The Power of Sharing : Teachers, Administrators and Parents Help Manage Schools

At Hillside Junior High School in Simi Valley, students are starting the school day later this year than last, and the traditional daily homeroom period is a thing of the past.

At Ocean View Junior High School in Oxnard, teachers decided that they needed training to help them emphasize writing throughout the curriculum, so they hired their own consultant.

Those decisions were made by teams of teachers, administrators and other school employees, who are part of a nationwide trend in power sharing called school-based management.

The idea is simple: to give teachers and other employees a voice in how their school is run.

The management-by-committee approach allows teachers, other school employees and, sometimes, parents to have a say in shaping curriculum, deciding how money is spent and planning the day-to-day operations of schools.

At its broadest, the concept allows schools to operate autonomously, increasing the power of teachers and parents.

“The person actually involved in the activity--the teacher in the classroom--sometimes knows better what needs to be done to make the job better,” said Ocean View Junior High Principal Frank Samuels.

Last year, teachers and administrators at Ocean View Junior High met each month to hash out issues ranging from curriculum changes to spending money for books and supplies.

The group of about 10--including teachers, the principal, the assistant principal and a representative of other school employees-- debated every item in an effort to reach a consensus.

The small, 2,360-student Ocean View district is the only district in the county that has implemented the concept at all of its schools.

As the Ocean View experiment enters its second year, teachers and administrators say they are looking forward to testing the boundaries of their new power.

“The idea is that more than one head can help you get through a problem, and everybody can contribute to a solution,” said Hugh Pickrel, principal of Laguna Vista Elementary School.

In Ventura County, several other districts have some version of school-based management, including school districts in Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks’ Conejo Valley Unified School District and the Hueneme Elementary School District. Many principals in other districts also consult teachers informally when making decisions that affect them.

The concept has taken on different forms in different districts.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, a far-reaching form of school-based management was started this year at 27 schools.

Committees of teachers, parents, principals and administrators at those schools will have the power to make decisions about graduation requirements, the length of the school day, teacher hiring and evaluation, and budgets.

Both Hillside Junior High School and the Conejo Elementary School in Thousand Oaks have received Mastery in Learning grants from the National Education Assn. to help fund their school-based management programs.

“For me, it makes good sense because resources are so limited in education now,” said Conejo Principal Claudia Spelman.

At Simi Valley’s Hillside, which is beginning its second year under the program, parents are also members of the management council, Principal Kathryn Scroggin said.

Last fall, Scroggin and Assistant Principal Steve Kalan were selected for their jobs by a panel that included teachers and other school employees, but no district administrators.

“We’re a little bit different from L.A.” Unified schools, Scroggin said. “We’re more of a grass-roots movement. No one came in and said, ‘This is how you do it.’ ”

In addition to three parents, Hillside’s group includes seven teachers, four students, two members of the support staff and the president of the teachers association. They meet at least monthly.

So far, the decision to do away with homeroom has been the Hillside council’s biggest change. Instead of homeroom, Hillside has shorter communications periods that meet only about 30 times a year. Some teachers felt the homeroom period was not an efficient use of time, Scroggin said.

“We basically changed the structure of our day,” Scroggin said.

The Simi Valley school board has been supportive, Scroggin said. “They may say, ‘You want to do what?’ but so far they have never turned down the decision of the council. . . . I won’t pretend 100% of the people are thrilled, but so far it seems to work very well.”

In the Ocean View district, each of the four schools has leadership teams of teachers and administrators who meet regularly to decide--in a limited number of areas--how their schools are run.

When faced with budget cuts last year, principal Samuels consulted the team before he decided to discontinue home economics, to not replace a retiring home economics teacher and to reduce the number of courses offered in shop.

Ocean View Supt. Robert D. Allen said the teams in his district have a say in the hiring of teachers and in decisions about school supplies, department budgets, books and staff development.

“It’s working, and it’s working very well,” Allen said. The district’s small size has made the experiment easier, he said.

At Ocean View’s Mar Vista Elementary School, the leadership team used part of its $5,000 school budget last year to buy equipment called manipulatives, which are geometric figures used to help children learn basic math. The school also bought literature books to fit into a state-mandated language arts curriculum, said Principal Nancy Cuellar.

“Those were considered priorities by the staff,” she said.

Mar Vista teacher Marcia Turner said the council allows teachers “to know a little bit more about the inner workings of the school and the types of decisions that have to be made. Sometimes as a classroom teacher you don’t get that perspective.”

Parents, however, are not allowed on the leadership teams in the Ocean View district. Although they play an advisory role at Samuels’ school, they don’t have an official vote.

“I’m not sure we’re ready to include parents on a leadership council,” Samuels said. He said the concept is still too new and predicted that it may be another three years before the council is running smoothly enough to allow parent participation.

Some Ocean View parents say they already participate in decision making at their schools.

Mar Vista, for example, has a discipline committee, a library committee, a parent-teacher club, an advisory committee for migrant parents, and other groups that help make decisions in various areas, said Jane Yanagihara, president of the Parent-Teacher Club.

Schools that receive state money for special programs, including migrant education, special education and classes for gifted students, are required under state law to have a council of parents, teachers and administrators to help decide how money for the programs is spent.

Allen said there appears to be a growing desire on the part of parents to be more involved in the management of school affairs.

Just how far Ocean View schools will take the concept of greater local control is still being explored, Samuels said.

“We took baby steps at the beginning,” Samuels said. “At this point, I’m still not sure we’ve tapped all the things we could do.”