Imagine a school where students and faculty are excited to show up; where everywhere you look, creativity flows; where students compose songs on the guitar between classes; and where teachers find ways to teach history through music and English through art.
That was the school Tony Gerlicz envisioned when he founded Monte del Sol Charter School in 2000—a place where public education didn’t have to mean rigid hierarchy, tight scheduling or fewer art and music classes.
“There were always kids hanging out in the courtyard, engrossed in conversation or playing basketball,” Lisa Van Sickle, the parent of one graduate and two students at Monte del Sol, says. “They never cared what color anybody’s hair is, and the kids were not walking around in a straight line, in uniform.”
Van Sickle says she’s “thrilled” with the education her oldest son got at
. The school’s approach, which centers on involving students in every aspect of their own education, transformed him from a kid who “fought school as hard as he could,” she says, into one who forged deep connections with teachers and administrators. Even when disciplinary problems arose, Van Sickle says, faculty, students and administrators talked it out together.
“The kids got to see incredible attempts to find common ground—which I think prepares them far better than their ability to do quadratic equations,” Van Sickle says.
But now, as Monte del Sol enters its 10th year later this month, it has become a school in crisis—an identity crisis, to be specific.
Gerlicz’ departure in 2008 coincided with the school’s mounting budget shortfalls and ongoing failure to meet test score standards. In her first year at the school, Gerlicz’ replacement, Angela Ritchie, has tried to address these problems—but her attempt to do so has proven divisive.
While some teachers laud the new energy she brings to the school and appreciate her efforts to balance the budget and beef up traditional academics, others say her top-down management style and dedication to improving test scores jeopardize the school’s original mission.
Faculty, staff and students have divided into sometimes bitterly opposed factions, with Gerlicz and Ritchie representing symbols in the larger and mounting conflict in public education.
That conflict pits the ideals of small schools, alternative learning methods and community buy-in against the inflexible benchmarks of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, and its concomitant testing requirements.
Charter schools particularly highlight this division.
“Charter schools [exist] to provide unique programs, different ways of assessing children,” Lisa Grover, the CEO of the
New Mexico Coalition for Charter Schools
, says. “There is an inherent tension between charter schools and the law, [which is] trying to make them very like public schools. A strength of any school, but especially a charter school, is its ability to manage change while still remaining true to the school’s mission.”
Whether Monte del Sol can do so remains uncertain—as does Ritchie’s future following a year of the types of conflict that perhaps no one would have envisioned when the school first sprang into being.
Monte del Sol opened its doors in August 2000—less than a year before Congress passed the Bush-era education reform bill known as No Child Left Behind.
Gerlicz, who held the title of head learner (Monte del Sol’s version of a principal) for the first eight years, says Monte del Sol was founded on the idea of giving Santa Fe students and parents an alternative—but still affordable—education option. Gerlicz, who answered SFR’s questions via email while overseas, says he wanted to create an arts-heavy, community-based educational model that “encouraged students to create, to innovate, to lead and to see their education as a critical tool in improving themselves as well as the communities in which they live.”
Even before the end of its first school year, demand for Monte del Sol had soared, with hundreds of students competing for a few spots in the school’s lottery system.
The new school bounced from the
Boys & Girls Clubs of Santa Fe
to a space in the Solana Center on W. Alameda before landing in 2003 at its current location, in the Nava Adé housing development near
.
Meanwhile, Monte del Sol pursued Gerlicz’ educational vision, boasting, at the height of its arts offerings, eight different options ranging from radio arts to film, spoken word, writing and photography. A unique mentoring program allowed students not only to try out careers that interested them, but also to interact with the greater Santa Fe community.
Gerlicz, whose background before Monte del Sol included leadership roles in two alternative schools and an international one, is unabashedly proud of the school’s success in many ways—graduation rates, student satisfaction, community interaction.
Still, “I wish I could tout the same high levels of achievement for our NCLB scores,” he writes, “but that is another whole level of conversation that is currently being played out at the national level.”
As a charter school, Monte del Sol is subject to the same standardized tests and federal programs public schools are. But, Gerlicz admits, “We never focused on testing.”
At first, the school didn’t have any trouble meeting
adequate yearly progress
, or AYP, the major test-score benchmark of No Child Left Behind.
But by the time of Gerlicz’ departure, AYP was the one area in which the school just wasn’t succeeding.
Victoria Dean, a rising senior at Monte del Sol, says the school “was so much about creating this safe space for people to really learn” that preparation for standardized testing fell by the wayside.
Designed to measure whether schools are improving, AYP draws from a variety of qualifiers—standardized math and reading scores, graduation rates and test participation.
When schools don’t meet AYP, they are required to implement a series of increasingly drastic changes. Making AYP again can stall the process, but Monte del Sol hasn’t done so in years. As a result, the school is currently in “restructuring”—one of the final disciplinary phases, with recommendations as draconian as firing half of a school’s entire faculty or turning the school over to the state.
Monte del Sol, which currently serves 373 students in grades 7-12 and retains many of its original faculty members, has plenty of company. In the 2009-10 school year, nearly 78 percent of New Mexico’s public schools failed to meet AYP. In Santa Fe, that number was 90 percent.
In part, declining scores are a function of rising standards. One of the oft-criticized aspects of NCLB is the increasing unattainability of its requirements. (As some evidence, the percentage of New Mexico schools failing to achieve AYP has risen steadily in the past five years.)
By 2014, every child at every school in the United States is supposed to have a perfect score on national standardized math and reading tests—a goal Ritchie calls “not realistic.”
Tony Gerlicz, Monte del Sol’s founder, envisioned a school that would encourage students to create, innovate and lead.
Ritchie, who headed public and private schools in Georgia and Alabama before coming to Santa Fe last year, says she disagrees with certain aspects of
No Child Left Behind
—but says it may have kicked off a necessary discussion about how to improve education.
“We’re in an era of educational change right now,” Ritchie tells SFR. “I think there will be some good that has come out of the school improvement movement, and there will be some things that probably weren’t appropriate.”
But such a statement is at odds with Gerlicz’ philosophy on the “school improvement movement”—an achievement-oriented campaign founded on No Child Left Behind.
“The punitive approach to education reform”—punishing schools for failing to score high enough on standardized tests—“is fundamentally flawed,” Gerlicz writes. “It does not work and will never work.”
It’s not just Gerlicz who thinks this way. With him is a cadre of parents, teachers and students who see Monte del Sol as a response to traditional public education’s manifest failings.
“Were I to do it all over again, I might have focused a bit more on teaching testing skills—but never at the expense of building a strong community,” Gerlicz writes. “Teaching to the test is a Faustian bargain.”
Some fear it’s a bargain that Ritchie is willing to make.
Gerlicz left Monte del Sol in 2008 to head the American School of Warsaw, in Poland.
“Initially, we were all surprised and shocked and disappointed and upset—then quickly very happy for him,” Ken Joseph, the chairman of Monte del Sol’s governing board, tells SFR. “I had great admiration that he could let his baby go like that.”
But Joseph, who was intimately involved in the first search process, says the hiring committee struggled to find a replacement who shared Gerlicz’ vision.
Instead, they opted for an interim leader in then-Assistant Head Learner Anne Salzmann.
Salzmann, who currently heads the
, a new early college charter school based at Santa Fe Community College, declined to speak to SFR for this story.
“I love that school; it’s part of my heart,” Salzmann tells SFR. “I just want to stay out of it.”
A second search committee had more success, narrowing the pool down to four candidates. One of them was Ritchie, a tall, blonde woman with an air of subdued authoritativeness.
After stints as a technical writer and stained-glass artist, she turned to education.
“I kept having this pull back to education because that’s really who I am,” Ritchie tells SFR. “As corny as it sounds, it was that idea of paying it forward: So many people helped me along the way, and I really feel that education is a way to move forward in this world.”
Before she came to Santa Fe, Ritchie worked as a teacher and administrator at public schools in Georgia and Alabama, and served for four years as the principal of a K-8 Catholic school in Rome, Ga.
After extensive interviews and meetings with parents, students, faculty and the community, the board voted to hire Ritchie as Gerlicz’ successor.
“In my mind, she was among the top two,” Carlos Ruiz, the vice chairman and longest-serving member of Monte del Sol’s governing board, tells SFR. “In her qualifications and experience, she measured up to our top three contenders, [but] when I voted for her, it was because she spoke Spanish,” Ruiz says.
In February 2009, Paul Biderman, then the board’s president, told a local newspaper Ritchie was “the best combination of skills and attitude.”
But Van Sickle says students (who also sit on the board, Ruiz says, but don’t vote) had a different perspective.
“My understanding is that the students preferred another candidate,” Van Sickle says. “Out of the four they had, I’m not sure [Ritchie] would’ve made the top three.”
Angela Ritchie, Monte del Sol’s current head learner, has a more traditional approach that some worry will alter the school’s creative atmosphere.
Credits: Photo: Alexa Schirtzinger
Nonetheless, everyone SFR interviewed for this story says they were excited for a new head learner, and worked to familiarize her with the school’s educational traditions.
But Cassandra Reid, the president of Monte del Sol’s Parent Teacher Student Association, says Ritchie and the school struggled to adapt to one another. Ritchie’s leadership style, Reid says, is “not particularly inclusive” compared with Gerlicz’ “extremely open” approach. Subsequently, Reid says, many of the faculty and parents once deeply involved in running the school now feel disappointed and alienated.
“The lack of openness to discussion has crippled the school to some extent,” Reid says. “There are strengths in the new leadership, but there’s also real trouble making that new leadership style fit with the values of the school.”
That challenge is not confined to Ritchie’s educational philosophy; it’s also related to her methods. The school’s low test scores, after all, aren’t her fault.
“[Ritchie] came in and noticed how extreme these deficiencies in test scores were,” Dean tells SFR. “The new administration has been a scapegoat, [but really] it’s what the school didn’t do at first to make sure we had good test scores along with this really beautiful way of learning.”
But to many, Ritchie’s businesslike leadership style isn’t the best way to accomplish the delicate balance between testing and creativity that Monte del Sol seeks.
One significant source of tension involves the personnel changes Ritchie made last fall. Faculty and parents say she eliminated a part-time counseling position without sufficient advance notice.
“We did have the budget cuts in the fall—I think everyone knows about that—and we did lose a position due to that particular budget cut,” Ritchie says. She says she gave the former counselor the requisite two weeks’ notice, and that the position was later replaced with a drug- and alcohol-specific counselor through a grant from Santa Fe Public Schools.
But when a section of choir also was eliminated, parents and teachers worried that the school’s focus on the arts would be compromised. The final blow came when the school’s
, whose projects included the memorial garden dedicated to the four Santa Fe teens who died in a car accident last summer (two of whom, Julian Martinez and Rose Simmons, attended Monte del Sol), had her hours cut from 30 hours per week to eight. The coordinator ended up leaving the school.
“A lot of the programs that made Monte so beautiful, like the garden and mentorship, are used more as a gimmick more than actually supported,” Dean says. “When people ask about Monte or come and scope it out for their kids, the new head learner will talk about how beautiful the garden is—but they cut the coordinator!” she says.
Ritchie is quick to explain that all the cuts had to do with the budget. Though Monte del Sol receives the bulk of its funding from the state, the garden coordinator’s position was funded through a separate foundation, which couldn’t raise the money to keep supporting a garden coordinator.
No one disputes the school’s budget problems.
“When the state tells you, you have to cut money, it makes for these really difficult decisions,” Lisa Otero, a history teacher and the school’s dean of students, tells SFR.
Van Sickle, too, appreciates the difficulty of the situation.
“[Ritchie] came in at a really ratty time, with all the budget cuts from the state,” Van Sickle says. “I don’t envy her walking into a charter school at the time she did.”
For Van Sickle and many others, though, the problem wasn’t so much the changes themselves but, rather, how they were accomplished.
“Instead of coming to the school community and saying, ‘Look, we’re hugely over a barrel; what can we do?’ they never even told anyone that it was happening—much less gave anyone in the community a chance to step up and say, ‘Choir’s really important for my kid. Let’s do a fundraiser and see if we can’t keep it,’” Van Sickle says. “Those decisions were just made. The whole atmosphere of openness and tolerance seems to be closing down.”
Gretchen Gordon, a congenial blonde who joined Monte del Sol in its first year as the school’s nurse, says that not only were the staff changes not transparent, but that they were also used as leverage.
“There were constant threats—‘The budget is tight; positions are going to be reduced,’” Gordon says.
Ruiz says that especially in the context of a school based on inclusiveness, Ritchie’s top-down approach to balancing the budget led to anger and frustration among faculty and community members.
Some parents and students were upset when the coordinator for Monte del Sol’s memorial garden (top) had her hours cut and then left.
Credits: Photo: Alexa Schirtzinger
“The changes may not be good, but [they’re] necessary,” Ruiz says. “The problem, quite frankly, was in the execution of those changes—the way staff was treated, directed [and], in fact, reprimanded.”
By late fall, faculty morale was so low that Gordon felt compelled to contact the National Education Association to ask for information on joining the teachers’ union.
“Once I started that, it was this constant coming into [Ritchie’s] office to explain myself,” Gordon says. “I felt I was being harassed and intimidated.”
Ritchie denies she was ever opposed to the union.
“I was in the union myself until I came here,” she tells SFR. “I don’t have any feelings about it, really.”
Gordon says her relationship with Ritchie continued to deteriorate, and she resolved to leave Monte del Sol at the end of the school year because “I’d feel complicit if I stayed.”
For students like Dean, the division within the school hit home.
“Our teachers were stressed out and upset and angry,” Dean says. “It started to get really distracting because there was such a huge rift in the faculty.”
Tensions came to a head this spring, when Monte del Sol began working on a restructuring plan, per NCLB requirements. Ritchie says she held public input meetings on the plan in April and May. The plan had to be approved by Monte del Sol’s governing board by June and then sent to the state.
Yet several teachers tell SFR they were never shown the plan.
“The way a restructuring plan gets written really impacts curriculum and the whole structure of the school, but there really wasn’t room made to have those discussions,” Reid says. The Parent Teacher Student Association spent months asking to have input into the plan, she says, but wasn’t given much of an opportunity.
“There’s no reason that plan couldn’t have been gathering input since September,” Reid says. “That would be the way to approach it in the Monte del Sol spirit.”
When asked about the level of community input to the plan, Ritchie seemed surprised that people felt left out. She listed several meetings held in the spring to alert faculty, students and parents to the plan and, she says, collect input.
“We wanted to make it as transparent as possible,” Otero tells SFR. But, she admits, “There wasn’t a lot of attendance.”
Ritchie also gave SFR a 19-page synopsis of the plan, which draws from some
No Child Left Behind
recommendations, but also attempts to incorporate Monte del Sol’s creative, participatory culture.
The need for the plan became official on Aug. 2, when the
New Mexico Public Education Department
released the 2009-10 AYP results. Monte del Sol again failed to meet AYP and will have to implement its restructuring plan, when approved by the state.
Parts of the plan call for typically Monte-style programs: quarterly town halls on academic achievement in both Spanish and English, cooperation with higher learning institutions, and mental health and tutoring services.
But other aspects of the plan have engendered resistance because of the apparent push toward a more traditionally defined administration. These include adding a receptionist, making Otero’s position as dean of students a full-time job (Otero will no longer teach history, Ritchie says) and involving an outside consultant charged with “coaching teachers as they implement changes to instructional practices.”
There’s also a plan to wire the school with a PA/bell system—itself the very emblem of regimented schooling. And then there’s this: “Head Learner will make all decisions related to staffing, staff scheduling and site-based budget,” part of the restructuring plan reads.
“The principal makes a hiring decision; that’s state law,” Ritchie says. “It shouldn’t be a change.”
But to some, it represents a transition to a more traditional administration—and with it, the usual focus on achievement.
“The mission now isn’t about making wonderful leaders—it’s about getting good test scores,” Dean tells SFR. “A lot of the original mission is being sacrificed.”
Ritchie doesn’t deny her focus on bringing the school’s test scores up to par.
This year, Monte del Sol will implement its restructuring plan, which calls for a PA/bell system and other changes.
Credits: Photo: Alexa Schirtzinger
“There has been, in the past, not as much concern for standardized test scores,” Ritchie tells SFR. “Certainly we have had to accelerate that process because we are in restructuring,” she says, pausing. “That’s been hard.”
When she first came to Monte del Sol, Ritchie says she tried to avoid shaking things up—“but I think change was forced upon us,” she says.
Though she says she tried to incorporate all three aspects of healthy schools—academic, financial and relational—into her role as head learner, “I’m aware that doesn’t take place in one year,” Ritchie admits. “You can’t just step in and become the former leader who’s been here for 10 years.”
But Ritchie isn’t one to apologize.
“We’re moving from a very young school into a much more stable school, and that [takes] a different kind of leadership,” Ritchie says.
The question is, what kind?
Ritchie’s arrival may have thrown Monte del Sol’s identity crisis into stark relief, but some believe it may have been inevitable.
Randy Merker, who taught at Monte del Sol from its founding until this year, says the current conflict is merely “exposing a lot of historic factionalization in the school.”
And the debate at Monte del Sol, he says, is happening everywhere.
“There are people who believe testing is a reasonable measure of student and school success,” Merker says. “[In] the first three or four years, we were much more interested in student-centered, project-based learning—a lot more concerned about specific student interest and desire in their own education,” he explains. “That’s not true now.”
Grover says that’s every charter school’s constant battle.
“What charter schools are really doing at their very heart is changing the way we think about public education,” she says. “There is a constant push-back of trying to make charters look like every other public school,” Grover adds. “They’re not supposed to be, and they don’t want to be. If they wanted business as usual, they would not have chosen to work in a charter school environment.”
Because charter schools see themselves as the vanguard, Grover says, they’re often populated and maintained by very passionate teachers, students and parents—and it will always be hard to reconcile the drive to revolutionize public education with the need to work within its confines.
Yet while schools are currently tied to this need to meet and maintain AYP, the broader, national picture may be shifting.
This March, the Obama administration released its “blueprint” for reauthorizing the
Education and Secondary Education Act
, the original basis for NCLB.
“They’re putting forward new ideas and building off accountability and reform,” Brooks Garber, federal policy vice president for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, says. Some of the reauthorization goals, Garber says, will include better modeling for teacher effectiveness, transitioning AYP to “college and career readiness” and rewarding excellence.
Gerlicz, for his part, believes NCLB will change.
“[US Secretary of Education]
Arne Duncan
and company already know it is a flawed system of reform,” Gerlicz writes.
Those changes are unlikely to come soon enough to affect Monte del Sol’s immediate future. That rests largely with Ritchie.
This June, after fielding the types of complaints voiced in this story, Ruiz says the school’s governing board opted to renew Ritchie’s contract for only one year, with measurable benchmarks—he’s reluctant to call them “conditions”—for her to achieve better harmony with the school community.
Of 301 prospective students in the lottery to enter Monte del Sol’s 7th grade class this year, 68 have received spots.
Credits: Photo: Alexa Schirtzinger
Around December, Ruiz says, the board will check in to make sure Ritchie is achieving the objectives outlined in her contract.
It’s an ironic echo of the very flash point that’s dividing the school: whether a set of measurable benchmarks—test scores, a restructuring plan, a provisional contract—can actually make things better.
When asked about her contract, Ritchie denied that it was punitive. Instead, she described it as the first stage of a process to formalize the school’s personnel system.
“We’re creating clearer job descriptions for every position,” Ritchie says. “When I came, there were no job descriptions written. I wanted, and I’m sure everyone wants, a job description with measurable goals.”
Ritchie says all school administrators now have well-defined objectives. When the teachers return from summer break—school starts Aug. 23—she’ll begin working on establishing similar benchmarks for them.
The goal, in Ritchie’s view?
“Just a little bit tighter ship.”
SFR
