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Photo By Jymi Bolden
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Welcome to Hughes Center.
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It's an overcast day in mid-April, and the halls and classrooms of Hughes Center resemble most large urban high schools. Posters on the walls remind students of the importance of education. A flier announces that tickets are available for the senior prom. Students lug book-laden backpacks from room to room.
In Sandra Wetzel's biology class, it's 11:30, and everyone waits for the bell to ring. In one of the three cafeterias, it's 5:40, and 200 students stream in for lunch. In the administrative offices, where Sue Taylor holds down four jobs, including teaching duties, it's 8:50.
Not a single one of Hughes' public clocks works. Frozen hands have kept the same time for the past two years.
While it seems time might have stopped here, Hughes administrators, teachers, staff, students and parents are hearing a loud tick-tock. Rumors abound as to what Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) administration will do with the school -- from stripping away its popular magnet programs to closing the facility altogether and selling the valuable Clifton Heights property.
A new roof will be installed over the summer break, but even CPS officials admit that's nothing more than a band-aid on the architectural gem at Clifton and Calhoun avenues. Estimates put the cost of renovating Hughes at between $10 million and $20 million.
When it rains, buckets are placed in classrooms, hallways and offices to catch water leaking through ceilings. Some parts of the building have been roped off to avoid crumbling walls and floors. Due to budget cuts, the school's 1,800 students have no full-time counselor to help them apply for college.
Despite all of the hardships, Hughes students participate in five magnet programs, from a math and science academy to a Paideia program. The school has missed CPS's target for ninth grade proficiency test scores, but not by much.
At present, CPS officials and board members claim there are no plans for the school, any of its programs or the building. But after a year of mixed messages and virtually no communication from those who run Cincinnati's public school system, Hughes supporters are wary. Many feel the school's days are numbered.
Time might be running out for Hughes, but when none of the clocks work, it's hard to know for sure.
Leaks, Cuts and Intervention
When asked about the clocks, Sue Taylor rolls her eyes and says, "It's as symbolic as it is pathetic."
Taylor is part of the glue holding Hughes Center together right now. Not only is she coordinator of the Professional Practice School, a partner program with the University of Cincinnati's College of Education, but she teaches African-American history and culture and is academic coach for the UC student teachers. She also serves as a makeshift guidance counselor.
The gaps have to be filled somehow, Taylor says. After a string of budget cuts, Hughes lost all of its counselors. Her job as a teacher is to make sure her students succeed, she says, but without counselors the students have no one to guide them through graduation and then to college.
Nor do students have an identifiable confidante to help them cope with the usual struggles of inner-city communities, she says. Observing a geometry class, Taylor points out only two students of 15 who lead what she calls a relatively normal life. Just last week she had to convince a student's mother not to "put her daughter out with the garbage" after the mother found out the student missed 14 days of school. Nine were for much-needed dental work that had to be done before the student lost her Children's Health Insurance Program benefits.
Taylor sits at her desk surrounded by piles of scholarship applications that await her review and mounds of paperwork detailing the status of the numerous school committees she sits on. There are also the usual telltale signs of a teacher -- a full key ring, little ceramic apples, scissors, tape, a stapler.
Her office is in the school's basement, lit by a hanging fluorescent light. The walls are decorated with inspirational posters of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Thank-you cards provide a cheery border to the closet door, reminders of the hard work she's done for the students who scurry down Hughes' halls.
Taylor's husband has come in twice to try to fix her office's slowly crumbling walls, but they don't bother her as much as the rest of the school.
"Luckily, no one's been hurt," Taylor says with a slight smile, her eyes expressing a silent "yet."
Taylor rattles off specific examples of disrepair: habitually disregarded hallways and rooms full of water-stained ceilings, cracked floor tiles and crumbling walls that practically blend in with one another. Last year, sections of the building had to be roped off because the ceiling was falling due to six years' worth of water damage. Students couldn't use a set of stairs because they were slippery from leaks. A student with cerebral palsy had to scoot up and down the steps to her gym class because the elevators were broken.
She points out classrooms where students have to step around buckets and garbage cans full of water from recent rainy weekends. Ten computers were lost after one storm, when teachers were seen pouring water out of the disk drives.
"Oh, we have leaks now," says special education teacher Gail Smith with a laugh, pointing to a barrel full of water in her classroom.
She sighs as she complains that she has to tell parents to watch where they sit when they come in for conferences.
"The kids are used to it," Smith says, "and that's sad. I'm used to it, too. We know these are the conditions, so we just go on with our daily activities."
The rampant disrepair that blemishes Hughes is no surprise to CPS administration. An official in the CPS facilities office estimates that repairs would cost approximately $10 million to $11 million to bring the building up to "good standards."
"But I wouldn't be surprised if that figure doubled," says Maxwell Thompson, project manager.
In fact, the CPS Facilities Master Plan estimates repair work at Hughes to cost more than $18 million.
This summer, about $2 million of work is slated for the school pending the school board's approval, Thompson says. The money will be used to replace four large sections of Hughes' roof, among other projects.
Replacing the roof six years ago obviously would have greatly decreased the amount of inside cosmetic work that needs to be done as a result of water damage.
While the state of the building has been deteriorating rapidly, so has the Hughes staff. Since the 1994-95 school year, Hughes has seen a net loss of two assistant principals, five counselors, its librarian, a visiting teacher, funding for program facility positions and two custodians. Hughes currently has one assistant principal, no counselors, no librarian and 10 custodians.
Since the spring of 1995, the school has essentially lost $160,000 from its yearly budget due to CPS budget cuts. The first cut was in the form of 15 teaching positions, most of which weren't restored.
In addition to that yearly loss, the CPS-wide reduction in the per-pupil budget allocation has caused Hughes to operate with $475,000 less for this school year and the next.
CPS officials project a systemwide decline in student enrollment in the coming years, which means less money for individual schools due to less pupils. For Hughes, it means having to rely on its mandatory contingency fund for daily operations -- which is supposed to be tapped only for emergencies.
Plagued with mounting rehab needs and a slowly declining staff, Hughes also suffers the stigma of having been placed in CPS's "Intervention" category for the current school year.
Two years ago, CPS administration conceived its Accountability Plan to rate city schools by comparing them to targets determined by continuous three-year studies of student and staff attendance rates and by sophomores' performance on the Ninth Grade Ohio Proficiency Tests (OPT).
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Photo By Jymi Bolden
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UC student teacher Raymond Kidd, a participant in
Hughes’ Professional Practice School
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The targets are different for individual schools. By considering past attendance and OPT performances, CPS officials assign each school a target they think it should be able to reach. The better the school scores, the more autonomy and flexibility it enjoys.
Schools can be placed into one of four categories, ranging from "School Achievement" (schools recognized for a combination of achievement and improvement) to "School Redesign" (schools demonstrating below-average achievement and not showing any improvement).
"Intervention" means that Hughes had average to below-average achievement while showing no or only slight improvement, and a CPS team was sent in to assess the reasons.
Hughes Principal Bob Suess says he understands the need for an evaluation system but claims that CPS uses a "flawed" formula to evaluate its schools.
First, he says, the district determines what a school's target score should be and raises it by 4 percentage points each year. Second, the formula evaluates a different group of sophomores every year on the OPT to gauge student improvement instead of following one group of students to see how they improve from year to year.
In 1997, 55 percent of Hughes sophomores who took the test passed all five parts of the Ninth Grade OPT, missing its CPS target of 60 percent. In 1998, 56 percent of Hughes sophomores who took the test passed all five parts of the test, this time missing its CPS target by 9 percentage points because the target was raised the from previous year's. The school actually improved its test scores but, in the administration's eyes, fell further behind.
"It's like expecting the successor of (St. Louis first baseman) Mark McGwire to beat his record of 70 home runs in one season with an increase of 4 percent," Suess says.
Teachers constantly feel they're chasing a higher performance standard, he says, based on a comparison of apples and oranges.
Jack Lewis, director of research and evaluation for CPS, won't say whether he thinks the district's formula is fair.
"The formula was crafted by a committee over several months ... and it came out the way it is," Lewis says. "My opinion of the formula doesn't matter. I just apply it."
Assistant CPS Superintendent Kathleen Ware says the evaluation formula is fair and the targets reasonable. She says it's the only way CPS can evaluate its schools and students.
Still, the Ninth Grade OPT, which is taken six weeks into the school year, measures what a student should know prior to entering high school. If a student can't pass the test, teachers have to spend time remediating him or her.
Because the Accountability Plan rewards schools for simply meeting their individual targets, mixed messages can be sent to the schools and the community.
Hughes, even though more than half of its sophomores passed the OPT in 1998, was said to not be improving because it missed its target, projecting a negative image to the community. On the other hand, if a school's target is to have only 25 percent of its sophomores pass the test and it reaches that, it's placed in the "School Improvement" category and is left alone.
Ware says that, to alleviate some of that inequity, schools are awarded for reaching at least one-third of their respective targets. But a school that reaches 99 percent of its target is awarded no more points than a school reaching 33 percent of its target.
Suess advocates "value-added education evaluations" -- following student achievement from year to year, using the same group of students. But the reality, he says, is that it's time-consuming to look at each student and compare scores.
"(The administration) is sacrificing statistical validity for economy," Suess says. "That's saying, 'It may not be accurate, but at least we can afford to do it.' The scary thing is that we all recognize the system is seriously flawed and, despite it, we're making decisions based on it."
In a letter to CPS Superintendent Steven Adamowski, Suess pointed out that his 1998-99 sophomores improved on all parts of the OPT over the 1997-98 class, yet the school's accountability status declined. Moreover, the improvements were gained despite budget cuts in 1994, 1995 and 1999.
Lewis says that Suess' suggested approach is difficult to implement on a large scale but wouldn't go into detail as to why.
Since the Hughes facility has needed a new roof for six years and CPS has deemed the school worthy of "intervention," school supporters believe district officials want to get rid of it.
After two failed tax levies in the past year and the possibility of another failure in November, the CPS budget faces a crisis. Forty-eight teachers already have been laid off districtwide, and Adamowski has recommended a budget cut of another $1.5 million.
If approved, that cut will come in the form of more than 4,000 CPS public, private and parochial school children losing yellow bus service next year, closing Washburn Elementary in the West End and eliminating 29 central office positions and two principal positions. If the levy doesn't pass in November, all extracurricular activities and athletics could be cut the second half of the 2000-01 school year.
Hughes staff suspects the new roof isn't a top priority on the CPS to-do list.
Taylor references a Jan. 15 Cincinnati Enquirer article that mentioned Hughes as one of six CPS schools in need of serious rehabilitation.
"All those needs are important to fix, but it's frustrating because we have no money," Cincinnati Board of Education Member Sally Warner was quoted as saying. "And I don't want to spend a lot on changes if we're not even going to use those buildings in the future."
Although Warner didn't specifically name Hughes in the quote, Taylor says it raised a red flag for her.
Property Valuable, School Not
One popular theory to tie the loose ends together at Hughes Center holds that someone -- whether it's certain school board members or CPS administration -- wants to sell the property. The school's location in the heart of the Clifton Heights business district would likely fetch a high price.
In a memo on the stationery of the Clifton Heights Community Urban Renewal Corporation (CHCURC), a development coalition, Treasurer Dan Deering tried to persuade the CPS board to sell the Hughes property to him. He said he'd renovate it and sell it back to CPS.
He further developed a plan that called for CPS to downsize Hughes' five magnet programs to three, cut its population by half and eliminate all bus services.
Deering, a real estate investor, says it's "inappropriate to comment" now on his plan. He says he's working with the Hughes Center and Marjorie Klusmeyer, secretary of the CHCURC board, for a "safety net" for the school. If the CPS board decides to close the school upon future administration recommendations, he says he wants to make sure the building remains standing.
"I want to save the building no matter what," Deering says. "It's a cornerstone for the (Clifton Heights) business district. My plan was a knee-jerk reaction to what I heard at a school board meeting."
Deering can't recall the date of the meeting but says it concentrated on closing some of the district's high schools and on the manner in which the properties would be disposed.
CPS owns approximately 80 buildings in the city but, according to a member of the High School Facilities Committee who asked not to be named, needs only about 70 because of a projected decline in student enrollment. The buildings it deems unnecessary would be auctioned, Deering says.
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Photo By Jymi Bolden
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Sue Taylor: teacher, administrator, makeshift
guidance counselor
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According to Deering, almost all developers interested in the Hughes property want to knock down the building. According to a Hughes' history packet, the fortresslike facility, built in 1908, is a "perfect example" of Tudor architecture detailed with modified English Gothic. Its life-sized gargoyles, which represent the advance of peace and knowledge over ignorance, keep watch over the grounds.
By auctioning the Hughes facility, Deering says, CPS wouldn't get its money's worth because no one can afford to buy the property at market value.
Klusmeyer, also the chairman of the Local School Decision Making Committee for Hughes Center and CHCURC representative for the Clifton Heights, University Heights and Fairview Business Association, says the CHCURC has no interest in the Hughes property and that Deering misrepresented himself and the CHCURC by attaching the coalition's name to his proposal.
"We in the community want to save the Hughes Center as a public school," she says.
Klusmeyer says she's continually showed her support for Hughes, meeting with Adamowski in December when she heard there was a possibility that Hughes' programs would be moved to Aiken High School.
Deering was reprimanded for using his position as CHCURC treasurer to try to persuade CPS board members to sell the property. He admits that he erred but feels he didn't have enough time to discuss his plans with the CHCURC.
Deering says Klusmeyer misunderstands him. Whether or not Hughes remains a high school is of no consequence to him, he says -- an architectural preservationist, he simply wants to save the building.
Another rumor floating around is that the University of Cincinnati is interested in buying or leasing the Hughes facility to renovate it for an Internet start-up company incubator or a high-tech charter school.
Ron Kull, UC's associate vice president of finance and its chief architect, didn't return phone calls to comment on the rumor, but Klusmeyer says she spoke with the UC representatives on the CHCURC and they expressed no interest in the Hughes property. Deering says UC officials have no interest in the property because it's too costly to repair and maintain.
"There are a few people who would like to see (Hughes) gone," Klusmeyer says, adding that she has her own theories as to why but that she won't explain them. "But many (businesses) like Hughes because they get a lot of business."
The only complaint about Hughes students that Klusmeyer remembers dates back to the 1960s when one of the local carryouts used to close its doors at the school's dismissal time and then open back up a few hours later. The owner was worried about liability because he sold alcohol, she says.
Hughes Faces Back-Door Restructuring
At the end of last year, the school board determined that Hughes needed to be restructured because it wasn't working. Under the High School Restructuring Plan, all CPS high schools -- save Walnut Hills, the School for Creative and Performing Arts (SCPA) and Clark Montessori -- would be transformed to consist of a preparatory academy for grades 9-10 and a senior institute for grades 11-12.
Since 1989, Hughes has been a magnet school offering five specialized programs -- health, communications, teaching, Paideia and the Cincinnati Academy of Math and Sciences (CAMAS). According to the latest High School Retructuring Committee Report, which will be made public on Monday, Hughes' programs will be dispersed to other schools, the un-named High School Committee member said.
Knowing the school's test scores were improving, Suess and Hughes faculty formally requested on Jan. 10 that Hughes be exempted from restructuring. They followed with a Jan. 20 memo listing eight concrete reasons why the school should be exempted. CPS administration didn't reply.
The situation came to a head at the Feb. 14 CPS board meeting, where approximately 60 parents, students and teachers bombarded the board and administration officials. Board member Harriet Russell then introduced a resolution to exempt Hughes from restructuring, which was passed. A collective sigh of relief was heard throughout the room.
Unfortunately, Taylor says, the relief was short-lived. She remembers her body shaking when she read a March 21 Enquirer article that detailed a CPS proposal to converge two attached West End schools -- Porter Middle School and Hays Elementary School -- into a fourth-12th grade math and science academy.
"It's back-door restructuring," she says. "I feel like I have a bull's-eye on my back."
Ware says she has no idea if Hughes supporters should be alarmed right now because nothing has ever been discussed about the CAMAS restructuring and that there was no such formal proposal. In reference to a March 24 CPS newsletter that outlined the proposal for Porter-Hays, Ware says, "You'll have to ask (CPS Director of Public Relations) Jan Lesley about that one."
Ware says she does know that the Jacobs Center, home of the middle school CAMAS program in Winton Place, is interested in creating a fourth-12th grade math and science program that, if housed elsewhere, would allow its Paideia program to expand.
Hughes administration has its own hopes, Suess says -- that a K-eighth grade CAMAS program be initiated somewhere and that Porter-Hays would make a great site for it.
Hughes already is similar to CPS's restructuring model, Suess says, because it offers core curriculum classes in the ninth and 10th grades and specialized programs in the 11th and 12th grades. Plus Hughes has a record of CPS firsts, he says -- it was the first city school to offer team-based teaching, a Paideia high school program and a Professional Practice School, which allows university students to receive intensive teaching training for class credit.
When Hughes was placed in the "Intervention" category and recommended for restructuring, Suess asked for the CPS targets for its individual magnet programs. Initially the data wasn't broken down per program, he says, but after his formal request for exemption from the restructuring plan, the data "suddenly" became available.
The data said that Hughes' CAMAS program wasn't meeting its targets and so was placed in the "Intervention" category for the 1998-99 school year. Barb Cassidy, the school's CAMAS program facilitator, says that doesn't make sense.
CAMAS sophomores surpassed CPS targets for the year in question in all categories but two, she says, and those targets were missed by less than 1 percentage point.
"We were assured that the study was not a complete picture, and yet they're still making decisions," Cassidy says. "Overall, our numbers are higher than any other program in the building. But we're labeled as 'Intervention' while the other programs are labeled as 'Improving.' "
If a math and science academy for grades 4-12 moves into the West End, it will surely affect Hughes, Taylor says. The West End is only two miles away, and approximately 35 children from that neighborhood attend Hughes' CAMAS program, which has a total enrollment of 375.
Glen Schulte, team leader for CAMAS's Zoo Academy, says that if his program were to move it would cause some logistical problems for him. Teachers provide the students' transportation to the Cincinnati Zoo, just two miles from Hughes, so transportation likely would be harder from another school.
The CAMAS program also benefits from a multi-million-dollar science lab at Hughes, one of the school's most modern and best-equipped areas.
The proposal to eliminate Hughes' magnet programs makes no sense to Terrance Strader, who graduated from CAMAS last week. With a 4.0 grade average and his choice of full-ride scholarships to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue, Cornell, Northwestern or Michigan, Strader wants to know how much research CPS officials have done about Hughes and accuses Adamowski of not even visiting the school.
"I don't think (Adamowski) knows the history of CAMAS and the Hughes Center," Strader says. "He's looking at (CPS) as more like a business than a school system."
Is Success Overshadowed by the Almighty Dollar?
When the resolution to exempt Hughes from restructuring was introduced at the Feb. 14 school board meeting, board member John Gilligan was surprised. He'd never heard any discussion among board members of exempting Hughes.
Gilligan says he's frustrated because similar scenarios happen more often than not.
"I'm trying to get the board to operate in a fashion that I'm more familiar with," he says. "I'm not used to the business of individual (board) members popping up and introducing a motion with some considerable significance and then we vote on it. There's not enough time."
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Photo By Jymi Bolden
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Biology lab in Hughes’ math and science academy
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The "fashion" Gilligan speaks of is the novel idea of discussing matters like the Hughes exemption in a committee forum before voting on them, something he became familiar with during his time as Governor of Ohio.
Gilligan says he's visited Hughes a few times and is impressed with what the school is doing and sees no reason for anything to change now or in the near future. Still, he can't guarantee the school will forever remain safe from restructuring, adding that he hasn't heard anything from CPS administration about the matter.
That's not to say that he won't hear anything soon, he says, because very often policy decisions are made by administration officials and sent to the board for ratification faster than you can say "accountability."
In the case of CPS teacher lay-offs announced in late April, Gilligan says board members had only 24 hours to review a decision that would affect more than 100 teachers. The board, he says, felt it was forced to vote and the administration said there were no alternatives. Yet, two weeks later, the administration approached the board with five alternatives. Forty-eight teachers lost their jobs, and the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers continues to appeal their cases.
"Why hadn't (the alternatives) been looked at before?," Gilligan asks. "These are people's lives."
The lack of discussion and communication between the school board and CPS administration and among board members themselves exacerbates the lack of communication between the school system as a whole and the Cincinnati community, he says.
"We've done an inadequate job in explaining what we're doing and why and what the overall scheme is," Gilligan says.
The results -- evidenced by the Hughes situation -- are rumors of epidemic proportions, he says.
Gilligan thinks the proposal to join Porter and Hays in the West End will be addressed at Monday's board meeting. He says the reason a math and science academy was proposed there was because that's what parents wanted. As far as the impact it would have on Hughes, he says it hasn't been discussed.
Ware, on the other hand, says that West End parents don't want a math and science program at Porter-Hays.
Differing responses among the ranks of the CPS system don't surprise anyone.
"(The administration) doesn't know what it wants to do," says Bill Sedgwick, CAMAS team leader for senior Hughes students. "No one knows what's going on, which hurts recruiting, because if our future is uncertain parents don't want to take the risk. If the program moves to the West End, parents will have safety concerns."
CAMAS parent Elvia Price of Bond Hill also is hearing different stories about Hughes. The most common theory is that Hughes' CAMAS program is being phased out much like the math and science elementary program was closed at Quebec Heights in Price Hill. Price's oldest daughter graduated from Hughes' CAMAS program last year, and her youngest daughter will be a CAMAS senior in 2000-01.
In December, CityBeat reported that CPS was closing the Quebec Heights CAMAS program because the area's community wanted a neighborhood school ("Magnet School Closing Doesn't Add Up," issue of Dec. 16-22, 1999).
The Hughes story reads like the Quebec Heights story, except that teachers and parents saw a beacon of hope in the school board's exemption of Hughes from restructuring. Quebec Heights was closed despite intense lobbying from parents, teachers and faculty. Like Hughes, it was showing test score improvement but wasn't meeting CPS targets.
With the Quebec Heights CAMAS program gone and the Porter-Hays transformation, Hughes loses valuable feeder schools from which it can recruit students, Price says. That, in addition to budget cuts and building neglect, sets up Hughes for failure, she says.
"I do feel like we're being targeted," Sedgwick says. "You hear about (Hughes) more, but I understand because it costs much more money to run the school. But if you're going to scrutinize, do it fairly. We want an opportunity to prove ourselves. Don't keep changing the (school's) structure and ideology every few years. We've only been here six years, and CPS spent (millions) to put us here."
The playing field isn't level, Sedgwick says, referring to comparisons among the city's magnet schools. Hughes' magnet program -- unlike those at Walnut Hills, SCPA and Clark Montessori -- doesn't have admissions criteria for incoming students. Those three high schools, exempt from CPS restructuring from the get-go, either test students or have specific requirements for admittance, which gives them more control over their student population, translating into higher test scores.
Ware says the reason for exempting those three schools is that their test scores are high.
"(Walnut Hills, SCPA and Clark) are held in a different light because they're predominantly white schools," Sedgwick says. "It's suspicious that they're being left alone while the rest of us are getting scrutinized."
Walnut Hills' student population is 35 percent black, SCPA's is 45 percent black and Clark's is 50 percent black. Hughes Center's population is 88 percent black.
The city's other magnet high schools also are heavily supported by alumni associations. Walnut Hills alumni, for instance, recently constructed a $12 million state-of-the-art Arts and Science Center for the school.
"All (Hughes) has are the pennies in the hallway," Taylor says, referring to a penny collection set up by Winged Victory: The Hughes Renaissance Project, a student/teacher rehabilitation program that's raised $12,000 for school repairs from their own pockets.
The uncertainty over Hughes' future makes everyone nervous, even Schulte, whose Zoo Academy is being used as the model for CPS's senior academy proposal.
"Job security is always a concern," Schulte says. "(The Zoo Academy) is a small school with 30 kids. We have the best student-teacher ratio in the city (and) we have a great success rate. Ninety percent of our seniors went to college last year, and we have a great employment rate. The question is whether success is overshadowed by the buck."
Out of Time
When a CityBeat photographer returns to Hughes Center for last-minute shots, he discovers that all of the school's public clocks have been fixed -- just in time for the school year dismissal on June 2. Taylor doesn't know why.
"It could be a good omen, or it could be a bad omen," she says. "It could be good in that no matter when it happens it means (CPS) is trying to fix some things. But it could be a bad omen in that they fixed them because they're trying to sell the building to somebody else."
On June 1, the High School Facilities Committee met to finalize its recommendations for CPS high schools. Hughes has been recommended to be closed, says the committee member who asked not to be named.
"When the board exempted Hughes from restructuring, (the committee) never got a clear answer as to whether it also exempted the building," the committee member says. "So, based on the cost of revitalization, we recommended that it close."
The high school plan does call for keeping all of Hughes' programs in existence, but they'll be parceled out to other schools if the recommendations are adopted by the board.
The reports of both the High School Restructuring Committee and the Facilities Master Plan Committee will be unveiled at Monday's regularly scheduled school board meeting. No action will be taken until the beginning of the 2000-01 school year.
If time has indeed run out on Hughes, at least its teachers, parents and students finally will know it. ©
