The Portsmouth School Committee last night unanimously approved a 25-cent increase in the cost of school lunches for 2008-09, dealt with a few other financial issues, and heard about the new rules for calculating graduation rates from the RI Department of Ed.

The increase in school lunch costs, said Finance Director Christine Tague, was a delicate balancing act. "I don't have to tell you about the increases in the cost of food," said Tague. Despite the need to generate extra revenue — the proposed increase would only create a cushion of about $6K on a $1M budget — she cautioned against larger price hikes. "There's a point of no return. You go too high and people will not participate."

The committee also took the opportunity to commend graduating PHS senior Julie MacDougall, who not only won a 2008 Robert Byrd Honors Scholarship, but had also served as the liaison to the school committee for the past year. Julie got a round of applause from the committee and audience. She did a great job keeping the committee — and the public — up to date on our high school activities, and she was always poised and articulate. Hope this was a great experience, and best wishes for much success at URI.

Superintendent Susan Lusi reviewed the results of the recent job fair (the process where laid-off teachers can bid into the anticipated positions available in the district) and reported that while everyone who was on the displacement list was able to move to a different position, there were still about 10 staff members with the right of recall for whom no position was available. There will be one additional job fair for teachers on July 17, but it is still unclear, given the state funding picture, whether there would be more positions to fill. "We can't take the risk of recall if we don't have a job," said Lusi.

Assistant Superintendent Colleen Jermain reported on the RI Department of Education's new high school graduation rate calculation, released last week, which brings the state in line with the requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Unlike the previous metric, which included all students who graduated no matter how many years it took, and which did not count students whose status was unknown, the new system counts both of these against graduation rate. Rhode Island, as a whole, instantly went from 89.2% to 70.6%, according to a RIDE press release distributed at the meeting. Portsmouth, which under the old formula had a 92.8% rate, is now measured as 88.2 (According to the RIDE handout, for PHS, GED students account for 7.9% of the kids who do not graduate in 4 years, with only 2.9% being "real" dropouts.)

"The irony," said Dr. Lusi, "Is that our state education leadership agrees that the standard should be the constant, and the time to finish should be the variable. We believe that everyone should cross the finish line. In NCLB, there are mixed messages in that regard."

School Committee Vice-Chair Dick Carpender seconded that thought, saying that students who take the GED route or spend a fifth year getting the diploma should be commended, not punished. He also noted that Portsmouth's actual dropout rate of 2.9% was the fifth-lowest of the state's 60 schools, according to RIDE's numbers.

A random observation. One of the interesting things about the new metric is the focus on "cohorts," or groups of students who all begin 9th grade at the same time. Transfer students are included in the receiving school's graduation rate. While RIDE promises to publish an "adjusted" graduation rate in the future, only counting those students who started with the cohort, that number is always going to be an asterisk. And why is this significant? Well, suppose you start at a charter school, say, and get kicked out. You transfer to another high school in the district and don't graduate. You count against the performance of the receiving school, and there's no cutoff — transfer in May of your senior year, and you still count. I can think of ways of gaming this system, can you?

And this whole thing is totally about measurement, not education. Shouldn't RIDE be focused on helping every student reach their potential rather than knuckling under to the ill-conceived Bush Administration mandates of NCLB? Is it important to track progress? Absolutely. But the risk is that this greater transparency is going to be used as evidence by the anti-school forces. (Speaking of which — tonight is the final budget hearing for 2008-09, so if you can, please come to the session at the Portsmouth Middle School at 7pm.)

Meeting adjourned about 8:20.