Superintendent Kelvin R. Adams now has two more years to lead St. Louis Public Schools towards academic stability – and ideally full state accreditation.
The SLPS Special Administrative Board (SAB) approved a two-year contract extension last week. Adams is now under contract through June 30, 2016. His base salary is $225,000 – the same since he came to SLPS in 2008.
Adams said he’s proud of several initiatives he has led so far, including nearly doubling early-childhood classroom seats, creating eight autonomous schools and balancing the budget.
“Dr. Adams has improved academics and stabilized the district’s finances,” said SAB Vice President Melanie Adams, who led the national superintendent search in 2008. “His strong leadership skills have helped to restore community confidence in the district.”
This year, K-12 enrollment was 25,700, a significant increase from its 22,500 enrollment in 2012. Adams attributes the gain from the closing of Imagine charter schools, as well as the early-childhood expansion. The district now has 2,160 preschool students, up from about 1,200 in 2011, he said. And many families are choosing to stay with the district after preschool, he said.
With many Missouri public school districts in crisis over fallout from the student-transfer law, Adams is hardly able to focus solely on his district. SLPS is currently only provisionally accredited by the Missouri State Board of Education. If the district slips academically, it could become subject to the state law, which allows students from unaccredited districts to transfer to an accredited district with the home district picking up the tab.
“There are many people who think we should be where Normandy and Riverview Gardens are,” Adams said, referring to the region’s two unaccredited school districts. “Normandy and Riverview will have a possible impact for us, and it has implications for any district struggling today.”
In August, the state board hired CEE-Trust, an Indianapolis-based consulting group, to create a new plan for how the state intervenes in unaccredited school districts. CEE-Trust’s plan includes giving individual schools more autonomy and eliminating the districts’ central office administration.
The plan’s schools would look similar to Adams’ autonomous school initiative. However, Adams said making every school autonomous is not the way to fix a struggling district.
“Part of the concern is that you don’t get so far away from standardization that you don’t get anything done,” he said.
Adams said he feels that some schools do better with direct oversight. However, he emphasized that no plan will work without community involvement in the planning process.
CEE-Trust is only one group offering the state board recommendations on unaccredited districts. Adams said his view is aligned with the Missouri Association of School Administrators’ recommendations.
On Tuesday, the association called on the state board to end additional school transfers from unaccredited school districts by establishing contracts with low-performing schools. These contracts would specifically outline performance expectations, a timeline for improvement, professional development activities, and intervention strategies.
Roger Kurtz, executive director of MASA, said this plan would “immediately stop the school transfer insanity.”
As for the long-term solution, the association submitted its “New Path to Excellence” proposal, in collaboration with the Cooperating School Districts of St. Louis, the Cooperating School Districts of Greater Kansas City and the Southwest Center.
Kurtz also said the new “Missouri School Improvement Plan,” submitted by AFT-Missouri, provides research-based interventions that could be the foundation for a school-improvement contract.
The association’s plan allows students currently participating in the school transfer program to continue to do so as long as they maintain residency requirements, Kurtz said.
