Top Schools Dismayed Over Abrupt Cancellation of Awards Program : Education: Prestigious federal recognition for excellence fell victim to congressional budget ax.

The November cancellation of the nation’s most prestigious award for schools is causing a hornet’s nest of protest in San Diego County, where principals, teachers and parents already had collectively spent thousands of hours preparing detailed application forms.

Only within the past couple of days have public and private schools around the country learned that Congress canceled the Blue Ribbon Schools of Excellence Awards for this year. The 35 California public elementary schools that qualified as finalists in the U.S. Department of Education program--including four from San Diego County--received a letter from state Schools Supt. Bill Honig.

“It’s incredibly disappointing,” Marjorie Postel, principal at Poway’s Tierra Bonita School, said Wednesday. “We literally spent thousands of hours in September and October with teachers and parents to put together the complex (37-page) document required of us.”

Poway Assistant Supt. Romeo Camozzi faxed a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander on Wednesday expressing keen disappointment and asking whether school districts and businesses throughout the nation might contribute a portion of the $885,000 program cost to keep it intact.

Alexander, smarting from hundreds of complaints during the past several days, held a meeting Wednesday with his top assistants to explore ways of restoring the Blue Ribbon recognition, which Congress cut as part of budget trimming. There was no decision on Wednesday, a U.S. Education Department spokesman said.

“It’s a real slap in the face of the nation’s best schools,” Joyce McCray of the Council of American Private Education said Wednesday. “I know that there’s been a lot of complaints reaching the secretary’s level.”

“My disappointment is that it sends a mixed message to schools,” said San Diego city schools Supt. Tom Payzant, whose Hearst Elementary School also qualified as a finalist.

“This is one of the few programs that attempts to identify exemplary examples of what works in U.S. education, and now we lose an opportunity to show (the public) that there are already some excellent, break-the-mold schools we can learn from.”

Payzant said the award is considered the most prestigious that a school can earn. Many outside reviews are required to win the Blue Ribbon designation, which comes with no money--only a flag to fly in front of the school--but with the recognition of having shown uncommon excellence.

Chaparral School in Poway and Murdock School in La Mesa-Spring Valley also survived preliminary screenings at the county and state levels to qualify to receive federal review teams--visits that have now been canceled.

The state invites only those schools to apply that show consistent success in increasing student achievement, based on statistical data.

Of 84 California applicants--out of 5,000 elementary schools statewide--35 passed the reviews necessary to have their documents sent to the federal level. There were 483 school finalists from all 50 states.

“It took eight weeks, a staggering amount of time, to detail our curriculum, our discipline, our parent involvement, our general philosophy; I can’t tell you how crestfallen we are at losing a chance to be recognized,” Murdock Principal Kathie Dobberteen said. The efforts included scores of student drawings of what they liked about their school, which were used to illustrate the otherwise formal document.

“There’s so much energy on the part of everyone involved in the process,” Chaparral Principal Raymon Wilson said. “How can they stop this in midstream? I just don’t understand why they tell us in the middle of the process.”

Actually, the program, an annual event since 1982, was first targeted for cancellation in June by the House of Representatives in its $205-billion appropriations bill, well before the applications process got under way.

The Senate, however, left the department’s request in its appropriations bill version. When the two bills were reconciled in early November, the awards program was left out of the final version that President Bush signed.

“There was no political agenda involved,” a House education aide said Wednesday, denying speculation from Alexander’s department that congressional Democrats wanted to ax a popular program that accrues publicity to a Republican president. “We were just looking at a lot of little things to try and cut” so we could increase grants for elementary schools and for biomedical research.

“And, when it was first dropped out in June, we heard nothing from the DOE, no expressions of concern. As far as we were concerned, it was a non-event.”

But, with the protest from schools around the country, Congress would probably reconsider and grant the funding if Alexander agreed to cut money for other programs in order to keep the Blue Ribbon Awards alive.

“It’s all in limbo but, frankly, this has been very much on the mind of the secretary the past couple of days,” the Education Department spokesman said.

“Frankly, Congress wasn’t aware” that schools already had submitted applications and that there was so much interest on the part of schools, the House aide said.