At what Price savings?

CEDAR FALLS - Closing the Malcolm Price Lab School at the University of Northern Iowa presents some logistical and scheduling challenges for education field experiences at UNI, but it also offers an opportunity to expand partnerships with area school districts and to try new models, UNI administrators say.

But opponents of the June 30 Price Lab closure, recently approved by state regents as part of UNI budget cuts, say they fear the quality field experiences offered for UNI education students at Price Lab cannot be replicated elsewhere, and that scheduling and travel to different locations for the training will be added burdens.

“I can participate in extracurricular or volunteer opportunities at (Price Lab), or be involved with other programs there that I normally wouldn't if the school was maybe a half-hour away,” Erin Thomsen, a 22-year-old UNI junior in elementary education from Naperville, Ill., said. “It kind of seems to me to be a step backward.”

UNI President Ben Allen and College of Education Dean Dwight Watson acknowledge losing the proximity of Price Lab will be one of the biggest hurdles in planning new models for students to get the field experience they now have at the lab school. But they say UNI will build the travel time into schedules and provide transportation for students who need it. Watson also believes this can be a chance for innovation, to build on collaborations with school districts in classrooms that are more akin to what UNI students will face when they are teachers.

“The lab school is icing, a little icing on the cake, but the cake is still rich,” Watson said of UNI teacher education.

Price Lab is among the field experiences offered to UNI students. The school is on the UNI campus and the Price Lab teachers are all UNI education instructors who work with UNI students and teach K-12 students.

The Professional Development School is another experience, in which UNI students do field work in the Waterloo and Cedar Falls districts, working with teachers in those schools and their UNI instructor who may teach the related UNI course at the off-site school.

Students also go to other districts for classroom visits, observations and co-teaching.

With the closure of Price Lab, the nearly $3.3 million UNI allocated from the general fund this year for the lab school will go toward cost savings, expanding the Professional Development School in area schools to replace the lab school field experiences, and to new research and development efforts that will happen around the state to replace Price Lab programs, officials said.

Of the lab school's $5.6 million budget this year, about $3.3 million came from the UNI general fund, which is made up of state funding and tuition dollars. In addition to that money, Price Lab this year got nearly $2.1 million in open enrollment revenue, which is mostly the per-pupil funding the school gets per student from the state to support instructional costs. Those per-pupil state dollars will follow the students to whatever district they attend next year.

Recent years of state cuts resulted in about $24 million less to UNI, necessitating budget reductions, UNI officials say.

Ideally, the state would provide the funding to support both Price Lab School and the Professional Development School partnerships with area districts, Becky Hawbaker, coordinator of the development program, said.

“The loss of the lab school presents immediate challenges and risks in maintaining the high quality of both the field experiences and the school's R&D function,” Hawbaker said via email. “However, it also offers an incredible opportunity to rapidly scale up a PDS model across a diverse range of schools and to ramp up the intensity of those partnerships.”

Price Lab sees about 500 “level two” UNI education students each year, who spend about 13,000 field experience hours in the school. Another 700 to 800 UNI students spend time at Price Lab for methods classes that have field experience at the school.

It's replacing those hours for level two and level three students that's the biggest issue. Level two students must spend a minimum of 25 hours in the classroom. In level one, two and three combined, UNI students must log at least 80 hours of classroom time.

Level two students at Price Lab are heavily focused on assessment, said Nadene Davidson, interim director of UNI's Division of Teaching, which oversees field experiences and Price Lab. Students teach segments, reflect on what they did and how it impacted achievement in the classroom, then reteach the segment or move on to the next segment, Davidson said.

Price Lab teachers are trained in this deep assessment and spend time working with the UNI students on it, lab school Interim Director Lyn Countryman said.

“One thing here is the teachers have time to talk to those students, and they know that's their focus,” Countryman said.

Under a new field experience model, it may be hard for teachers in other school districts to find the time to spend on such things, said Countryman, who has been at UNI since 1990 and is in her second year as interim director.