School officials say they were told by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges that the high school accreditation is no longer in jeopardy.

01:00 AM EST on Wednesday, March 29, 2006

BY JOHN HILL
Journal Staff Writer

JOHNSTON -- Johnston High School is off the hook.

Twenty months after the New England Association of Schools and Colleges threatened to revoke the school's accreditation, high school principal Elizabeth L. Mantelli and Schools Supt. Margaret Iacovelli said yesterday that association officials have told them the high school has been taken off probation.

"This was my goal," an almost giddy Iacovelli said.

"This is what we needed to do, and they did it," she added, "that staff."

NEASC officials did not return calls seeking comment. Mantelli and Iacovelli said they had spoken to Pamela Gray-Bennett, chief of NEASC's secondary schools commission, and NEASC board members who told them the formal announcement of the 900-student school getting off probation will be coming in a letter soon.

School Committee Chairman Robert LaFazia said all the credit was due to the school's staff for turning the culture inside the building around.

"They brought a school up that was ready to fall below the ground," he said. "It was even worse than that -- and we had a lot of people who were skeptical."

Besides criticizing the school's lack of attention to academic rigor and a lack of progress in improving curriculum, leadership and organization, resources for learning and student assessment, NEASC's threat last July to withdraw its accreditation also blasted the town's political leadership.

The adults running the school system "are incapable of working with each other and lack agreement on the direction of the school, resulting in a polarization of the teaching staff and causing many initiatives to grind to a halt due to dysfunctional behavior," NEASC said.

LaFazia said one of the key messages in that report was that everyone, including School Committee members, had to do their job -- and not someone else's.

In the recent past, he said, School Committee members meddled in administrative matters, which left staff paralyzed for fear of being contradicted by a committee member.

The NEASC threat got everyone focused on what was good for the system and not themselves, he said.

"We had a reputation of individuals interfering," he said. "You cannot do that. I don't know squat about school business. You leave that to the individuals you have in place to do that."

Keeping Iacovelli was also crucial, he said. The school and district had seen a lot of turnover in top positions, LaFazia said, and it needed continuity if it was going to recover.

Inside the building, Mantelli said administrators and teachers worked on re-examining their jobs and how better to focus on the standards on which NEASC judged the school.

Though NEASC was very critical of the school, it was doing some things well. Its 2004 test results pretty much hit the state average for reading, writing and mathematics skills; 74 percent of Johnston 10th graders achieving the state standard for writing conventions.

Mantelli said the School Committee appropriated more money for substitutes, and that gave teachers more time to meet in groups and coordinate their lesson plans. The freshman class has been broken into groups of 75 students, with teams of six to eight teachers assigned to monitor their progress through the first year of high school. The teams meet once every seven days to check on how the students are doing.

Mantelli said the school staff also made a serious effort to get parents and others in town more involved in the school.

"We were not doing a good job of reaching out to parents," Mantelli said. Now, she said, the parent-dominated School Improvement Team is providing valuable observations and insight into how things are done in the school.

LaFazia and Mantelli also credited interim vice principal Kevin Sheehan with an important role in the turnaround. A former high school principal in South Kingstown and North Smithfield, his experience in other schools made him a valuable resource and reassuring influence, they said.

"He'd been through this stuff before," LaFazia said. "He guided us."

Everyone learned that an important part of their job was letting the people below them do theirs, LaFazia said. And he said he hoped Iacovelli would keep doing hers.

"As far as I'm concerned," he said, "she can stay there as long as she wants."

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