GENTRY — One of the goals set in a school-board-developed tool to evaluate the performance of Gentry School District superintendent Dr. Randy Barrett raises a question that should be on the mind of parents with children in the district. That goal - only one of five - was improvement in all extracurricular activities of the district with performance measured, in part, by competitiveness with other similar-size schools in the region.
As summarized in an article in the Feb. 17 issue of the Courier-Journal, the school board said the goal regarding improvement in all extracurricular activities should be evaluatedby participation and being competitive with other schools in the league.
“If we’re not competitive with anyone in our league, weekend after weekend, then there’s a problem,” school board member Coye Cripps said.
Cripps also suggested that students who couldn’t perform well in one sport or activity be reassigned or encouraged to try another activity where they might do better rather than sitting on the bench. Instead of a coach working with 20 or more students on a team, it might be better to cut some who aren’t doing well and redirect them, he said.
This raises a questionabout the extracurricular activities of the school district: Is their purpose educational and for the further development of all students in the district? Or, is their purpose competitive and focused on success measured in terms of competitiveness, wins and championships.
Even if the answer is “educational and for the further development of students,” an element of competitiveness will always be there - no one likes to lose and a goal of being the best and winning is a strong motivating factor in most activities.
But has our district moved so much toward the purpose and goal of competitiveness and winning that students will be excluded from sports and activities they may desire to learn and which they may enjoy because they are not the best of the best and may take up a coach’stime and possibly even hinder a team from winning? Has it come to the point where coaches and instructors will be evaluated in their performance, not by how well they teach and instruct, but how much they win?
I am all for striving toward excellence, but I would hate to see the kind of thinking which dominates professional sports creep down beyond the college level into high school sports and activities.
The Gentry School District’s shared core beliefs, which the board, staff and community worked hard to put into writing follow:
1. Opportunities must be provided for each teacherand student to excel by maximizing their respective abilities to assure students receive a strong foundation;
2. All stakeholders are in partnership to encouragelifelong learning to promote success applicable to each student’s future;
3. Each student’s success must be objectively and quantifiably measured; and
4.We must provide a safe and healthy environment that is conducive to learning and also promotes the development of character and citizenship.
The district’s mission statement is to “work with the community in providing safe and successful educational experiences for each student.”
Those words “each student” come up again and again in the district’s core beliefs and mission statement. So I ask the questions:
Are the district’s extracurricular activities to be for the benefit of each student or for those who excel in the sport or activity?
Will students be excluded from activities they maywish to learn and in which they desire to participate if they cannot contribute significantly to a team’s competitiveness?
Will teachers and coaches be evaluated, and maybe hired or fired, based on a team’s competitiveness rather than upon their abilities and efforts to teach and instruct each student participant?
And, since it is in the evaluative tool for the school district superintendent, will the superintendent face the possibility of not having his contract renewed if the district’s athletic teams don’t fare well on the field?
I’ve asked a lot of questions. It will be up to you, the stakeholders, tochoose the right answers.
Randy Moll is the managing editor of the Decatur Herald and the Gentry Courier-Journal. He may be reached by e-mail at randym @ nwanews .com
Opinion, Pages 5 on 02/24/2010