Pages

Friday, August 23, 2013

Fox C-6 Only Ranked 173rd in State - Ranked 21st Among Local School Districts Under New State Standards!

Fox C-6 Only Ranked 173rd in state of Missouri out of 560 schools according to latest MSIP 5 Annual Performance Report! However, Superintendent Critchlow was the 4th Highest Paid Superintendent in the state for the 2012-2013 School Year.

This report should be a wake up call for our community. We have been told for years how great a job our district has been doing by our superintendent with very little evidence to support her claims. This latest report isn't just about MAP scores. It now includes college and career readiness. In a prior post, I pointed out that Fox is in the bottom 25% of the state for the Percentage of Graduates Taking the ACT. This latest report takes that into account as well as the district's Composite ACT Score.

We as a community want our students and our district to do well. Fox is not a poor performing district. However, it's not one of the top schools that Superintendent Critchlow has been overly touting it to be. Her salary however has apparently been increased by our school board based upon those exaggerated claims. Now that Missouri DESE has calculated a "letter grade" for each school district in the state, it's much easier to see how Fox really compares to other districts. The Show Me Institute addressed this in an article stating that letter grades help address transparency since it has been very difficult until now to see how your school district compares to other districts.

Now that you are able to compare Fox to other districts in the state, do you have a different opinion as to how well our district is doing compared to what our Superintendent has been telling you?

Do you think our Superintendent is being paid too much money to run our school district based on Fox's recent ranking in the state?

So, how did this happen? Fox has a list of accomplishments on the district website. Based upon that list of accomplishments, Fox appears to be doing really well. After all, Fox earned a Perfect Score year after year on Missouri's Annual Performance Report since Critchlow was promoted to Superintendent. Here are some of those accomplishments listed on Fox's website are:

  • The District has received Distinction in Performance from the state of Missouri for 10 years in a row
  • Fox C-6 School District named as a National District of Character, 2009
  • Perfect Score on Missouri's Annual Performance Report (APR) 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010
  • Lone Dell Elementary named as a National Blue Ribbon School
  • Lone Dell Elementary named as a Missouri Gold Star School
  • Several schools named as DESE Top 10 Schools for academic achievement
One of the most touted accomplishments in at Fox is that the district is a "National District of Character". It can be found on the district's website and nearly every piece of paper sent home to parents. It's on the cover sheet of most school board documents. Character education is a good thing. Building self-esteem for every student is a good thing as well. However, touting it so heavily loses its luster quickly when district administrators and some school board members don't seem to follow many of the Character Education traits. The traits that appear to be the least followed are Honesty, Integrity, Respect, Service and Responsibility. These traits are imprinted as watermarks on district letter head. Those words become meaningless when you see how certain individuals conduct themselves at board meetings, parent meetings, in the media and in their correspondences. It's time for these words to be removed from many of our documents as they aren't worth the ink required to print them. Perhaps in the future under new leadership they can regain their worth. But until then, they should be removed.


For more information on MSIP 5 and the new Performance Report visit Missouri DESE's website here:


With limited information and limited oversight by our school board, the board has nearly doubled Superintendent Critchlow's salary since she was promoted to Superintendent in 2005.

Can Fox C-6 taxpayers and Missouri taxpayers get a refund on our Superintendent's salary?

Tuesday August 27, 2013 is the next school board meeting. This would be a very good time to go to a school board meeting and ask our school board some questions. After all, the school board works for the community and the Superintendent is hired by the school board. It's not the other way around. Remember that you will need to fill out a Public Comments form in order to speak at the board meeting and it must be handed in prior to 6:45PM.

The Rockwood School District now has open discussions with the community prior to their regular school board meetings in addition to the Public Comments session. Fox C-6 needs to have similar meetings so the community can discuss with our board members that represent us what our concerns are within the district! After all, they work for us.

You can read more about Missouri DESE's new public school system rating system in the St. Louis Post Dispatch and see where Fox ranks among the other schools.

Gone is that "Perfect Score" claim when Fox met 14 of 14 standards. There is now a much finer grading system.


If Superintendent Critchlow was paid according to our district rank among the LOCAL districts, that would have placed her salary at $192,238 instead of the $246,824 she was paid for the 2012-2013 school year!



Everyone person I speak with about the problems in our district are always shocked to learn how much our school board has been paying our Superintendent. This is a systemic problem across the state. However, our school board has not been doing its due diligence and is not being fiscally responsible with respect to central office administration pay.

It's time to tell your friends and neighbors to contact our school board members and let them know that this is completely unacceptable. Our school district needs new leadership and a new pay scale for our central office administrators. There's no way that our school board can justify the outrageous salaries when school performance doesn't match up to those of other districts.


Local School District Rankings Under
Missouri DESE's New Rating System

School District
Rating
Brentwood
100.00%
Franklin County
100.00%
Strain-Japan
100.00%
Parkway
99.60%
Lindbergh
99.30%
Clayton
98.90%
Ladue
98.90%
Kirkwood
98.20%
Webster Groves
97.50%
Festus
96.40%
Francis Howell
96.40%
Wentzville
96.40%
Spring Bluff
96.30%
Lonedell
95.60%
Silex
95.40%
New Haven
95.00%
Affton
94.30%
Ft. Zumwalt
92.90%
Rockwood
92.90%
Mehlville
92.50%
Fox C-6
92.10%
Orchard Farm
91.80%
Washington
91.10%
Wright City
91.10%
Jefferson Co.
90.40%
Elsberry
89.30%
Valley Park
89.30%
Troy
88.90%
Hancock Place
88.60%
Maplewood-Richmond Heights
88.60%
St. Clair
88.60%
Crystal City
88.20%
Hillsboro
88.20%
Winfield
88.20%
Northwest
87.50%
Sunrise
87.50%
Meramec Valley
87.10%
St. Charles
86.80%
Sullivan
86.80%
Windsor
85.70%
Grandview
85.40%
Hazelwood
85.40%
Dunklin
84.60%
Pattonville
82.90%
Desoto
81.10%
Bayless
79.30%
Warren Co.
76.80%
Union
75.70%
Ritenour
71.80%
Ferguson-Florissant
69.30%
University City
66.80%
Jennings
65.70%
Riverview Gardens
28.60%
St. Louis City
24.60%
Normandy
11.10%