Changes in administration, high turnover among teachers and a reluctance to change have put the reshaping of Medford high schools by 2006 in a precarious position, officials say.

Teachers worry about when the new small schools will be announced, how they will be staffed, whether there will be enough time to develop a new curriculum, and how the changes will be sustained.

Parents wonder how students will choose a small school, what classes will be available and whether teachers will be qualified to teach specialized courses.

Students fear they won’t see their friends or could be stuck in a line of study they don’t like.

After 18 months of work to remake Medford’s two high schools into clusters of small learning communities, thanks to $2.6 million from the Oregon Small Schools Initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Meyer Memorial Trust, answers remain elusive.

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And unanswered questions can dilute support for the initiative, said Doug Jantzi, the new director of secondary education for the Medford School District.

"The schools are in a critical place," he said.

In an exercise gauging support among North Medford High School’s teachers last week, many said they generally supported the initiative but had concerns. Few unconditionally endorsed it. None wanted to abandon the work, he said.

"It goes back to questions the district hasn’t been able to answer," Jantzi said.

The district has had three superintendents since starting the OSSI reform process and administrators have struggled with tight budgets and extra duties, he said.

"What has hurt them in moving ahead is the district office turnover," Jantzi said.

He said Superintendent Phil Long has charged him with making sure the schools get the district guidance and support they need, as well as answers to tough questions about long-term funding and staffing.

Turnover among teachers at North Medford also slowed work. Retirements, reassignments and hiring to restore positions cut in past years brought 25 new teachers to the school this year, Principal Doug McKenzie said.

"We couldn’t have anticipated that, but we needed to get them on board," North’s OSSI coordinator Ruth Ann Schwada said.

Both North and South Medford high schools have pushed back internal deadlines for the final evaluation of proposed small schools. Instead of completing proposals by the first week of November, design teams now have an additional month to take into account feedback received at recent community events and add details to their plans, change coordinators said.

The delay means the high schools won’t select the new small schools — including one that must open on each campus by fall 2006 — until January.

Jantzi said the district typically needs eight months to launch any new program, so it will have little wiggle room to map out a course catalogue, assign teachers and preregister students for a new school.

The tight timeline has teachers worried. Steve Preston, a North Medford teacher designing a PathFinder School that focuses on projects guided by student interests, said his school could be ready to open next fall, but teachers need to know which proposals will go forward and how they will fit into them.

"People want answers so they can plan," he said.

Paula DeKorte, a Medford mother of four — two North graduates, a junior and an eighth-grader — attended an open house this week looking for answers about the initiative, too.

"I was pretty opposed to it at first, until I saw what they were doing," she said.

She liked the focused learning environments that build on kids’ interests and she liked that officials sought community input. She noticed lots of involved parents of honor students, but wanted to see more attention on low-achieving and special-needs students.

"I think this could really take off and soar, or it could plummet if they don’t get the proposals to the community and parents," DeKorte said. "They’ve got to kind of hurry."

The Portland-based OSSI change coach guiding Medford schools, Paula Kinney, is pleased with the pace of progress here.

"They are right on track," she said. "They are being pretty strategic. I don’t think they are moving too slowly."

While some of the six other conversion schools funded at the same time as Medford’s have announced their small schools or even opened them, Kinney said some went too fast and skipped steps that could force them to rework things later.

She said both Medford schools need to work to get a broad segment of the community involved in the process, then need to buckle down to develop curricula.

She’s advising them to open freshmen academies first for the easiest transition. It avoids concerns about how to integrate all grade levels of a small school into an existing comprehensive high school, helps young students make the shift to high school while building a new, small school culture, and gives other design teams an additional year to create their curricula.

She also noted that Medford has strong district support for the change. In districts where only one high school got a grant, there has been contention between schools and between the changing school and district officials, she said.

"I like the fact that it is a districtwide initiative," Kinney said, noting that administrators and board members have gone on study tours and kept apprised of the work.

Still, doubt, fear and unanswered questions are part of any change, she said.

"Conversion schools are darn hard work," said Kinney, who has served as principal at two new or changing schools. "Any district that accepts the challenge is brave."

Reach reporter Anita Burke at 776-4485, or e-mail aburke@mailtribune.com.