When our school improvement team first met the teachers wanted to talk about discipline and when to hold the staff meetings. They wanted to use the process to improve their working conditions. I had just completed a report about the teachers unions’ positions on school improvement teams and site-based management. It was clear from the actual literature put out by the two national teacher unions that they saw school improvement teams as a way to advance the goals of teachers, instead of improving the educational outcomes of students. I looked at what Monroe School needed; it was smaller class sizes and more time for teachers to plan together and get more training. The teachers on our team were more interested in shortening their time at school than planning together or learning new methods, so I put my attention first to reducing class size. Our class sizes ranged from 24 to over 30 students per class. As I looked at our staff allocation it was clear that we had the staff to bring those numbers down. We had part time art, music, and PE teachers who had taught regular classes the year before when the expressive arts program had been cut. We had one and a half special education teachers and a full-time aid. These teachers worked one on one with a very few students for short periods of times or helped out in regular classes. The philosophy of the district was to include special education student as much as possible in regular classes. Three of our regular teachers were former special education teachers. We had a teacher and a half plus two full-time aids assigned to the compensatory education program. We had a half-time aid working in the library. If we could find a way to reorganize the use of existing staff, we could get down to a class size of fewer than 20 students per class. I talked to several of the teachers and came up with a way to move all teachers into the regular classrooms during the main instructional time, and then to change their roles in the afternoon to run shared recess, expressive arts, and remedial activities. Doing this would also allow us to use the expressive arts times to reinforce instruction with thematic projects. I wrote up the plan in a simple outline and shared it with the school improvement team for discussion purposes only. At my next staff meeting the district’s union president showed up without prior notice. When I asked him why he was there, he said he had an announcement to make. His announcement was that under no circumstances would any plan such as the one that I had discussed with the school improvement team ever be implemented in the district. It would be a violation of work rules and the union would not permit those rules to be changed.

At the end of my first year at Monroe School eight teachers retired or transferred out. I hired some new young teachers and some others transferred in. I started my second year enthusiastic that with new blood we could eventually make the improvements that were needed. There was also a new assistant superintendent for instruction in the district and her first act had been to send a copy of Glasser’s The Quality School to each administrator. I read the book right away and have been reading Glasser ever since. I was aware of some of his previous work but this book made so much sense for what I was trying to do at Monroe. Over the summer I had attended a Total Quality Management seminar with Larry Lezotte, the researcher known for the literature on effective schools, and he had clearly drawn the connection between Demming’s ideas and school improvement. Glasser’s ideas showed me how that could be done.

During my first year at Monroe, I had insisted that parents should be a part of the process. Parents started to feel welcome in the school. They were even permitted to sit behind the desk in the office, an outrage to some teachers. Parents began to volunteer to help in classes and around the school, and the PTO became an active partner in raising money and improving the school. Being the parent of an elementary child myself, I knew how important it was to be listened to and to feel a sense of involvement with my child’s school.

My daughter’s first grade experience at her school had been difficult and troubling. She didn’t like going full days and reported being tired and having headaches. Before going to school some days she would get sick to her stomach. We took her to the pediatrician several times and discussed her problems with the school. While she seemed to not be growing at the pace she had been, the pediatrician could find nothing wrong. He suggested she might be suffering from stress and in March we found her a counselor. At school she was struggling with basic letter recognition even though she knew her alphabet by heart when she left the Madonna preschool two years earlier. She continued to have headaches so we took her to a optometrist who specialized in working with children. She found that Charyl was delayed on a couple vision tests, but was in a normal range for most. She gave us some eye exercises to do at home that Charyl resisted doing. We were happy when summer came and we could spend some time up north at our vacation home. But even there Charyl continued to have difficulties with episodes of headaches, vomiting, and night fears. That summer we noticed that one of her eyes seemed to be wandering out and we were concerned. We had her evaluated by a neurologist who diagnosed her as having a learning disability and related stress. We had her evaluated by a private psychologist who found her to be a very bright child with low academic skills. He said she was learning disabled but could not tell us why, or explain the random variance in test scores. As parents who were trained in special education we were extremely frustrated. We had told these things to many parents. “Your child is learning disabled. We really don’t know why. We recommend a resource room. We don’t know if your child will perform academically.” It didn’t make sense. We could put a label on the problem, but there seemed to be little we could do to treat it.

In the fall we had Charyl evaluated by Nancy Sorenson, a special education teacher in Brighton. She noticed that Charyl was seriously developmentally delayed in some basic motor areas. This didn’t make sense either because Charyl had always met developmental milestones up until first grade. Nancy said she did not think that Charyl could see the words on the page and suggested we see a Developmental Optometrist named Dr. Steven Ingersoll. Steve saw Charyl in December of 1993. For the first time we began to hear an explanation of Charyl’s learning problems that made some sense. Charyl had an exotropic left eye and Steve could show us how her visual condition effected her learning. He was also able to analyze her test scores and tell us what they meant. When Steve described the developmental nature of such problems it didn’t ring truefor Charyl, but the rest of his explanations made a lot of sense. He explained his treatment methods, and in January we began to pull Charyl from school and take her to Bay City two days a week for vision therapy.

Charyl responded well to the vision therapy but she continued to have other physical symptoms that worsened over the fall. We switched pediatricians and the new doctor could find no source for Charyl’s health problems. Finally in February we took Charyl to another neurologist for another evaluation. At our insistence the doctor ordered a MRI. A week later we went in for the appointment that radically changed the direction of our lives. Charyl had the MRI and they were prepping her for an EEG when the doctor stopped the test and pulled us out of the room. The MRI had revealed a large tumor directly behind Charyl’s eyes. The tumor was blocking the flow of cerebral fluid from her skull, causing severe hydrocephalous. The doctors insisted that she be admitted to a hospital immediately for emergency surgery.

Shelley and I were devastated. Our worst fears had come true. Charyl had a large, wide spread, but benign tumor. The tumor was inoperable. Both Shelley and I left our jobs for the rest of that school year. We stayed by Charyl as she went through three surgeries on her brain. I reviewed the medical literature on the type of tumor Charyl had and conducted a search for a doctor to treat her. It was a common type of tumor but being wide spread was very unusual. We finally located an expert at Duke University Hospital who had treated four other children with similar tumors. In May Charyl began a year of intense high-dose chemotherapy. The fist two doses were extremely toxic and were given in the hospital at Duke. The tumor shrunk. The rest of the therapy was given once per month at a lower dose over the next year.

While I was gone from my job, a retired principal had covered my school on a part time basis. When she couldn’t be there a central office administrator named Ron Somers covered my school. When I returned to work Ron covered Monroe for me whenever I needed to be gone with Charyl. I had known Ron for the 15 years I had worked in Wayne-Westland but we had never been close. Ron had been a curriculum director and assistant superintendent, and I had used his advice during my first year at Monroe and worked with him on other projects over the years. I always felt my building was in good hands when Ron was there for me, and we developed a strong level of trust and caring for each other as he helped me endure the worst time of my life.

I returned to Monroe School full time in the fall of 1994. Charyl spent that school year in chemotherapy and she came to school with me each day, looking bald and beautiful. She had enough energy to get through the morning in a second grade class and then Rosalie Seal, who had taken care of her since she was an infant, picked her up and took her to dance class, vision therapy, or home. That fall I resumed my efforts trying to make improvements at Monroe School. I had been in numerous discussions with Dr. Ingersoll about Charyl, so after hearing him speak at Northville Schools, I invited him to come talk with my teachers at Monroe. He gave three lectures to my staff, but before we could get to implement anything the district announced that the school would be closed.

When the two parents came to me for help in starting a charter school I was prepared for a risky change. I knew Charyl would need my continued support, I saw little hope that school reform would ever be a reality in Wayne Westland, and the district was offering a buy-out for anyone who left. I told the parents I would help them if they would find out the details, expecting them not to follow through. The next week they told me they had arranged a lunch meeting in Wayne with me and Mike Farley, the Director of the Charter School Office at CMU. I went to the meeting and I was surprised at how simple the process seemed to be. I told Mike about some of my ideas and he encouraged me to apply. He thought I would have a good chance to get a charter. I started writing. First I had to write a basic idea paper describing the framework of the school and the ideas we would be implementing. You have probably read that paper because we give it to all prospective new parents. As I was writing I talked to Dr. Ingersoll and asked him if he wanted to get involved. He was very interested because he wanted the ideas and methods he was using in his clinics to be used in schools. A charter school would be a good way to make that happen. As we talked further we decided to become partners in the project. We agreed to work together to open the school. I would direct the school and he would put a clinic in the school. He also agreed to try to help find financing for program start-up and for the building.

I finished Phase 1 of the application and sent it in to CMU. Within a couple of weeks it was returned approved. Phase 2 included more detail about curriculum and staffing and after that was approved Phase 3 described things like budget and building. By early March the CMU Charter office had notified us that we were going to be recommended to the CMU Board to be authorized to receive a charter. It was time for me to make a decision. I had an April deadline to take the buy-out from Wayne Westland. I applied for the buy-out and called the district superintendent to tell him what I was planning.

The superintendent came over to Monroe School and I told him I was planning to leave the district and was in a position to receive a charter to start a new school. I told him we wanted to buy or lease Monroe School. He congratulated me on my new direction and said he thought it was a good project. He said he would take my request to the board. I was a little suspicious of his good will because he had been told a month earlier by the board that they were not going to renew his contract in July. He took my request to the Board and that was the beginning of the end of my reputation in Wayne Westland. I was denounced at board meetings and all of the properties the district was planning to sell were pulled off the market.

In April we were authorized by the CMU Board of Trustees to receive a charter for a school to be called Monroe Developmental Academy. Steve had found some investors and we made a formal offer to buy or lease the soon-to-be closed Monroe School. The Board never responded formally to our offer, but the superintendent told me they were going to use Monroe as a warehouse and would never consider selling or leasing it to me. Early in May, by chance, we found out that the district had quietly re-listed one of its other buildings. We found a small classified ad for the building in the Sunday Free Press. Through an attorney we made an offer on the building. In late June, not knowing it was us, the district accepted our offer to purchase the building.

We were scheduled to close the sale on the building in September and began making plans to open the new school in late September or early October. The building was across the district from Monroe, but parents said they would send their children. The building had been in use as a school through the end of June, so there was little we needed to do to re-open it, except buy furniture. In July, I started advertising for and interviewing teachers. In August we announced that we planned to open our school. We held two information meetings followed by a ten-day enrollment period. At the end of the enrollment period we had signed up 320 students.

But now the district knew we were ready to open a new school in one of their buildings. They were not happy. As a part of a pre-purchase inspection of the building we discovered an abandoned underground storage tank on the grounds. The district had inherited the building when they annexed another smaller district, and they had no records on the tank. We needed to complete an environmental inspection of the property before our investors would buy the school. We knew this would delay the opening of school, but even worse, the time we needed to inspect the property would take us beyond the end of the time on our purchase agreement. We requested an extension of the purchase agreement and the new Wayne Westland Superintendent denied our request and canceled the sale. We were out in the cold. Just before Labor Day we had to inform our prospective parents that we would not be able to open.

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