Board members should listen politely to the emotional pleas made by this acutely small minority of district parents and students, but they should base their decision on the facts. Closing Gateway is good for the district as a whole.
First, Gateway’s limited size means it costs over $700 more to educate a Gateway student than it does any other middle school student in the district. Second, Gateway was chartered to provide access to International Baccalaureate (IB) programming not available in neighborhood schools at the time. Making IB curriculum available at Brody Middle School solved that. With Merrill on the west, Meredith on the north, Goodrell on the east and now Brody on the south, middle school students in every corner of Des Moines have access to IB. Last, if the duplicative and tiny Gateway stays open, the district will be forced to spend more than $1.7 million to renovate space needed for vital Central Campus classes that could use the Gateway classrooms.
The District shouldn’t have opened Gateway in 2010. It did because doing so created the illusion of innovation and this helped to continue distracting the community from noticing school leaders lack the vision and courage to address our long festering middle school problem. Middle school is where the deficiencies of education come into bloom and most go perennially unaddressed. We can no longer avoid our failing middle schools. It is time for a comprehensive plan for educating students across the learning spectrum. To continue funding a token school serving 171 students would further hinder serious reform.
The former superintendent lobbied her school board heavily to approve the Gateway Secondary School in 2009. She was losing a battle to open a charter school she had promoted as groundbreaking – she eventually got the charter school, but that boondoggle has and can be discussed in another column. The superintendent needed a win and she pushed hard. The plans and rationale were scant for Gateway, but board members were told it was intended as an IB school and they quietly followed along as they usually did.
Fast-forward to today and we find a middle school serving less than 200 students while the others in Des Moines serve nearly 700. Worse, Gateway is off course. Students take high school classes like fashion design because funding isn’t available to offer the intended more appropriate middle years IB curriculum. That should be reason enough for the board to push to close the school.
Gateway costs more to operate than other schools. It is a duplication of existing neighborhood schools. It uses space needed for Central Campus classes attended by high school students throughout the district. And, Gateway has failed to meet its stated mission.
There will be 150 or so severely disappointed families should the school board accept the administration’s wise proposal to close Gateway, but it is in the best interest of the community and the families of the other 32,000 Des Moines students to let this pet project fade away.
Four years ago an administration disinterested in data and sound planning bamboozled the school board into voting for the Gateway School. On Tuesday, a different administration will present a well-thought and documented argument to close that same school. Here’s hoping the school board has the courage to make a decision based on facts and reason while seated in a room packed with people clutching tissues.
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Graham Gillette can be reached at grahamgillette@gmail.com
This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register essay.
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