Salt Lake District seeking funds for reform program

The Salt Lake City School District and the governing board of its highly touted reform program are asking the community to contribute an additional $500,000 needed to complete school improvement plans in every school in the district.

The district has been singing the praises of the Eccles/Annenberg Challenge, a six-year school-improvement grant set to end this summer, in order to woo donations from local businesses and foundations and show the community the program has worked.

"We have already demonstrated that the educator training programs funded by the challenge have provided a strong return on investment for those foundations, businesses and individuals who have brought us this far," said Peter R. Genereaux, president of Executive Resource Group and co-chairman of the Eccles/Annenberg Challenge community governing board.

The Walter F. Annenberg Foundation in 1996 gave the district a $4 million school-improvement grant with the condition the district would raise additional money.

Large chunks of the matching funds have come from such organizations as the George S. and Dolores Dore Eccles Foundation and the R. Harold Burton Foundation, which originally donated $1 million but withdrew $400,000 of support in summer 2001 because of concerns with the program. The district has put forth about $4.7 million of its own budget and in total has raised $12.7 million of a $13.2 million goal.

The money has been used in large part to improve teachers' skills through specialized training programs that match the needs of individual schools and their varying challenges.

Eccles/Annenberg supporters say the challenge is the reason the district is doing much better than it should be considering its challenging student demographics.

Fifty-seven percent of children in the district belong to low-income families, 37 percent have limited English language proficiency and 33 percent of students change schools over the course of an academic year.

"In spite of that, their achievement was greater," Genereaux said.

Of the three schools that have already completed three-year school improvement plans, scores went up significantly on the Stanford Achievement and Criterion Reference tests, district officials say, citing a boost in the district's fifth-grade SAT national ranking from 39th percentile in 1998-99 to 52nd percentile in 2000-01. They say other schools in their first or second year of the challenge are expected to have similar results.

Once the challenge ends this year, the district will stop attaching the Eccles/Annenberg name but will continue this new way of doing business in the district, Superintendent McKell Withers said.

"Is it thank you and goodbye? No, it's thank you and let's get going," Withers said. "Sustained, targeted work does make a difference."

While finding money to continue specialized school improvement plans beyond the Eccles/Annenberg Challenge is an issue, the district is concentrating on finding the $500,000 to finish up the challenge so each of the 38 schools can complete three-year plans.

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