level 1 or 2 ELL students (those who are the least proficient).

In addition, the demographics of the school changed dramatically after it became a Horace Mann charter school. The percentage of Hispanic students dropped from 30% in the 2007-08 school year to 23.6% in 2008-09, the first year it operated as an in-district charter. By 2016-17, that number had declined even further, to 18.7%, or nearly half what it had been as a regular district public school. Not surprisingly, there are similar declines in the percentages of students whose first language is not English and English language learners.

DESE raised concerns about these issues in its site visit report of Feb. 25, 2016, noting: “Enrollment of English language learners (ELLs) and economically disadvantaged students are below rates of the comparison schools. Enrollment of special education students is equal to comparison schools, although below Haverhill Public Schools. In 2014-15, the school did not implement many of its recruitment and retention strategies because the recruitment and retention plan was approved in late December of the previous year.”