Unit 4 Updates: Reorganization and More

Last month there was a Cheat Sheet post on possible demographic reorganization plans put forward for Unit 4 by Cooperative Strategies, a consulting firm working for the Board of Education. That post had a preliminary overview, links to coverage, and a lot of background information. This month's post covers a lot of the fall out and cascading responses between the public, the Champaign school board, and the consulting firm. There are also the usual Unit 4 updates and news items afterward.

Demographic Reorganization Updates:

There was a rally before the school board meeting on 10/10 by the Unit 4 Families for a Smarter Solution group. Illinois Newsroom had coverage of the rally and meeting here with a lot of details. WCIA's coverage also included the text of the Superintendent's letter that caused a stir separating the consulting firm's task and Board's focus on the achievement gap.

There was a great deal of public comment from parents, residents, activists, and organizations at that meeting (public comment starts at 27:27 in the meeting video here). The local NAACP branch made a statement about its concerns at this meeting as well (also laid out in a News-Gazette guest commentary here).

In between the two Board of Education meetings in October, there were also in-person focus group meetings by the district's consulting firm on the issue, Cooperative Strategies. Coverage of the 10/17 and 10/18 In-Person Focus Groups:

• From Illinois Newsroom on 10/19: Parents at Champaign Unit 4 open houses: don’t move students next year
• From the News-Gazette on 10/19: Community members hold Unit 4's demography consultants' 'feet to the fire' in Tuesday meeting
• Blurb from WCIA on 10/19: “It won’t make the kids happy”: Unit 4 parents meet in Garden Hills
• Coverage from the first in-person focus group meeting at Carrie Busey Elementary from Fox Illinois: Cooperative Strategies addresses Unit 4 School of Change concerns

The 10/24 School Board meeting (videos, agenda packets) had a bit more of a response from the Board members themselves after additional public comment (begins on the first video around the 2:31:45 point). Illinois Newsroom had an overview of that meeting here. Excerpt:

[Unit 4 Superintendent Shelia Boozer] spent twenty minutes of the meeting detailing her efforts to implement the district’s 2020-2025 strategic plan. The document focuses on ways the district can undo systemic racism and improve academic outcomes for Black students, multilingual students and students with disabilities.

In addition to balancing spending between schools, Boozer described new training for teachers and administrators, supports like therapy and more. One of her top priorities is to expand the AVID program (Advancement Via Individual Determination) to all schools in the district. The program gives low-income students mentors, peer networks and writing training to help them excel.

Boozer framed changes to the schools of choice as one strategy – a way to remove barriers to low-income students and students of color. Board members echoed the sentiment.

The latest coverage from the News-Gazette's 10/28 "Meeting Minutes" feature also had an overview of what we've learned, remaining questions, and some other highlights about the reorganization plan and players. One particular personnel change at Cooperative Strategies seemed to puzzle a lot of folks:

An email sent this week from The News-Gazette to Cooperative Strategies’ Ohio-based point person on the Unit 4 project came back with an automatic reply noting “Scott Leopold is no longer with Cooperative Strategies, LLC.”

Asked how his departure from the firm, after 17 years, would affect the district’s plans, Unit 4’s Stacey Moore said: “Mr. Leopold is still the lead on this project until the district’s decision is finalized.”

According to his LinkedIn page, Leopold is now director of planning for HPM, a strategic management services company based in Birmingham, Ala.

More at that full article here. I haven't heard any clarification or explanation about how a former employee will be running lead on their company's project, however. The other big highlight is that the Board and others appear to be coming around to pushing the Board's original timeline (which originally would have finalized plans presented in November and approved with a vote this December).

The villages of Bondville and Savoy, which are also part of Unit 4 came up at the Board of Education meeting as well as a special Savoy Village Board of Trustees meeting this week. Discussions about the diversity of those towns as well as their desires for the district were brought up in public comments in both meetings. WCIA's coverage of the Savoy meeting highlighted some interest (and financial pitfalls) in leaving the Unit 4 school district:

The Savoy Board of Trustees voted unanimously to encourage the Champaign School District to create neighborhood schools Tuesday night. They held a special meeting to hear from concerned families.

The district is considering proposals that could uproot many elementary students from their current schools, including Carrie Busey in Savoy. Some people suggested detatching from the district, but Village President John Brown said that outcome is unlikely.

“If you detach or a section of the village detaches from Unit 4, not only do you have to find another school district willing to accept you, but you also have to take along a portion of that debt,” Brown said.

That full article here. There was more coverage on that meeting at WCCU and Illinois Newsroom as well. Other speakers warned (or threatened depending on the point of view) that Unit 4 will lose even more families and residents to neighboring districts rather than accept the plans laid out thus far. 

Those who can afford to leave may have to weigh concerns about crowding in those peripheral districts and related tax questions. The News-Gazette recently highlighted the crowding issues at one of the nearby school districts to the West, Mahomet-Seymour Community Unit District No. 3.

A map of the school districts around Unit 4 within Champaign County highlight some of the ongoing issues with racial disparities and long term effects of segregation in the area. From the Champaign County GIS Consortium website (click to enlarge): 

One can compare the demographic data (available via national or state level data tools) around the area and see some familiar historical trends. The districts encompassing Champaign, Urbana, and Rantoul have racial disparities with far more Black students and far fewer white students than the state average. Every school district bordering them has extreme racial disparities in the opposite direction with almost no Black or Hispanic students and generally a vast overrepresentation of white students. 

Compare with Fisher CUSD 1, Thomasboro CCSD 130, Prairieview-Ogden CCSD 197, St. Joseph CCSD 169, Tolono CUSD 7, or Ludlow CCSD 142 on the Illinois State Board of Education's Illinois Report Card data. Here's a snip of the data for the other district the Village of Savoy area borders:

This modern data has been highlighted in recent segregation overviews in Illinois from Governing Magazine that included Champaign-Urbana and surrounding areas mentioned in a previous Cheat Sheet post here. The News-Gazette had an overview of desegregation efforts within C-U school districts back in 2019, but that doesn't address how segregation evolved along and outside school district boundaries during those efforts.

Some of the trends date back over a century as the Black population grew in the area after the Civil War and into the Great Migration. During the Racial Nadir era here (roughly 1890-1930s) is when much of the county became "lily-white" in the parlance of the times. De facto segregation and the color line became more brutally enforced by local authorities and private vigilance efforts (with varying cooperation and conflict with local law enforcement bodies). This chart compares the changing Black population within the Twin Cities and the rest of Champaign County:

During the decades between the racial Nadir era here and segregation efforts in the last generation, a great deal of factors compounded these disparities including: racial covenants, open loan and realtor discrimination, redlining, community disinvestment and neglect, etc. The growth of the Chanute military base also played a major role in creating a new large African-American community within the County during this time. 

Having an internationally renowned state flagship university in the middle of the county has made us unique in many other demographic respects as well. There's are additional aspects of diversity that set us apart from other regions of downstate Illinois. There are also a lot of examples of early activism and desegregation actions within Champaign-Urbana that put us ahead of many regional trends.

The districting, zoning, and bureaucratic systems that have created and maintained familiar racial disparities throughout the Midwest, however, have in many other ways made us sadly typical. Often people wonder how we could be struggling in our local education systems while having such a prominent university in the middle of it all. Some have pointed to a recent article in The Atlantic highlighting research suggesting that many college towns suffer even more inequality problems: The College-Town Achievement Gap.

Other Unit 4 News:

• The Champaign Urbana Schools Foundation issued a variety of grants for projects and classroom ideas, according to the News-Gazette. The CU Schools Foundation website also has an overview of the program and the grants here.
• Area superintendents participated in a TV special on issues facing area school districts, including Unit 4. Coverage by Illinois Newsroom here. Full video of the event here.
• Already mentioned in a recent MTD Updates post, was an update on Unit 4 versus Urbana's District 116 contract costs with MTD. The same News-Gazette article also highlights some of the local changes and competition in substitute teacher pay.

Unit 4 Reorganization and More

The biggest news out of Unit 4 this past month were the proposals to drastically reorganize the school district away from the current "School of Choice" system. The proposals were introduced during a presentation by a consulting firm known as Cooperative Strategies at the 9/26 school board meeting. The next school board meeting is tomorrow October 10th and is likely to have many people organizing before the meeting, attending the meeting and participating in public comments towards the end (links for meeting agenda, information, and public comment rules). 

For folks interested in seeing the 9/26 proposals presentation for themselves it starts just after the 2 hour, 1 minute mark in this school board meeting video on the Unit 4 website. The PDF presentation is available here. The school board meeting agendas and documents are available here.

The News-Gazette had initial coverage of the announcement, presentation, various players, and reactions in their 9/30 "Meeting Minutes" feature. A few excerpts:

You’ll likely be hearing and reading the acronym SES frequently in the coming weeks. “That is ‘socio-economic status,’” board member Kathy Shannon spelled out at this week’s meeting, and it’s severely out of whack between the neighborhoods of elementary schools on the high end of the spectrum (Carrie Busey and Barkstall) and the low end (Booker T. Washington, Garden Hills, Stratton). “We as a community, I think, I hope ... we know that it’s really important that we don’t have schools full of rich kids and schools full of poor kids,” Shannon said....

This is just a report, this is an initial step presented to the board,” President Amy Armstrong emphasized to those anxious parents watching Monday’s meeting — most of them on Tuesday after streaming issues prevented the meeting from being broadcast live on Unit 4’s website. “And the community steps into the next part of the process.”

...

The project website that houses the aforementioned survey is also home to a handy school-locator tool, where users can type in their address and see which cluster they’d fall into if this option is adopted.

A lot more information at the full article available on the News-Gazette website here. There were additional articles on the reaction by the community here. One organized group mentioned in that article, Unit 4 Families for Smarter Solutions, is pushing for alternative policy proposals and has already had its own public meeting towards that goal. Video of latest community meeting here (PowerPoint presentation available here). People didn't appear to be coalescing around any particular alternate proposal at this initial meeting. Many different perspectives were shared on the history of school segregation here, multilingual needs of the community, and criticisms of how focused the Cooperative Strategies proposals actually address any of the problems they're focused on.

More details on the focus groups arranged for further community input to the Cooperative Strategies firm. Links to the survey and focus group application are available on their website here.

More coverage:

• WCIA initial proposal coverage here. Latest reaction coverage here, including yesterday's community meeting and an interview with NAACP president Minnie Pearson who attended and spoke at that meeting. Additional recent Unit 4 articles here.
• Illinois Newsroom 10/4: "Families weigh desegregation benefits, familiarity as Unit 4 discusses abandoning its school choice system"
• Reaction news segments from WAND and WCCU.

For more background on Unit 4's previous attempts at dealing with racial and socioeconomic disparities, local segregation, and integration of schools there is a lot of territory to cover. The most recent and helpful overviews to get started may be the district's recent Needs Assessment (February 2020) and Strategic Plan (September 2020).

• The Needs Assessment was developed by another education consulting firm called FourPoint Education Partners and is available on the Champaign Board of Education's website here. This also relates to the board's declaration of racism as a health crisis in June 2020. 
• The Strategic Plan for the district was developed based on that assessment.

For even more background, here are some additional helpful links:

• A 2019 Cheat Sheet post on segregation in Champaign-Urbana highlighting excerpts of a Governing Magazine series looking at modern segregation in downstate Illinois, including towns like ours.
• WILL coverage of the local branches of the NAACP and ACLU 2019 letter explaining ongoing concerns about racial disparities in outcomes, opportunities, and treatment in Unit 4. The full letter is still available on the Champaign County ACLU's website here.
• A critical look at the aftermath of the Consent Decree and settlement from a former Unit 4 teacher and administrator in 2012. It was republished on a searchable local Unit 4 blog that covered Unit 4 from late 2008 through 2020.
• The News-Gazette had a very brief overview of the extent of school segregation here during the racial Nadir and desegregation attempts after World War II and then the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s.

For legal wonks here is the text of the 2009 Settlement Agreement that helped usher in the end of the Consent Decree and the 2002 Consent Decree ruling itself. There are also records available through the University on the history of the legal battle that led to the Consent Decree. 

The long history of integration and segregation in Champaign-Urbana is difficult to summarize. In some ways we were unique and different from other Northern towns... but in other ways we were tragically typical. I strongly recommend folks take advantage of our great African-American history resources and archives locally to learn more about the evolution, changes (forwards and backwards), and the backlashes that occurred both nationally and locally over the past generations here.

Other Unit 4 Updates:

• CU One-to-One mentoring training dates and coverage from WCCU.
• The News-Gazette had coverage of the Superintendent's pay raise and overview of the previous school board meeting. Other approved items including the sale of excess Chromebooks to other districts and the donation of other surplus supplies.
• The 9/16 "Meeting Minutes" feature noted some approved district hires and "a moment of silence for Central coaching icon Lee Cabutti."
• The latest updates on the tentative SY 2022-2023 budget is available from the last meeting agenda packet here. 
• Area superintendents (including for Champaign schools) had a public event on area school needs covered by WAND here. 

Unit 4: New Year and New Superintendent

This post has news updates from Unit 4 and an overview from January's school board meeting. The biggest news is this month the Board of Education finalized its decision for the next Superintendent of the Unit 4 School District. From the From the Unit 4 announcement this past week:

The Unit 4 Board of Education has selected Mrs. Shelia Boozer to lead Unit 4 Schools pending negotiation and formal Board approval of her employment contract. She will succeed Dr. Susan Zola, who is retiring in June after leading the District for four years. 

Mrs. Boozer currently serves as the Director of Teaching & Learning and Technology in Springfield District 186. It is a large and diverse unit district that serves approximately 14,000 students in 36 schools. Over the past 23 years in education, she has had an excellent educational career as a teacher at the elementary and middle school levels, and assistant principal and principal at both the elementary and high school levels. Mrs. Boozer used her adeptness to build relationships with students and their families, as well as motivate and encourage staff and students to succeed.

More at the full announcement here. Video of the announcement is available on the Unit 4 website here (starting roughly at the 3:30 minute mark). The News-Gazette coverage highlighted her energy and the historic first:

She’ll be the first Black woman to serve as the district’s superintendent.

“I think it’s significant based on what’s happening across our nation,” [school board President Amy Armstrong] said. On Wednesday, “we saw the inauguration of the first Black female vice president, and I think for our student body that is majority Black, they can look up to a Black woman that is leading this district forward. And all of our students will be able to say, ‘I can do that.’

“It’s exciting for us that what you’re seeing at the national level is showing at the local level with women in leadership, and we’re excited that in Unit 4, we’re going to have our first Black female superintendent.”

Full article available here. Background on the final three applicants was covered in the News-Gazette here and there final presentations to the board are available on zoom video with link and password from the Unit 4 website here.

January Unit 4 Board of Education Meeting 1/11:

The January Board meeting (agenda available here, Part 1 video, Part 2 video) focused primarily on how to safely provide in person learning for the most students during the pandemic in an equitable manner. The News-Gazette had an overview that week:

For at least the first two weeks of the second semester, Unit 4 schools will remain completely remote, Superintendent Susan Zola said during Monday’s school board meeting.

“Similar to other districts across the state, we’re going to give our districts a few more weeks on our distance-learning platform,” Zola said, “and the first opportunity that we might see students back in person might be Jan. 19th.”

The board also voted unanimously to move forward with the district’s plan to implement an option for the superintendent to call for an e-learning day in lieu of a snow day or another type of emergency day.

That full article here.

Current Superintendent Susan Zola started her report around the 1:23:35 mark of the Part 1 video (there was a long closed session at the beginning of the meeting before returning to open session at the 1:11 mark). She explained the difficulties of coming up with a back to school plan where the needs of students are at odds with the pandemic limitations. She also noted that parents are at odds on what they believe is the best solution.

Zola made a special point to demand civil disagreement and constructive criticism as opposed to racist hate, threats, and wishing harm upon staff and board members.

Principals from the district gave their reports as well for different grade school and high school considerations starting at roughly the 1:32 mark in the Part 1 video. Both the Superintendent and the principals made clear there wasn't an ideal plan that could satisfy the competing desires and concerns of all parents. They explained how they tried to provide the best educational opportunities within the constraints of the pandemic between remote learning and limited in person classes, additional study halls and after school programs.

In the Q&A that followed there were concerns about access for the at least 129 homeless families with children in the district and waiting on approval for the surveillance testing program through the University. That testing system is still a few weeks away. There was also a discussion of construction delays during the pandemic and how it could impact opening schools in the future. For now, at least, the district is able to work within the available space given current restrictions.

There were several parents and district students who participated in public comments starting at the 2:43:50 mark in the Part 1 video and continued on into the Part 2 video. Parents pleaded for in-person learning for a host of reasons from their ability to work, organize their lives, for their kids to succeed in learning and for their family's sanity. Students had feedback about difficulties with remote learning, communicating with teachers, struggling to do well in their studies, and the logistics of classes and afterschool programs during the pandemic. Many missed their friends and teachers. WCIA had feedback from parents, students and the teachers union in their coverage. Excerpt:

Brylie Klaudt is an eighth grader at Edison Middle School. She said factors like accessibility, resources, and not being able to talk to both teachers and friends on a consistent basis make it difficult to be fully engaged as a student.

“I don’t think i’m getting the education I’m supposed to be getting,” Klaudt said. “I really feel like it’s just dumbing us down and shoving all this work in our faces with such a short period of time,”

Interviews and video segment with the full article here.

The school board's comments at roughly the 14:15 minute mark into the Part 2 video also repeatedly thanked the public who provided constructive and polite criticism. They noted multiple incidents by the public involving racist comments and unacceptable behavior. They asked for decorum and understanding in these trying times and to now that the board members they disagree with still have the best intentions for their students.

After board comments there was a quick explanation of few other school board meetings related to the Superintendent discussions. There are no videos for those meetings on the website as they were almost entirely in closed session and held at another location.