"I Really Want to Leave;" UNI Students Frustrated With Price Lab Closure Plan

About 100 education students expressed frustration and displeasure with plans to close in a meeting this morning with President Ben Allen and Dean of the College of Education Dwight Watson.

"I'm just disappointed in my university," UNI junior Anna Phalen, 19, said after the meeting. "I really want to leave."

Allen has Price Lab, effective June 30, a decision the Iowa Board of Regents . Price Lab, which is the designated Research and Development School for Iowa, has 366 students enrolled this year and assists in teacher training at UNI.

Lyn Countryman, interim director of Price Lab, said 524 students completed their level 2 field experience at the school during the 2009 to 2010 school year, and 782 students gained additional field experience at Price Lab in the same time period. On average, she said, each year Price Lab is involved in training 1377 UNI education students, providing more than 20,000 hours of training time per year.

Waterloo and Cedar Falls superintendents Gary Norris and Dave Stoakes said in the meeting with the Board of Regents Monday that they feel their districts can absorb those students. Education students at the meeting, however, expressed skepticism.

“It’s fairly obvious this decision has already been made," one student said at the meeting. "I'm just going to express a repeated concern. All you have told us so far is you hope to have this in place. You hope the teachers will agree to help us. It is really absurd to me that there is really nothing in place. So we’re really hoping that we have a college of education next year, but we don’t know."

Allen said he believed having students placed in outside schools could be an improvement for UNI's education program.

“I think we have to be a bit more creative about how we think of these opportunities," he said. "To reject ahead of time the chance to have a more realistic field experience is unfair.”

Phalen, however, disagreed.

"I feel like Price Lab School does actually offer an elevated experience," she said. "They teach at such a higher level. I want to bring those higher level instruction techniques to my future classrooms."

Common themes expressed at the meeting and from talking with students afterward were frustration with what they saw as a lack of a clear plan for keeping the education program strong moving forward and the fact that their input hadn't been sought until after the decision was made.

"How are you going to check on the progress (of the new placement program)? Are you going to ask the students? Because you didn’t ask them before you made this decision," one student at the meeting said.

In an interview last Thursday, Watson said creating a transition team to address the issues raised by losing Price Lab was his top priority.

"If the closing of the school is the end of June, then we’re talking about Fall 2012 as the time where we have to have something in place," he said. "The decision compels us to act."

Many at both today's meeting and a community meeting Sunday said Price Lab was what made UNI's education program unique and attracted students to the school. They said they were afraid UNI was undermining its role as the state's top education school by closing Price Lab without a clear, public plan on the table to replace what it offers.

"This proposal cuts at the core of the reason UNI exists in the first place," Sen. Jeff Danielson, D-Cedar Falls, said at the community meeting. "If there is another plan, we (state legislators) don’t have it, you (community members) don’t have it. If there is another plan, share it, and it better both improve and reenergize that campus around being a state and national leader of education."

Education student Stephanie Buckley, 20, a junior, put it bluntly.

"It's not the college of education that's keeping me here after losing Price Lab," she said. "It doesn't seem real."

In Thursday's interview, Watson said such comments had been a, "visceral wake up call."

"We have to replace it with something equally as visceral and compelling," he said. "If you came to UNI because of Price Lab and the opportunities we have to offer, we have to fulfill that promise in some reconfigured way."

UNI Teacher Education Faculty members have also spoken out. At a faculty meeting Friday, 59 out of 180 faculty members - everyone present at the meeting - issued a unanimous vote against supporting the recommendation.

Allen and Watson will meet with students again tonight, at the , at 7 p.m.