Georgetown Schools Need Help!

The following letter was published in the Wilco Sun on February 2, 2020. It describes the sorry state of Georgetown schools and the resources that are available to help improve those schools.

"I am writing to continue the conversation of Eric Robinson and the Reverend Ron Swain regarding the pitiful state of public education in Georgetown, with six schools out of 16 being given a rating of F and four schools being given a rating of D, a rapid drop from no schools with an F rating in 2015.

Education is the civil rights issue of our time as it is the gateway to our goal as a country of equal opportunity. I think it is past time for Georgetown citizens to evaluate the current leadership in the school board and system superintendent to determine where leadership changes are urgently needed.

Dr. Swain noted the criticality of reading as the most important learning tool. Research has shown that children who can’t read at grade level by seventh grade will fail, and when they fail, they drop out of school. And when they drop out of school, it is much more likely that they will join a gang and eventually get into serious trouble.

School leadership might learn something from the Waco Independent School District, which publicized the need for volunteers who would read during lunchtime with children who were reading below their grade level. My wife and I volunteered and were given brief training and then regularly lunched with three third graders who read at 2.0 and three fifth graders who read at the 3.5 level. The school provided the reading materials and periodic testing to measure improvement and to gradually increase the reading material as the children’s reading skills improved.

It was a remarkable and wonderful experience. I made six new friends and was thrilled to see how this small amount of individual attention allowed my third graders to increase from 2.0 to 2.6 in their reading skills in the first two months of our time together. Volunteers were recruited from churches and civic groups or individuals who had heard about this opportunity. Today most of the public schools in Waco have such a volunteer program.

Georgetown is lucky to be the home of Sun City, where 14,000 retired “volunteers” live and could potentially be reading practice tutors.

Two extraordinary movies on the “civil rights” of a good education that I would highly recommend are Miss Virginia, an award-winning movie that documents a remarkable true story, and Waiting for Superman, another award-winning movie about the seven Harlem Academies (charter schools in New York City) and how inter-city children who are properly taught can have a 96 percent graduation rate, with 90 percent going to college with test scores comparable to private schools in wealthy suburbs.

WALTER L. BRADLEY, Ph.D."