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Normandy may go to court in transfer case

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: Normandy school superintendent Ty McNichols says the district has a secret legal strategy to address the student transfer situation, but in the meantime it needs to make sure that the 3,000 students who have stayed behind receive the best education possible.

He told a sometimes contentious town hall meeting Monday night that the district’s poor showing in the state’s evaluation last week – the lowest score in Missouri – doesn’t accurately reflect the progress that some of Normandy’s schools have made.

The way the scores are compiled, McNichols said, schools that start at a very low level have a tough time moving up enough to register in the final computation.

“If you’re in the basement,” he said, “you don’t get any points. You may have started in the basement, and be halfway up the steps from the basement, but if you’re not out of the basement, you get zero points.”

And, he told several dozen people meeting at the Natural Bridge branch of the St. Louis County Library, that when he took over as superintendent on July 1, he started to overhaul procedures to help teachers do their job as well as they can. But he also said that because of budget pressures, some staff cuts may be made, and he wants to make sure that the best teachers and administrators are the ones who stay.

McNichols’ message to Normandy staff members was this:

“We can support you two ways. We can help you grow, or we can help you go, and there are some people in this district who need to go. They are not good for kids.”

Financially, he said he thinks Normandy can survive “to the end of the year by our chinny chin chin.” One idea that he said would help would be to limit the tuition Normandy has to pay for transfer students.

Right now, Normandy has to pay the entire amount of tuition of the receiving district. It gets $7,000 from the state and the rest of its per-pupil cost from local sources. He said the district could be in much better financial shape if it only had to pay that $7,000 figure to the receiving districts and the state paid the rest..

Working for a change like that, he said, could be part of what he called a three-pronged strategy he and Normandy officials have mapped out – one for academics, another for the community and the third for behind-the-scenes legal maneuvering.

The last, he said, needs to stay under wraps until whatever court action the district decides on is filed. But, he added, he does not want people to think that the district is going to be sitting back and not working to make every legal move possible to ease the strain Normandy feels because of the law that lets students living in unaccredited districts transfer to accredited districts nearby.

“The public needs to know that I’m fighting for the 3,000 kids that are sitting in my buildings every single day,” McNichols said.

“We have a legal plan. I’m not going to reveal my legal plan to the public so that the people on the other side can prepare for it.”

Will lawmakers act?

Since the Missouri Supreme Court upheld the transfer law in June, students from Normandy and Riverview Gardens have left their home districts to enroll elsewhere. McNichols said that the numbers are still in flux – final counts won’t be taken until the last Wednesday in September. He noted that this time last year, the district had 2,800 students and ended up with 4,000.

“We normally get 500 or 600 kids after Labor Day,” he said.

As he has in the past, McNichols went through the list of changes he has made in the short period he has headed the district. New principals have taken over at the middle school and high school, and partnerships with area universities have been arranged to help bolster the district’s academics.

Now, he said, Normandy needs more community support and an informal network of what he called “big mamas in the neighborhood” to help spread the good word about what is going on.

“There are a lot of things that we have to fix that have nothing to do with MSIP5 and nothing to do with DESE,” he said. “We have to fix some of our systems that don’t make sense.”

McNichols said he has not passed up any opportunities to make Normandy’s case in the media – “I’m tired of being on TV,” he said – but he wants to make sure that parents and other adults in the district take their share of responsibility for building support in the district. He compared what happened in Francis Howell, the district that Normandy said it would pay for students to be transported to, with what has happened in his district.

“Think about the outcry that has happened in Normandy,” he said. “There hasn’t been any. Think about the outcry that happened in Francis Howell. As ridiculous as you may think it was, they showed up at the gym in an overflow, and the politicians started jumping up and demanding things.”

Dryver Henderson, who led the town hall meeting, said he hoped that lawmakers could find a way to repeal the transfer law and bring the Normandy students back from the districts they are attending now. He noted that next month’s veto session of the General Assembly would be a good opportunity for that to happen, though Gov. Jay Nixon has said he would not put the transfer law on the session’s agenda.

Lawmakers have scheduled hearings on the issue to be held throughout the state and in Jefferson City in September and October. But Henderson said he hopes action could come soon.

“It’s projected to kill us,” he said of the financial impact on Normandy, which must pay tuition for any student who transfers. “Therefore it ought to be stopped.”

He expressed surprise and dismay that the district’s lawyer and school board have not already gone to court, and several members of the audience agreed. That is when McNichols discussed the legal strategy that Normandy says it has to keep secret until the time is right.

For one thing, he said, until the district can document precisely how many students it has lost and how much their departure is costing, it would be hard to make a good argument in court. His goal, he said, is to raise the district’s level of accomplishment so much that student would not want to leave.

“We want all of our kids to come back,” he said. “Do I think that’s going to happen if the court reverses it? I don’t think so.

“When I talk to people who ask what we’re going to do about the 3,000 who stayed, they don’t say it, but they imply that they should have gotten out, too. What are we going to do for the 3,000 who stayed so the 1,000 will want to come back?”

He said the way that the new school evaluation plan, MSIP5, is structured, just a small improvement in some student test scores, like 3 percent, could bring the point gains that the district needs. In the data released last week, Normandy earned just 11.1 percent of the 140 points possible, far short of the 50 percent needed for provisional accreditation.

McNichols said the pressure is on for the district to improve, and he said he understands why parents want their children to get the best education possible.

“In my head, I get it,” he said. “In my heart, I want them to stay. But if we don’t make the schools better, we’re going to lose 1,400 or 1,500.

“The short game is how do we get enough MSIP points to survive. To me what this year is about is surviving.”

Dale Singer began his career in professional journalism in 1969 by talking his way into a summer vacation replacement job at the now-defunct United Press International bureau in St. Louis; he later joined UPI full-time in 1972. Eight years later, he moved to the Post-Dispatch, where for the next 28-plus years he was a business reporter and editor, a Metro reporter specializing in education, assistant editor of the Editorial Page for 10 years and finally news editor of the newspaper's website. In September of 2008, he joined the staff of the Beacon, where he reported primarily on education. In addition to practicing journalism, Dale has been an adjunct professor at University College at Washington U. He and his wife live in west St. Louis County with their spoiled Bichon, Teddy. They have two adult daughters, who have followed them into the word business as a communications manager and a website editor, and three grandchildren. Dale reported for St. Louis Public Radio from 2013 to 2016.