Raising Community Awareness to “Close the Gap” in Florida

An advocacy group fighting to close the achievement gap in Pinellas County, Florida has launched a new “Close the Gap” campaign aimed at putting strong public pressure on the county’s school district. The campaign is the newest initiative of the Concerned Organizations for Quality Education for Black Students (COQEBS), an organization that has been pushing the school district, which serves all of Pinellas County, including St. Petersburg, to take steps to close the achievement gap in county schools.

Closing the Gap

Advocates claim the school district has not lived up to its end of the bargain in a 2000 court settlement that ended a 36-year desegregation lawsuit, Bradley v. Pinellas County School Board. The long-running case was closed under the condition that the district take specific steps to close the black-white achievement gap in the county.

Last year, COQEBS and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund entered into formal mediation with the school district, attempting to get them to abide by the agreement. In order to add public pressure to the situation, COQEBS began the new “Close the Gap” campaign, bringing in activist and former Pinellas student Gypsy Gallardo to lead it.

As the St. Petersburg Times reported, Gallardo has pledged “to put on tennis shoes and get out in the street and try to make things happen.” The first item on her agenda is gathering 10,000 signatures on a petition demanding that the school district honor the agreement. Raising community awareness, Gallardo hopes, will put a spotlight on the district’s failure to “ante up to their end of the bargain.” Although the school district claims that it has made significant progress, Gallardo has said that she intends to make the district’s actions on this issue a major issue in the 2008 School Board elections.

While arguing that the primary responsibility for closing the achievement gap lies with the school board, COQEBS is also looking to community members to do what they can. At a press conference in December, members of the organization called for grassroots, community efforts to heal problems in families and in local communities to improve students’ opportunity to learn.

In 2006, about two-thirds of white students in Pinellas County achieved proficiency on state exams in reading and math, compared to only one-third of black students. State figures put the graduation rate for black males at 42 percent, while members of COQEBS say that state figures are misleading and that the graduation rate is much lower.

“Good Faith” Action

Between 1998 and 2000, the plaintiffs and defendants in Bradley v. Pinellas County worked out an agreement by which the school district could be declared “unitary” and the case dismissed as long as the school board undertook specific initiatives to close the achievement gap. These initiatives included: a school choice plan aimed at ensuring and maintaining diverse schools; new and renovated school facilities; increasing and maintaining diversity in faculty and administrative staff; facilitation of diversity in participation in extracurricular activities; and a quality of education initiative involving a specific plan to address black achievement. Finally, the agreement set up an advisory committee to which the district board would provide regular progress reports, so that the committee could “assess and advise” the board on its plans.

However, advocates claim the school board has been uncooperative since the 2000 agreement. A 2005 report by Dr. Eugene Givens, III criticized the school board’s lack of action: “The simple answer to the question of whether or not the Pinellas County School Board has acted in good faith to reduce the achievement gap between black students and white students is no.”

According to Ms. Gallardo, the board did not produce any required progress reports until its report on the 2004-2005 school year. The report, according to Gallardo, showed minimal action on the initiatives required by the court. Furthermore, Gallardo claims that the report’s analysis of progress in closing the achievement gap only looked at a specific subset of black students that dramatically skewed achievement numbers upwards. Gallardo called the report “something they just slapped together, with numbers that give a very skewed picture of progress.”

Gallardo is hopeful that the Close the Gap campaign will help bring the school board in line and that the mediation process – which could last as long as a year – will yield progress. If not, the agreement indicates that the parties would return to court.

The Close the Gap campaign is receiving support from The Children’s Campaign, a Florida non-profit advocating on behalf of children.


Prepared by Matthew Samberg, January 16, 2006