Orr plans public meetings to address school safety issues, plan the way forward

Anthony Orr, superintendent of Nelson County Schools, explains the town hall-style meetings he plans for June and July to get input from the public, brainstorm ideas and then develop plans to address problems at Old Kentucky Home Middle School and Nelson County High School. Click to enlarge.

By JIM BROOKS
Nelson County Gazette / WBRT Radio

Thursday, June 1, 2017, 11 p.m. — Superintendent Anthony Orr unveiled Tuesday night his plans to address student behavior problems and school safety problems in Nelson County Schools — specifically Old Kentucky Home Middle School and Nelson County High School.

Board member Damon Jackey listens as Superintendent Anthony Orr discusses his plan to address parents’ concerns with school discipline, academics and school culture at OKHMS and NCHS.

The process will include a series of town hall-type public meetings to address the issues that fall under three broad topics: school safety and discipline, academics, and school culture.

These topic areas cover the range of complaints and concerns that the board has received from the public at recent school board meetings, Orr explained.

The first round of meetings will be listening sessions designed to get additional input from parents, students and district employees about their concerns in order to better describe and identify the problems. The second set of meetings will focus on brainstorming solutions, and the third will begin the planning process to address the issues.

Once those plans are formed, the school district’s leadership will focus on helping the staff and administration at the schools implement those plans and support them with whatever resources that they may need to be successful, Orr said.

Though the exact times of the meetings have not been set, Orr said he hoped to have at least two meetings at different times each day in order to give everyone an opportunity to attend.

The first listening sessions Tuesday, June 13, will focus on school safety and discipline. The Wednesday, June 14 listening sessions will examine academic concerns. The final listening sessions on Thursday, June 15, will examine school culture.

The next week, the sessions will focus on brainstorming ideas to address the issues identified during the listening sessions. The meetings will follow the same topics in the same order: school safety on Tuesday, June 20; academics on Wednesday, June 21; and school culture on Thursday, June 21.

This PowerPoint slide illustrates the planned schedule for the district’s town hall-style meetings to address concerns at OKHMS and NCHS. Click to enlarge.

The information gathered from the listening and brainstorming sessions will be made available to the public and used as the basis for planning meetings that begin Tuesday, July 11.

The exact times and locations of the meetings will be announced soon via local news media and on the district’s Facebook page, he said.

Orr said the process needs the public’s participation as a priority.

“What we want to do as we move forward is to make sure we seek the input and the advice of the community from whom we’re getting the feedback,” Orr said. “Could I sit in my office and make a lot of plans? Yes, but I don’t think that’s what the community wants, that’s not what the community needs, and that’s not what we’re going to do.”

Orr noted that the district had already put measures in place at the two schools to address parent concerns prior to the recent board meetings. Those measures will be continued and supplemented by the planned actions that come out of the town hall meetings.

DATA SUPPORTS PARENT COMMENTS. Orr told the board that information in the most recent survey of the district’s educators provides hard data that confirms the complaints the board has heard from its staff and parents at earlier meetings.

The 2017 TELL Kentucky survey is anonymous statewide survey of school-based licensed educators in Kentucky, with results by district and then by individual school.

The survey includes questions on teacher and school leadership, as well as student conduct.

The TELL Kentucky survey of Old Kentucky Home Middle School teachers in the student conduct section show a dramatic drop in teachers’ positive experiences between 2015 and 2017.

Kentucky TELL survey results for OKHMS. Click to enlarge.

For example, when asked in 2015 the question, “Students at this school follow rules of conduct,” 40.6 percent of teachers gave positive answers. In 2017, no teacher at the school gave a positive response to that question.

When asked the question, “School administrators consistently enforce rules for student conduct,” 70 percent of teachers agreed with the statement in 2015. In 2017, this dropped to 5.9 percent.

When asked to respond to the statement, “The faculty work in a school environment that is safe,” 75 percent gave positive responses in 2015. In 2017, that number dropped to 17.6 percent.

ORR TAKES A STEP BACK. After hearing complaints about his leadership from the public at recent school board meetings, Orr said that he has removed himself from the principal selection processes for both Nelson County High School and Old Kentucky Home Middle School.

“I want those two schools to have real confidence in their (site-based council’s) decision without any question of my hands muddying the issue,” he said.

Bob Morris, the district’s director of student support services, is serving as chair of the principal selection committee meetings, Orr said.

Board member Damon Jackey noted that the hiring of a school’s principal is critical in addressing the need to change a school’s culture. A school’s site-based council is responsible for hiring its principal, and Jackey called on the district to do whatever it could to help the site-based councils with those hiring decisions.

Board member Diane Berry said she hopes the parents who have spoken at the past board meetings will attend the upcoming town hall meetings to offer their input and their suggestions for how to the schools can improve.

“I want us to get deep into this, I want us to figure out what went wrong, why it went wrong, and how are we going to make it better,” Berry said, adding that she had no problem changing a policy if it can make a difference.

“This is a very critical stage of us,” Berry said. “We’ve got to take steps to make it better.”

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