Editor's note: Nashville's public school system has come under intense scrutiny in recent years after nearing state takeover. As the district has wrestled with academic performance, it has also spent the past few years embroiled in schoolyard fights — between the city and state over charter school laws, among bickering board members and administrators over politics. At the same time, parents with the means to send their children to private schools have fled MNPS, while others have moved across county lines to escape the school system.
As for the kids who are left, many have families who actively dedicate themselves to public schools, often to ones of their choice. But they're the lucky ones. Others don't have the economic luxury to choose. The growing strain on resources, the widening demographic changes in Davidson County, the political turbulence behind the scenes, and the number of parents and promising students who have left the system indicate a looming crisis in Nashville public education.
Yet there is reason to hope, and a chance to act. This is the second in a three-part series probing the issues that face the beleaguered school district, the people they affect, and the district's reaches for success. The first story ("Speaking in Tongues," Oct. 16) concerns English language learners and their impact on the school system; it is available here.
Kristen Vaughn had been warned. Bring a blanket, they said — you're going to need it.
She volunteered for the assignment anyway: to teach in a portable classroom behind Tusculum Elementary School. A few inconveniences, she expected. But nobody told her she'd have to battle so many wasps. Or what it would really be like to keep her students' attention when her classroom's temperature soared to 82 degrees in the first days of school. Or when temperatures plunged last week, with winter yet to begin.
She'll have to keep the heat on in her classroom overnight through the winter months. That way it will be warm when students get there the next morning, and it'll stay heated throughout the day — though she admits that's an art she hasn't mastered yet. She'll have to hope all her kids have jackets, hats and gloves and don't lose them during the day, as happens all the time in schools across the city. At her school, many parents can't afford to replace them.
These are daily concerns when you're teaching in a metal box, Vaughn says, as her third-graders chatter around her.
"They know that this doesn't happen at other schools," she says. "They can sense that this is a little bit unfair."
But they're hardly alone. This particular box, a stone's throw from Nolensville Road, is surrounded by 21 others just like it.
The beige modules are filled — not only with second-, third- and fourth-grade students, but with their teachers, reading specialists, music teachers and family resource officers. They are scattered around the school's backyard like rows of Monopoly houses.
And without them, there would be nowhere for these students to go.
Tusculum, known as home base for the divisions-winning South Nashville Little League team, is only one of 69 schools placing demands on the district's 335 portable classrooms. They're a quick fix meant to defer a situation that's primarily a problem at schools here on the city's south side — but which affects the entire Metro school system.
Across the district, three in 10 schools — 43 schools total — have more students than they have space for. The bulk of them are elementary schools like Tusculum. Five Metro Nashville schools are currently teaching hundreds more children than their schools were meant to hold. These schools are operating at 125 percent of capacity, or higher.
Having too many students does not in itself indicate a low-performing school. Three out of four children at Granbery Elementary School in Crieve Hall are on grade level in reading or math, although the school operates at 134 percent capacity. Two miles north, Crieve Hall Elementary sits at 115 percent capacity, yet nearly 80 percent of the student body is at grade level in math and science. On the other side of Radnor Lake sits Percy Priest Elementary, at 113.4 percent capacity. Almost 90 percent of the student body tests at grade level in math.
But overcrowding puts a much greater strain on schools already groaning under the effects of poverty, transient children moving in and out of the student body, and disproportionate numbers of English language learners. The test scores that govern Tennessee public education tell MNPS the same thing: Children facing one, more or all of those concerns — who make up the bulk of Nashville's schoolchildren — lag far behind their more privileged peers.
These factors are not overwhelming at Granbery (where fewer than 15 percent are English language learners), at Crieve Hall (where less than half the students are low income), or at Percy Priest (where only 1 in 10 kids comes from a poor family, and almost everyone speaks English as a first language). At schools affected by all those concerns, however, it piles on one more cinderblock of burden.
Tusculum is among the lowest performing schools in the district. Nearly 80 percent of its students speak a language other than English at home; approximately 1 in 4 students performs at grade level. Next to James A. Cayce Homes on the East Side is Kirkpatrick Elementary, operating at 125 percent capacity. Forty-one out of 100 students — almost half — will not spend a full year there. A staggering 99 percent of its student body comes from a low-income family: Only 1 in 100 of its kids doesn't. Less than 15 percent of its students can read, do math or science at grade level. Up further north there's Madison Middle School, at 107 percent capacity. Just as many children come and go, 80 percent of them below grade level.
District officials say assigning good teachers to stand in front of every student, every day — regardless where a classroom is, or what special needs kids bring with them — is key to overcoming such challenges. But schools that need the most help are struggling to attract and keep those teachers.
The city's swelling population isn't waiting for the schools to find their stride. As the city attracts more people, the number of students and the teachers needed to reach them — and the pressure to push kids through the system — is only growing.
In the next 25 years, the greater Nashville metropolitan area is expected to become home to about 1 million more people. Davidson County alone will grow by about 185,000, according to the Metro Nashville Planning Department, largely because those moving to Music City are of childbearing age and are expected to multiply.
That growth is happening rapidly in South Nashville, which has become a hub for the city's immigrant population. Communities from Antioch to Woodbine have welcomed parents and children from Kurdish refugee camps, war-torn African countries and economically ravaged areas in Latin America.
Correspondingly, South Nashville faces the worst overcrowding. But the problem has spread across the district. Elementary schools are feeling the most strain, with 32 schools squeezing in more students than they have space to fit. Six middle schools are over capacity, as are five of the city's high schools.
Meanwhile, as the south side swells, schools in northern Davidson County are operating under capacity. High schools sit nearly half empty — such as Stratford and Whites Creek, at nearly 57 percent capacity. More than 3 out of 10 seats are empty at Hillwood and Maplewood, while Hunters Lane and Nashville School of the Arts are only slightly more than 80 percent full.
The congestion isn't a new development. For as long as Tusculum principal Alison McMahan can remember, the school has always had a portable out back. Now there are 22. Portables proliferate behind the 1930s-era building, already subject to a half-dozen additions.
The sprawling cafeteria is one of the last rooms from the original structure. It feeds 725 children a day. The room is so crowded, teachers bring their classes there in three-minute intervals to make sure they can all make it through the lunchline and find a seat. Even that doesn't always work, teacher Kristen Vaughn says.
"My kids will get through the line and there's still not anywhere to sit in there," she says. "I don't know that lunch is the social and relaxing time we wish it could be."
Other teachers had told Vaughn some of the drawbacks of teaching in portables. But she volunteered anyway, because her hands were tied teaching inside the building. The roof leaks, the AC is old; pipes are crushed. What bothered her most was that the electricity is so unpredictable, the staff has adopted an only-plug-in-what's-needed-for-teaching rule. That means no lamps, no coffee maker, no flexibility — in a room with no natural light.
Parents sometimes tell Principal McMahan they don't want their son or daughter in a portable. But except for kindergarten, more than half of classrooms are outside. Unless a student needs a handicap-accessible classroom, she tells them, you roll the dice.
Installing portable classrooms is one of the quickest ways the district can react to capacity. The district has 335 portables on hand, and about 280 will be used this year for classrooms. Others will be repurposed for bathrooms, family resource centers, office space and sometimes storage.
The district dropped off six additional classrooms behind Tusculum this fall, to handle the extra 85 students the school picked up last year. That meant crowding nearly 30 kids into a single classroom toward the end of the past school year. This year the district planted the cubes in rows, eating up the basketball courts and part of the playground.
There was another addition this year: a bathroom. It's a cold one-room portable, with stalls for boys and girls on each side. They're joined by a common room featuring sinks and two paper towel rolls, one of which is running out of paper.
In this trailer city, McMahan says, with unironic enthusiasm, it's a luxury.
How did this school get to this point, where there are so many scattered portables you can get lost counting them? Where there are more classrooms outside than in?
"I guess the short-term answer is, we don't have control over how many students show up at a given school," says Ken Murdoch, MNPS director of construction and planning. "When we're in a growth community, as southeast Nashville is, we do projections — but then there may be in fact more students [who] show up than we projected."
The district computes how many students it thinks a school will have five years ahead, taking into account census data, residential construction permits and population trends. The latest projection compiled last year, which assumed no future construction projects, shows more than 63 schools will soar above capacity by the fall of 2017. The worst four would top 140 percent.
It's no surprise South Nashville has grown, MNPS officials say. But it has grown so much the district has been unable to keep up.
"There's only so much money to go around, and you have to essentially prioritize your needs," says Chris Weber, MNPS director of student assignment services. "Unfortunately, there just hasn't been enough capital to keep pace, and too often the overcrowding drives the political need for capital. It's hard to really request building before [students] come."
Of MNPS' wish list of annual projects, the mayor's office and the Metro Council annually OK a little more than half the funds needed for the year. The projects left behind build up as a backlog, delaying every set of classroom additions, additional schools and needed repairs down the line.
Last year, 10 school-based projects won capital funding. After a two-year wait turned into four years of adding portables, that list included Tusculum, which sat at more than 120 percent capacity when the city OK'd $17.4 million to rebuild the school for more kids. If all goes well, the new facility will be ready to open in fall 2016.
The city is spending $110 million on school district projects this year, $40 million of it going toward erecting new buildings, repairing old ones and buying land to build on in the future. Other expenses are districtwide items, such as $15 million for technology and $10 million to replace buses and vehicles.
The most expensive item this year covers a total renovation and a new gym at Hume Fogg Magnet High School, one of the highest performing schools in the state. Its cut this year is $22.7 million. Tusculum is the next priciest item, followed by $14.5 million to build another elementary school nearby to help absorb the area's growing population.
When portable-classroom students learned Tusculum was building a new school, McMahan remembers, their bright eyes widened at the idea of joining the other classes.
"Like, under one roof?" they asked, incredulous. "Like, all together?"
"Having a portable is just a reality for them, it's just like a given," McMahan says. "For them to think about being under one roof is like a dream."
The biggest headaches in an overcrowded school largely involve time, she explains. They're distractions, like making sure kids are bundled up before making a trek on the crunchy stone gravel to the bathroom. They're worries, like not knowing who might be walking around the back of the school because the schoolyard isn't fenced.
"There is so much lost time just having to walk from that far away from the building to go to the cafeteria, to go to art, or to go to the bathroom, or to go to the front office to pick up something your mom forgot to give you," the principal says. "My teachers do as well as they can, but at the end of the day they lose a lot of time traveling to and fro."
Tusculum's teachers need every minute they have. The school ranked as one of the city's lowest performers this year, measured among the bottom 25 percent countywide. Eight in 10 students are behind grade level in reading, according to the state department of education, and 7 in 10 students are lagging in math.
Last year, more than two-thirds of its students were learning English for the first time. That number has risen. Only 145 of the boys and girls at Tusculum speak English at home. The rest speak one of 26 other languages, originating anywhere from Nepal, Iran or Burma to Honduras, El Salvador or Mexico.
That in itself places a strain on the school, and consequently the system. (See "Speaking in Tongues," Oct. 16.) But the more startling figures concern poverty. At Tusculum, a grim 95 percent of children qualify as low income. Out of a schoolroom of 25 students, to put the numbers in stark terms, only one or two go home without facing uncertainties about food, clothing or shelter — worries to which learning takes a back seat.
Lower performing schools are demanding new attention in part because they're offsetting advances MNPS has made across the county. Districtwide, slightly more than half of students are performing at grade level, according to results from the annual Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program. Metro schools improved incrementally in most subjects.
But the system still struggles to get more than 50 percent of students scoring proficient or advanced on almost every subject. Worse, as schools in Memphis began to improve, the state found 15 schools in Nashville had sunk to the bottom 5 percent statewide, putting them in jeopardy of state takeover. Two of those institutions have been repurposed, leaving 13 failing schools for the district to try to save.
Problems at those schools run the gamut from high mobility — large percentages of students moving in and out of the school, disrupting the flow of classes and resources — to troubling disciplinary rates. Those may have some bearing on another problem across the district: the inability to attract and retain teachers, resulting in unstable school staffs.
Throughout Metro, nearly a third of teachers are new to the job. Many come from teacher prep programs such as Teach for America, or area universities including Vanderbilt and Middle Tennessee State University. By and large, they lack support, says Katie Cour, MNPS executive director of talent strategy.
"Public education in general is not as strong as it needs to be around supporting teachers once they're full time in the role," Cour tells the Scene. "Especially new teachers. It is a very difficult job, teaching in general, no matter what school you're in. We as a district, definitely, and we as an institution, the public education sector, just really needs to be doing a better job at supporting the teachers in the role."
For 2014-15, nearly a third of the district's teachers have had fewer than three years in front of a classroom. Almost 58 percent of those in the district's teaching corps have taught for less than a decade.
This fall the district hired more than 700 new teachers, replacing 688 who had left the spring before. Nearly half of those were retirees, and 30 left after the district flagged them for low performance. The rest probably quit to start families, start new careers or try something else, Cour says. But she doesn't know for sure.
"What we want to be able to make sure is not happening is a teacher leaving the district because they're not happy and still want to stay in teaching," Cour says. Toward that end, she is beginning to track exit surveys now filled out by roughly 1 in 5 exiting teachers.
"Some people want to move on and do other careers, and that's fine," Cour says. "But if they want to stay in teaching and they don't want to stay in the district, we need to find out why, and we need to address those issues — and that's the pool that we're focused on.
"It's different in different buildings. That's part of the problem."
For years, teachers and staff within would quietly complain about a bureaucratic "culture of fear" at MNPS, where decisions came from the top down at the Central Office with a heavy fist. Since then, the district has attempted to loosen the reins somewhat, handing principals more autonomy and more decisions over how to spend money in their schools. Cour says she doesn't know if the top-down culture still lives and breathes, only that she hears few examples pointing to it.
"I think that there's a perception bigger than a reality there, but I do think that it's something that needs to be looked into, and we need to be identifying if teachers are not feeling supported in certain schools," she says. The culture the district wants, she adds, is one where staff feels supported with room to grow — and that kind of room can't be provided by a portable.
Over the past four years, Tennessee education officials have thrown teachers under a microscope. The state has required schools to evaluate teachers regularly and grade them on teacher observations, student test scores — even on factors they scarcely control, such as schoolwide graduation rates or test scores on a subject they don't teach.
On a scale of 1 to 5, more than half the district's teachers are scoring high, with solid observation scores and decent overall evaluations. More than 3 in 10 are earning the highest marks, moving the needle on their students' academic growth.
Yet those who remain — nearly 2 in 10 — are seeing their students' performance decline. MNPS is still refining the process so teachers feel they're getting a fair shake and meaningful feedback, Cour says, but it's far from refined.
Her bigger challenge, though, is figuring out what will make the district's best teachers stay — having strong leaders in the building, to cite one frequently mentioned incentive, or providing leadership opportunities whether teachers want to stay in the classroom or move up the district ladder.
MNPS might have avoided some of these concerns in the past if it had sought actively for teachers, not passively. Up until a few years ago, Cour says, "recruitment" at Metro largely meant posting a sign that the district is hiring.
"I don't think we were strategic about recruitment at all until four years ago," Cour says. "At all. I mean, we kind of just recruited by putting the application up on the website."
That's all changing, she says. To address the 13 lowest performing schools, she's hunting around the district and the country for 100 teachers with experience turning around urban schools. While this search ostensibly addresses low-performing schools, she says, it's more of a pilot program to attract experienced teachers. That comes as a shift from the district's apparent method, which has been to rely on a constant stream of young would-be educators from prep programs — many of whom work for two years and flee.
"I think everybody in the district would agree that a great teacher is a No. 1 priority," Cour says. "It's how we define great teaching that maybe is still a little not as clear." As for school leadership, she says, there's lots of room to improve.
There's that word again: room. It means something entirely different to Kristen Vaughn, alternately freezing and sweating with her kids in the portable trailer at Tusculum. She looks forward to having her kids in her own classroom, under the same roof as the rest of the school. Children will loosen up more, she believes. They'll worry less about who might be creeping around outside their portable box, or how cold their toes are getting on the uninsulated floor — scenes that play out at overcrowded, under-resourced schools across the city.
When they're finally in the same building, Vaughn intends to use her saved time to work on lesson plans. But those dreams will have to wait. There's an all-too-familiar threat that has to be dealt with right now. A wasp is flying around the portable scaring her kids, threatening to land and sting. She'll borrow a student's shoe and move in for the kill.
If only Vaughn could crush all their problems so easily.
Top 10 over-capacity schools
Lakeview Design Center: 141.7% capacity
Tusculum Elementary Schools: 134.8% capacity
Shayne Elementary School: 134.6% capacity
Granbery Elementary School: 134.4% capacity
Paragon Mills Elementary School:126.6% capacity
Thomas A. Edison Elementary School: 124.7% capacity
Kirkpatrick Elementary School: 124.4% capacity
Henry Maxwell Elementary School: 119.6% capacity
Ruby Major Elementary School: 119.3% capacity
Westmeade Elementary School: 117.3% capacity
Email editor@nashvillescene.com.
