Coalition submits Dothan school improvement plan

A coalition that prepared a plan of action for improving Dothan’s city schools submitted the resolution to the superintendent on Thursday, but its job is far from over.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Dothan Community Relations Group President Mark Freeman told members of Neighbors Improving Children’s Education as the group adjourned its meeting.

That’s because the plan is just a blueprint. Members of the coalition are expected to be active in its implementation.

The resolution, presented to Supt. Tim Wilder at Walton Park, outlined three pillars of the grassroots outreach plan, including parental involvement, discipline/achievement and closing the achievement gap.

The document, put together by the coalition which was created in response to Wilder’s challenge to the DCRB at its meeting on Sept. 14, recognizes “an increased number of students in the Dothan City School System are from low income, single parent households and a significant body of research suggests that low income children consistently fall behind their peers in test scores, graduation rates, college enrollment, and other measures of academic success.”

It also said “children born into poverty are half as likely to graduate from high school and those who do graduate perform at a low grade skill level – creating a culture of low expectations.”

The coalition said any problem facing the school system is solvable and it will “channel our combined energies into ensuring that our children get the educational opportunities they desire.”

The objective, to improve the output of the school district, was one Wilder endorsed.

He listened to stories from parents and others at the meeting who told of race issues, of students being unfairly disciplined, of students being labeled as troublemakers and of the effects those incidents have in the classroom.

One woman said she heard a white teacher refer to students in her classroom as “her little zoo.”

“I assumed she meant ‘animals,’ that’s what’s in a zoo, animals,’” she told Wilder.

Wilder, who was hired this past summer to run the Dothan school system, said he wants to hear what parents have to say. He said 55 percent of students in Dothan city schools are African-Americans, “but in most of my meetings, it probably wouldn’t surprise you that most of people that like to tell me how we need to do things … were not people of color,” Wilder said.

“If you like straight talk, you’ll like me. If you don’t like straight talk, you won’t like me, because it takes that,” Wilder said.

Wilder said he was in a meeting Wednesday talking to two women who were retiring from the school system who talked about race relations.

“They talked about, ‘I don’t want to play the race card, but …,’ ‘well, I don’t want to do this, but …’ and I said, ‘wait a minute, you’re talking to somebody who was born and raised around people of color,’” Wilder said.

He was hiding with his brother and sister in a closet in the house he was raised in because his father hired the first African-American principal in that school district when his father was superintendent in 1971.

“People were throwing rocks in our windows and burning crosses in our yard, so you’re talking about somebody who understands,” he said.

The community plan presented by the coalition would employ tactics such as expanding the base of advocates, volunteers and community supporters, creating an infrastructure to manage and measure the effectiveness of the efforts, and conducting town hall meetings and training meetings to engage and involve the community.