THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, February 14, 1995 TAG: 9502140286
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY PERRY PARKS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ELIZABETH CITY LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
Gov. James B. Hunt Jr.'s budget buzzsaw sliced through the heart of an Elizabeth City-Pasquotank Public Schools project Monday.
Hunt's proposed spending for 1995-97 eliminates a five-year pilot program - now in its third year - to re-examine what children should be taught and how best to teach them.
The Elizabeth City-Pasquotank Schools were receiving nearly $200,000 a year as one of six state sites developing the concept, called Outcome Based Education. OBE has been a cornerstone of the system's varied reform efforts since 1992.
Hunt's recommendation does not automatically eliminate OBE, but it puts the project in jeopardy as the General Assembly negotiates a tight budget.
``I just walk a little funny with a knife stuck in my back,'' Assistant Superintendent C.E. ``Mack'' McCary said Monday afternoon. ``That's how it feels. I feel betrayed.
``It makes me very suspicious of state initiatives, whoever's pushing them.''
McCary and Superintendent Joseph Peel had often spoken of OBE as being different from other school reform efforts, which typically come and go like phases of the moon.
The changes recommended by the project, which focuses on teaching children to apply knowledge as well as to memorize information, were too fundamental to turn back on, they thought.
But a state audit report last fall showed that all six pilot sites were behind in the five-year timetable laid out by the General Assembly. That report was cited in Hunt's recommendation to kill the project.
``It did not look like it was going to be up and running and showing a benefit in two or three years,'' said Susan S. Adams, budget administrator for the education section in the governor's budget office.
Adams said that because most of the OBE money goes to staff training and planning, sites that want to continue their projects can use other staff development funds.
Not all the sites, Adams and another state official pointed out, have made the same progress through OBE as has the Elizabeth City-Pasquotank system.
Peel said the lost funds will cut into staff training and new technology, hindering a number of efforts that have given administrators high hopes for the project.
Following OBE's philosophy that all students can learn, but at different rates; that students are clients of the schools; and that success is based more on what students can do than on what they know, the district has begun a realm of innovations in teaching, classroom organization and student evaluation.
Some of those initiatives have been recognized by the governor's office as outstanding.
``My hope for our schools, and for all those in them, is that we will be brave enough to change when change is needed. That we work together in our quest for innovations in education,'' Hunt said in a September press release congratulating risk-taking programs at P.W. Moore and Pasquotank elementaries. Peel said Monday it was disheartening to learn that the state is likely to abandon the OBE project.
School officials said they found the OBE cuts ironic, since the governor is still pursuing a long-term plan to overhaul testing and assessment based on a set of recently identified ``essential skills.''
The goals of that project are similar in many ways to the OBE concepts. Elizabeth City-Pasquotank is also a state pilot site in the assessment program.
School officials said they will continue to pursue the goals of their OBE project, but probably at a slower pace. by CNB