Last year, an Oak Park and River Forest High School consultant’s report showed that residents who don’t have children attending the school have a less favorable view of the it than parents do.
OPRF officials concluded that they needed to do a better job reaching out to the wider community. So, this year, Supt. Greg Johnson has been making the rounds.
During his third appearance last week, Johnson appeared before 24 people at a Community of Congregations event held in the fellowship hall of United Lutheran Church in Oak Park.
Most of those in crowd had kids who had graduated from OPRF years ago and were eager to hear about what the school is like now.
In a 20-minute presentation followed by an hourlong question-and-answer sessions, Johnson said that the school is committed to equity and excellence.
“It is a school that is committed to equity and excellence in all the different ways that we go about that work and I will tell you that both of those things are challenging,” Johnson said. “So, none of the work we do at the high school is easy and we stumble along the way, and do our best to stare ourselves in the face when we stumble and course correct and move forward.”
The most pointed questions came from Ross Lissuzzo, an OPRF parent, who pointed out that the achievement gap between Black and white students at OPRF has grown in recent years and that absolute academic achievement, as measured by the Illinois State Record Card, has gone down in recent years.
“What we’re doing is not working from an academic perspective,” Lissuzzo said.
Johnson did not dispute Lissuzzo’s characterization of the data.
“That’s exactly right,” Johnson said.
He said that it has not been possible to track academic growth of students in recent years because the COVID pandemic has disrupted testing. The school report card is based on the SAT exam, which all public high school students are mandated to take as juniors, and each class is different.
Closing the achievement gap has been a main focus at OPRF.
“There are no quick fixes to this challenge; they don’t exist,” Johnson said. “Post- COVID, you see an expansion of some of our gaps and that’s a fact.”
“What really is key to the quality of the school,” Johnson added, “is what happens during sophomore, junior and senior years.
He said that it is too early to tell how effective the school’s Honors for All approach has been, noting that next year’s junior class is the first class that was impacted by it. Their performance on the SAT next year will yield important data.
“It’s an important year for us, without a doubt,” Johnson said.
Johnson pointed out that administrators have not found evidence that the new Honors for All curriculum is causing harm.
“There’s no clear sign that what we’re doing here is causing harm,” Johnson said.
Johnson also fielded questions about the school’s focus on behavior education and restorative practices instead of punitive discipline, a move prompted in part by new state rules.
One questioner noted that OPRF has always been a different experience for those in the honors tract than for those who took regular level classes. Johnson noted the diversity of classes offered at OPRF, but said that the school has been trying to get more consistency in its classes so that the same class taught by different teachers will cover the same content. Johnson said that OPRF has traditionally given teachers a lot of autonomy to develop their classes and the focus on consistency and some uniformity among classes may have caused grumbling among some teachers.
Many of those who came out on the rainy evening to listen to Johnson said they were glad to learn more about what is going on at OPRF.
Myia Riley, a 2014 graduate of OPRF, said that she was concerned by the drop in academic performance at the school, noting that last year it was ranked last year in the top 13% of public high schools in Illinois. She said it was ranked in the top 10% of high schools when she attended.
“There’s some things that I think are good but I have noticed kind of the decline in the academics since I was there,” Riley said after the event.
Tony Graefe, whose daughter graduated from OPRF several years ago, said that closing the achievement gap is a big task.
“There’s so much to be done closing the gap that’s it very difficult to do,” Graefe said. “Closing the gap it’s also the elementary schools, the feeder schools, it’s not just the high school. There’s so much involved in it, it’s a monumental issue.”