After being caught up in a yearlong controversy over its Earn and Learn dropout-prevention program, Evanston-Skokie Elementary School District 65 has decided to reverse the program`s focus, change its name and abandon the program`s 24-member policy board.
”Making money will no longer be a major incentive” for participating students, said James Hawkins, assistant superintendent of District 65 schools. ”There will be less emphasis on work and more emphasis on education.”
Starting next fall, Hawkins said, the program will no longer be called Earn and Learn, though a new name has yet to be chosen.
School officials will form a new ”advisory” board to run the program. It will not be independent or a separate entity as the policy board was. The group will consist of teachers and parents and will answer to the school board.
The new program will focus on homework labs and 16 career tracks, including retail, health care and finance. It also will train students to operate computers and expose them to community-service work.
”The major component before was work, and it did not relate to any profession,” Hawkins said. ”One of the things we want to do is offer a strong career awareness that ties in the technical field with the academics.” The nationally renowned program, established 20 years ago to assist potential dropouts, paid students to perform in jobs after school in a setting designed to teach good work habits. The participants were paid only if they attended class and performed well in school.
After years of success, the program came under fire from parents last summer. The problems escalated in recent months, with parents calling for the dismissal of several policy board members.
Parents charged that Earn and Learn had been abandoned by the school board and mismanaged by its administrators and that the school board and the governing body had ignored the parents` concerns about their children. Students, they complained, were being verbally mistreated and exposed to harsh work conditions.
Earn and Learn administrators denied such charges.
Last week, after receiving Supt. Joseph Pollack`s recommendations for changes, the school board voted 4-3 to revamp the program.
”I hope it will be a positive move,” said board President Lynda Ancell, who cast a yes vote. ”Part of it is similar to what we had before but more community-service-oriented.”
Ancell said school trustees established an advisory board because of legal advice that they did not have the power to dissolve the policy board.
”The policy board is there in essence, but I don`t know what they plan to do,” she said. ”I will hope some people who worked on the Earn and Learn policy board will continue to work with us.”
John Donohue, who was president of the policy board, said, ”District 65 made it very clear it is no longer participating in Earn and Learn. It has reassigned the director. It`s too bad. I think a bunch of students who would have been served by Earn and Learn will not be.”
The former director, Rick Weiland, has been reassigned to teaching duties, and no director has been named for the new program, Donohue and school officials said.
”The parents are happy because this is a good concept,” said Joan Bariffe, a parent who served on the policy board but felt her concerns for the students were ignored.
”They (school officials) want to do things with the children to motivate them to learn because, when they enter high school, a lot of them still have a hard time,” she said.
