In their continuing struggle to raise test scores and regain accreditation, leaders of the Normandy school district have stressed a positive message: high expectations, strict standards, no excuses.
But students at the often-troubled Normandy Middle School have learned a different lesson.
Earlier in the year, school officials said that for eighth graders to move up to the high school, they needed a 2.0 grade average. Now, in the waning weeks of the school year, that threshold was suddenly lowered, without warning or explanation, to 1.0 average.
Eighth graders Kayvion Calvert and Unique Snelson never had to worry about whether they would be moving up to ninth grade. Unique’s grade point average is 3.8, and Kayvion has a 3.7 on a scale that has 4.0 as the top.
But when they heard about the new policy, they wondered why the call for high expectations had suddenly been reversed, and why students who haven’t seemed to care about doing good work should even bother now. They got in touch with a reporter to make their disappointment known.
“I come to school every day and do my work and really worked,” Unique said in a recent interview, “because I wanted to get a 4.0 GPA by the end of the year. To find out that people that come to class and don’t do anything and only do work sometimes get to go on to the ninth grade, and I earned it -- it wasn’t fair to me. So I was very upset.”
Added Kayvion:
“They get on their morning announcements every morning, and they tell us to strive for excellence and be the best that we can be. But we all know that 1.5 and 1.6 are not the best that students can be.
“When students that were going to correct themselves and try to be better and actually move on saw this, they were saying, well, I have a 1-point whatever they have, so I feel there’s no need. I’m going to pass anyway, so they just dropped whatever they were doing and did whatever they wanted to do.”
Normandy Middle School has not been one of the bright spots in a district that has had its problems with academic achievement. Both academically and in terms of discipline, the district’s new superintendent, Charles Pearson, has been the latest administrator to acknowledge that the school has fallen short.
“We cannot ignore the fact that our middle school has had some serious issues,” he told a meeting of the district’s appointed governing board earlier this month. “We need to start doing some things differently.”
To try to improve the situation, Pearson has proposed moving sixth graders out of the middle school, back to elementary schools, and leaving just seventh and eighth graders in the middle school. Normandy Middle School will also have a new principal in the coming year after the contract of Principal GeNita Williams was not renewed.
'It doesn't add up'
It was Williams, the students say, who had stressed throughout the year that promotion from eighth grade to Normandy High School would require a minimum GPA of 2.0. A letter to parents from Williams in January reiterated that "to be considered for promotion to the ninth grade, students must have a minimum Grade Point Average (GPA) of 2.0 or higher."
“When Dr. Williams told us it was going to be a 2.0,” Kayvion said, “some people were trying to get their grades up again. Once they found it was going to be a 1.0, they weren’t really worried about it.”
He and Unique said they didn’t think Williams was the source of the change.
“For her to just come and just drop the bomb and say that it’s going to go down to a 1.0,” Unique said, “it doesn’t add up to me.”
What Williams was trying to do, they added, was fix an atmosphere that they said can too often be out of control, with teachers forced to act more like babysitters than someone trying to get a lesson across.
Normandy did not initially respond to a request about who made the decision to change the promotion standard and why. However on Wednesday, Superintendent Charles Pearson joined “St. Louis on the Air” host Don Marsh to address who made the decision to change the promotion standard and why.
Pearson said administrators sent home letters forewarning students who were not meeting expectations.
“In speaking with the [former] superintendent in January when first semester grades came out, there were 347 [middle school] students who were operating below a 2.0,” Pearson explained. “At that time, what the administrative team did was set an expectation that we expect all students to be here, and if you were not, you are in danger of being retained.”
Pearson also discussed other issues during the show.
During a 35-minute discussion last week about their time in Normandy, at the public library across Natural Bridge from the middle school, the two students – wearing their class T-shirts – talked about how difficult it is for good students to get the nurturing and challenges that they need.
In math class, for example, Unique said she had worksheets with four or five problems, often simple addition and multiplication. That’s not the kind of rigor students need to get ready for high school, she said.
“I do not feel that I have everything that I need,” she said. “I have some of the basics, but not everything that I could have if we didn’t have distractions in our classroom. I do feel disrespected, and I’m wasting my time.
“I come to school to learn, expecting to learn. We have Sally and Susie over here talking and laughing. Then the teacher has to put them out of class, and they’re in and out of the door, so by the end of the hour I haven’t learned anything at all.”
That kind of atmosphere, Kayvion said, does no one any good – top students or those who are struggling.
“You send those people to high school,” he said of the ones scraping by with a 1.0, “and they’re not ready. Basically you’re setting them up for failure. When you get to high school, it’s not based on grades anymore. It’s based on credits.
“So if you send them, and they’re freshmen, but they don’t have everything that they need to be on that level, then they’re not going to get their credits. By the end of the school year, when everybody else graduates, they’re still going to be back in the same grade they were in next year.”
Why not transfer?
Given their drive to succeed, and the atmosphere that they think is holding them back, why haven’t Kayvion and Unique taken advantage of the opportunity to transfer to accredited schools, as state law allows?
Kayvion said he considered going elsewhere and even went to orientation at Lutheran North after being accepted there. But even though he is making a sacrifice for his own education, he said, he wanted to stay at Normandy.
“I feel that if everyone keeps leaving and keeps leaving,” he said, “it’s not getting any better and it’s just going to keep going down. So I feel that if I stay, I could at least attempt or try to make a change, like with my test scores. Also, I can help other students bring up their test scores and classwork.
“I’m willing to make that sacrifice for other people. … I don’t like to see people fail.”
At Lutheran North, he said, “it was OK, but I still can’t see myself in nobody else’s colors. I’m Normandy.”
Unique said she did attend class in Francis Howell for seventh grade, but she came back to Normandy.
“Then my mother considered transferring me out again,” she said, “because once again she felt that I was not prepared to go to high school because I didn’t know what I needed to know and they weren’t preparing me. But I convinced her to let me stay, because I don’t think leaving is going to make it any better … I decided to stay because this is my home.”
To help get misbehaving and underachieving students back on track, Unique and Kayvion said the answer is not the kinds of in-school (ISS) or out-of-school suspensions that Normandy is using now.
“With ISS,” he said, “they don’t do anything. It’s just like a normal regular classroom, with 40 or 50 students, mixed grade levels. They’re just sitting in there talking on their phones, throwing stuff around, and they have the teacher in there standing at the door with a walkie-talkie, acting as a security guard. That’s not right.”
Unique had this answer:
“I think they need to be sent to an alternative school, where they’re going to have people who are going to put their foot down and be serious, not letting them slide and still having fun and it’s just a big party. That’s how they see ISS at our school, that it’s just a time to go and have fun. They’re finding ways to go to ISS just so they can go in there and have fun and do what they do.”
Is the problem related to race? Unique said it’s more a question of resources.
“When we try to use the Internet,” she said, “it’s slow, and it shuts down. I know that has nothing to do with race, but I feel we don’t have what we need or what we could have to achieve better.
“You look at all the predominantly black schools, and they’re slowly failing. You go to the predominantly white schools, and they’re just getting better and better. It doesn’t add up to me. … You can’t have somebody trying to teach someone if they can’t really connect and understand what’s going on and what’s happening. You can’t teach somebody to walk a dog if they’re not used to dogs.”
Both students would like to see Normandy’s requirements become more stringent, to change a culture where it is too easy to slide by, sometimes with grown-ups not seeming to care.
“We need to put our foot down,” Unique said. “If we say that you can’t pass with anything less than a 2.0, you need to stick with that. We have to be more strict, and stick to our word and adjust to our atmosphere. I think that’s some of the problems that some of our teachers have. Where they came from is different to where they are now, so it’s hard for them to adjust to the different attitude to control some of us.”
“In Normandy, it’s different,” Kayvion said. “You have to be constantly on them. I know some teachers don’t like fussing or yelling at their students, but at Normandy, that’s what you have to do to have them understand. What they’re doing now is not working.”
