Word: school
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...help with that effort, the board has recruited Rod Wright, president of Attitude Research, a St. Louis polling firm that specializes in school-finance votes. Fortunately for Webster, he has kids in local schools and donates his time. The goal, he advises the board, "is to get people to vote their emotions and aspirations--and not their pocketbooks...
That is becoming tougher and tougher to do, acknowledge Wright and others close to the school-financing issue. Caught in the nationwide movement to induce equity in school funding (state aid is capped at 1992-93 levels), the district is also hampered because Missouri requires a supermajority 4-out-of-7 vote on all school bond proposals. Then there are the unfunded government mandates, like the Americans with Disabilities Act, which forced Webster Groves to spend more than $1 million in the past three years on compliance...
Phillips, a sharecropper's daughter, is one of those magical teachers whom you could imagine in a hundred roles: talk- show host, prison warden, poet laureate, mayor of a midsize city. She teaches some of the best kids in the school and some of the worst, but like many teachers, it's the ones in the middle she is concerned about. "In trying to be something for everybody, we're not doing an intensive job for any group," she says. "There's something noble about this mission, but it doesn't always serve students well...
...sweet and the stars are out, the milky streetlamps still lit at 5:45. It would be a great morning to be fishing. The school doors are already open when principal Pat Voss pads up the front steps in her cranberry Goofy T shirt and heads for the main office. Nancy Giessmann is in the cafeteria making breakfast, Vron Murphy is in the office doing photocopying left from the night before. The flag next to the front steps is still flying at half-staff, in honor of the teacher who dropped dead in the hallway between periods two weeks...
Voss, universally known as P.V., climbs up to the windowless weight room above the gym for her morning workout: abdominal crunches in sets of 20, leg presses and toe raises, free weights for working her obliques. She's thinking about tonight's school-board meeting. A survey last year found that most people in town are happy with the schools--which she considers a challenge. "That could mean they're less willing to spend more to improve them...