Local School Fails No Child Left Behind Act

In a small town just down the road from my own the school system has been corrupt for years. They have been funneling money into projects that they never explain. They take money from the school upkeep funds to buy new jerseys every three months for the football team, and the school is understaffed. A friend of mine has a child taking chemistry at the highschool there and it is being taught by a lunchroom lady that has no degree whatsoever.

I suppose it doesn't matter since she can't do her school work on her desk due to the bucket that has to sit on it to catch the water leaking through the ceiling. No money is spent in this school unless it goes to the football team, and its a real shame that the level of importance that is given to the football team isn't given to the reading, math, arts, and science programs.

Recently in this town the school system was put on to academic probation under the No Child Left Behind Act. It seems that the teaching staff has failed to teach the children in the elementary school to read at their own grade level. There are children there in the 5^th grade that read at the 3^rd grade level, and 4^th graders reading at the 1^st grade level and so on. I see things like this on the news all the time so I wasn't extremely shocked by the situation. What I was shocked by was the explanation and the solution.

The spokesmen for the school district said in a recent interview with the local paper that "Our school has enough disabled/handicapped students to create a subgroup, and that subgroup is what lowered our test scores. The students in the wheelchairs and with other disabilities were the only children with low test scores, and our teachers are not capable of dealing with students like these."

As I read the article I was shocked at that statement, I went on to read that these students did not have any learning disabilities, they were all physical. So my question is simply this why are these teachers not able to teach these children? Since when is it okay to over look a child simply because they are in a wheelchair or have scoliosis? If these teachers cannot teach these children how can they teach other children? What was equally as shocking was the names of all the students that were grouped into said subgroup were actually published in the paper along with the testing scores.

I took it upon myself to attend the quaint town meeting that was being held over the subject. At the meeting I learned that if the school does not bring up the test scores within a year that the school will undergo academic maintenance, which consists of a totally new teaching staff to be assigned by the state. The teachers that now teach in the school district will be required to take additional classes also provided by the state.

The school board debated back and forth over what should be done in the mean time and settled on combining two projects into one. They decided that a new school, which is already under construction, will solve the problem. Supposedly new dry erase boards and new desks will solve the problem of not being able to read.

After this announcement the floor was opened up for questions. At that time I asked my burning questions and also how a new school will help the teachers pay more attention to the students they have been neglecting. At that moment the meeting was adjourned and I was asked to leave.

I will never know the answers to my burning questions and I will never know what will happen when the state learns that a lunch woman is teaching science, but I do know that a new building will not fix the IQs of the people running the school system that drove it into the ground in the first place. I know that nothing will change and there are too many children suffering for it. Honestly, the more I think about it all the more I see why the school plays up the football team so much, to me it seems like the only good thing the school has going for it.