Schools
Price Lab Director Doubtful of School's Future
Lyn Countryman told Patch she is not optimistic about the school's future.
Malcolm Price Laboratory School interim director Lyn Countryman is not optimistic about the future of the school, which officials plan to close at the end of the year.
Protests, a lawsuit to block the closure, and the Iowa Senate's vote to keep the school open and provide funding for another year, have given hope to supporters that perhaps the school can be saved. But, Countryman does not share the sentiment.
“According to the president of the university, it’s a done deal, and no matter what money they have, it won’t make any difference,” Countryman told Patch. “I am an admin at the university, and I have to take the university stance. It would be very difficult to keep the school open, because the teachers have taken other jobs.”
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She said about ten of her school teachers have already accepted other positions for next year and others have received job offers. She said some of those positions are at University of Northern Iowa; the university moving some Price Lab teachers into positions working with teacher education students doing classroom placements in area schools.
The Price Lab School website says the school serves a unique purpose as Iowa’s only clinical teacher education and research oriented K-12 school.
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With 366 currently enrolled students, Countryman says the school is 50 percent larger than any other K-12 school in Iowa.
The school is competency-based, meaning if a child’s demonstrates proficiency outside of their age group, that child can skip one or two grades, which is the direction the state of Iowa wants to go with education, Countryman said.
She gave the example of 8-year-old Alex Glascock, who moved from third to fifth grade and went on to be a first-place finisher at 2012 Iowa Knights of Columbus State Spelling Bee competition in March.
UNI plans to replace the Price Lab School with the Iowa Research Development Center for Education Innovation, but Countryman says she would be "hard-pressed to see if they could do anything better than what we’re doing now."