Troubled Louisville high school in more trouble

This time, it’s with the Feds!

Without question, the “Academy as Shawnee” is one of the state’s most troubled high schools.

Shawnee was one of the very first schools in the state to land itself on Kentucky’s Persistently Low-Achieving Schools list back when the program first started several years ago.

The school’s high school graduation rate in 2011 in the new Unbridled Learning release package is a truly abysmal 42.3 percent. That is solidly in what a research team from the Johns Hopkins University has termed a “Dropout Factory.”

Shawnee’s new Unbridled Learning rank is way down at the lowest possible rating, the 1 percentile level.

However, The Academy at Shawnee is listed as a magnet school because of its aviation maintenance programs. Students at Shawnee can actually earn FAA licenses in airframe or power plant maintenance.

Uh, maybe.

It seems records-keeping at The Academy has been a bit hap-hazard. The FAA is fussy about records keeping for schools that train aircraft mechanics, and the Courier-Journal reports the:

“FAA found record-keeping discrepancies that included faculty forgetting to sign forms, students forgetting to sign in and out of classes, and students using the wrong forms to document their course work.”

The article does mention that students have a 100 percent pass rate on FAA exams, but as our schools often like to tell us, real education involves a lot more than just test scores. In this case, the reason the FAA is so hard over about records-keeping is that habits of sloppy records keeping can lead to missed aircraft inspections and maintenance that does not get done properly. That, in turn, can lead to innocent passengers and flight crew getting into a whole lot of trouble.

Sloppy paperwork and the slipshod maintenance that results also lead to aircraft companies getting hit with multi-million-dollar fines to encourage them to keep records accurately and do things properly, too.

So, the kids at The Academy didn’t learn an important lesson.

And, since the Courier says the school got in trouble over paper work ten years ago, it looks like the faculty needs to learn some lessons, too.

At present, the Jefferson County School District and the Jefferson Community and Technical College, who jointly operate the Shawnee program, have voluntarily shut it down. They hope to get recertified next year. For the sake of the students and the aviation industry, I hope they finally get it right, next time.