State says class time short at Andover High

State Education Commissioner David P. Driscoll has directed the school system to come up with a plan by Friday to provide more class time to comply with the state's 10-year-old "learning time" regulation. State law requires 990 hours per year of instructional time without exception, said Heidi Perlman, spokeswoman for the state Department of Education.

"We want them to develop a plan that boosts the number of classroom hours by second semester this year and moves the district to full compliance by next September," Perlman said. "If they refuse or simply don't comply we will refer this to the state attorney general's office for enforcement."

Perlman said the state could withhold funds from the school. This year, the district received $9.2 million in state aid, including $4.9 million in direct funding. Its total budget was $46.8 million.

Perlman said Driscoll has been unmoved by Andover's contention that it is being unfairly singled out and that other districts are also ignoring the rule. "We know of no other districts that are out of compliance with this regulation," she said.

The state acted after Ellen Travers, the mother of a senior and a sophomore at Andover High, filed a complaint with DOE in October. She said the lack of course offerings appeared to affect younger students the most. In addition to a limited number of courses, classes are so full that students must accept whatever they were assigned, Travers said.

"My senior has already completed most of his requirements so that one less course hasn't really affected him, but for my sophomore it was different," she said. "When he was assigned three study halls for the year and I complained, the only course they could offer him was theater arts, and he is just not a theater guy."

A key component of the sweeping Education Reform Act of 1993 requires the state's public high schools to provide each student with 990 hours of instructional time per school year; elementary schools must provide 900 hours. Middle schools may provide either 900 or 990 hours.

At Andover High, the 990 hours has translated into eight courses of 124 hours each a year for each of the school's 1,750 students. But half of Andover's 381 seniors will take only six courses, three each semester, under the school's "block schedule" system and no student was allowed to sign up for more than seven courses all year, said the school's principal, Peter Anderson.

A shortage of teachers means that some students were assigned two study periods out of the four 84-minute periods each day this term, Anderson said.

School officials said Andover, one of the more prosperous communities in the state, does not have the $1.5-$2 million needed to hire more high school teachers. "We can't hire more teachers because we cannot afford to hire more teachers. It is as simple as that," said School Committee Chairwoman Tina Girdwood.

Girdwood and School Superintendent Claudia Bach said they knew they were violating state law when they balanced the district's $46.8 million budget by laying off 10 high school teachers and assigning students en mass to unstructured study halls. State aid to the district, which spent $8,220 per student in fiscal year 2001-02, was cut 20 percent for the current fiscal year, which runs through June.

"At budget time last spring we were faced with very, very difficult choices and cut hundreds of thousands of dollars out at each grade level," Girdwood said.

School officials are scheduled to meet with the town's Board of Selectmen and Finance Committee today to try to craft the plan required by DOE, but predicted it would be unfunded. "We know we are not meeting the needs of our high school students," Girdwood said. "This is not just a school issue, but a town one."

The town is "just barely" complying with the class time requirement in the middle school and elementary level, Girdwood said. Anderson said the high school has never complied with the 990 hours rule since it took effect in 1993, and the district has been steadily losing ground since.

State education officials, however, said Andover was last reviewed in 2000-01 and was in compliance then. "It's impossible for us to keep track of the class time hours in every school in every district in the state," Perlman said. "We rely on the districts to follow the regulation. We check on them periodically."