I shouldn't be discussing these things because they will most likely come before the board. But I feel I owe the public a sense of my feelings on some things that have happened in the past week and we don't have a board meeting until November 6th. So I am going to 'sound off and (hopefully) be heard'.
First is the situation at Middleton where one of our teachers entrusted with our children's well being was arrested for having a sexual relationship with a special needs student. The story gets even worse when another student came forward and did the right thing in reporting this relationship. The student that reported this crime to the school administration was not believed and ultimately sent home from school pending a conference with her mother for 'rumor mongering'.
As a parent and a school board member I am appalled by this teachers violation of her students' and the public's trust. I am also very upset that a student who stepped up and did what we are constantly trying to teach our children to do was punished.
I hope the rest of the school board feels the same way I do and does not make excuses for this horrible situation and steps up to the plate to ensure this never happens again.
Read more about this story in the St. Pete Times here.
Another situation that has angered me this week is the blatant disregard for the policy set by this board in the hiring of an outside consultant. In my opinion we were misled and this serves to validate my lack of trust of this administration. There are some (not all) in upper level administration who will omit information and feed us half truths in order to get the votes they want. How can this board make thoughtful, informed decisions without all the facts on the table?
Some of our administrators may not care about how your money is spent, but I do and I am highly upset at this situation.
You have frequently heard me talk about culture change and how desperately it is needed. This is precisely one of the reasons I ran for public office and why my opponent had so many of the who's who of ROSSAC administration on his finance report.
This is S.O.P. for some and will not be tolerated by me. It is this very lack of tolerance and impatience that has attracted so much venom towards me in the past, as I am sure you have read about on blogs and in the papers.
Read more in the Tampa Tribune article here.
Stay tuned; you will be hearing more on these issues in the near future.
18 comments:
There seems to be a strategy of sending requests for hiring, altering long-standing teaching schedules, and any number of things desired by those in senior administration through the vetting process with blinding speed. The purpose is to get the votes necessary for approval before anyone has a chance to study its contents.
The democratic process is designed to be slow and deliberate for good reasons. One of those reasons is to prevent those in powerful positions from getting everything they want when they want it. A monarch wants what she wants now or heads will roll. We deliberately deny that kind of power from developing. One way is by carefully vetting each request and being certain they remain as requests and do not somehow convert to demands.
Perhaps, a policy needs to be introduced that all requests for board approval over a set amount of money must be presented at one board meeting but not voted on until, at least, the next. Items might be discussed the morning of a board meeting, but this is not sufficient time for ideas to percolate. Any major decision is best decided after at least one night's sleep, but usually after several intervening days.
Anonymous 36 year teacher,
At your request I will not print your post. I hear what you are saying and appreciate your thoughts. But based on what I know it is my job to make judgement calls.
I understand the fine line we must walk in order not to allow upset students to unjustly accuse teachers of something that could ruin their career. I will keep this in my thoughts as conversations take place in the future.
However, children's safety must always be our number 1 concern.
I have checked our policy and if a teacher is accused of anything that requires an in-depth investigation and the charges are unfounded it will not in any way affect their permanent record...in an ideal world anyway. That's where it is up to the school board to make sure both innocent children and innocent teachers are protected.
Thank you for your experienced advice.
I think the key here is that the article about the Middleton situation noted some facts that appear to be overlooked.
1. The woman had NO control over her portable. Kids were coming and going at all times. That means that no learning was taking place there. Not good for any of the students involved.
2. The Middleton administration (a couple of years after driving most of its initially prestigious faculty base away) noted that they "intended" to get someone to help with classroom management. How nice. Road to hell, anyone?
Teachers who cannot control their classrooms at all fail because of lack of respect. Lack of respect is earned just as much as total respect. Teachers who do not command any respect, especially first-year teachers, need to be assisted and monitored. If there had been someone else in that classroom, that person would have been able to lend credence to the girl's accusations.
Now, because of a decision to not pay someone to help teachers struggling with classroom management, something this district has long needed, especially at difficult schools like Middleton, the district will be forking over millions in lawsuit money. AGAIN.
I am glad I decided to not teach this year. What a disgrace being in this profession in this district has become. Thanks, Elia.
English Teacher...thank you.
I will start with the premise that the “suspension” was the District’s choice of method to deal with a behavior. The behavior was the student kept talking after being told not to.
The first-out articles stated that the teacher was a special education teacher. A more than cursory understanding that is above and beyond what is needed to correctly fill out paperwork of the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) is needed to understand the complexities of the authority and responsibilities that schools have in dealing with behaviors of SpEd students.
For lack of space to explain it all, I refer all to wrightslaw.com - bottom left side - click on link to “Behavior and Discipline”. One article everyone should read is (scroll down) “Learning and Behavior Problems- Whose Fault is It?”
Use the search capabilities and type in the word “manifestation”. Follow the links to understand the responsibilities of the District related to behavior and suspensions.
Another media article states that the student witnessed inappropriate behavior of the student and teacher. From the media comments, I wonder if the District’s issue is more of a perceived refusal of the student to respect the “authority” of the school to stop talking. It reminds me of the time I witnessed an Assistant Principal very upset that two kids were running in school. She was more upset that they didn’t stop after she yelled at them to stop. She was more upset that they ignored her authority than about the running. The kids, unknowing to her, were deaf. Administrative decisions, once done but based on wrong information, are very difficult to be undone. As stated in one article, no one will second guess authority.
Along with many questions regarding the use of the school’s authority in dealing with a specific behavior is to ask, rhetorically of course, how this situation would have been handled if it had been a regular ed student.
Regarding the hiring incident:
By MARILYN BROWN, The Tampa Tribune
Published: October 26, 2007
TAMPA - First came a committee to advise Hillsborough County school officials on health issues.
Next, a local council was created to respond to the nationwide obesity epidemic.
Then, two years ago, a task force was set up to write a district wellness plan to comply with federal law.
Now, the district has hired a consultant for $54,000 to 'provide a wellness program for all students districtwide.'
No bid was advertised. No members of existing committees were contacted. The only medical doctor employed by the district said she was never asked whether a consultant - or new wellness plan - was needed.
Are you familiar with the "Alinsky Method"?
Here are a few comments one can find about it:
In the book, "Educating For The New World Order," the author, Bev Eakman points out repeatedly the necessity of the educationists to preserve the ILLUSION that there is: "Lay, or community, participation in the decision making process, while in fact lay citizens are being squeezed out."
"In this process, one or more people known as "Change Agents" or "Facilitators" appear to be acting as organizers, "allowing" each person in the group to express their concerns about some program or policy under consideration. While this process is going on, people are urged to make lists or form into task forces. The Facilitator carefully notes which members of the group are leaders, which are "loud mouths" and which may be easily swayed to different viewpoints.
At a certain point, the previously friendly Change Agent begins to act as "devil’s advocate," becoming an agitator. The process involves playing one part of the group against another, the "divide and conquer" technique. Anyone who is not clearly in accord with the Facilitator’s agenda is made to appear ridiculous, inarticulate, ignorant or dogmatic. The idea is to make these members of the group angry thus escalating tensions. The end object being to shut opposition voices out of the group.
The "targets" of such manipulation rarely, if ever, realize how they are being manipulated. If they do suspect, they generally have no idea how to defeat the process.
This method is being used at all levels of government to force meetings toward PRESET conclusions. There are three steps to defeating this process. They are simple to learn, if not always easy to put into practice since the Facilitators are well trained in agitation techniques."
http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/Educate/alinsky_method.htm
I don't know if this is an accurate portrayal of what has happened, but as some say, if the shoe fits......
"We were misled and this serves to validate my lack of trust of this administration. There are some (not all) in upper level administration who will omit information and feed us half truths in order to get the votes they want."
It sounds as though the board is purposefully and routinely misled and that this happens enough to anger you.
Unless and until someone gets booted out for misleading the board or demoted (with pay cut) for providing misleading data this will continue.
No one should be immune.
Send a message.
Make a motion so we can see who is on board and who doesn't care.
The child who reported the affair went to her mother (an adult) because she (a child) did not know how to handle the situation. The mother should have been on the phone the next morning, before the roosters crowed, reporting what she heard to no one less than the principle. Had she done that she would have opened the lines of communication between adults.
It is true that an injustice occurred if the student who reported it was suspended solely because she kept harping on her original report. The mother of the girl, however, was very late getting involved as she apparently waited another week to meet about the suspension. Had the mother become involved immediately after her daughter reported it to her the school's handling of it might have been different.
If a student tells his or her parents something untoward is going on at school it is because the student does not know what to do, or is embarrassed to do anything. (After all, plenty of junk goes on that the student doesn't want the parent to know about.) If, by the adults judgment, it is something untoward it becomes the parent's responsibility to handle the report for the student.
Perhaps the school should discuss how it handles these types of reports so they will learn from this one, but I cannot hold the school completely responsible in wrongfully suspending the student under the circumstances mentioned.
The teacher's conduct, on the other handle, long ago left the unethical arena and became a criminal matter. Other than instructing the new teacher that having sexual encounters with a student is a no-no, I do not know what else we can do in a free society to monitor this type of thing.
Although one sexual encounter of a teacher and a student is too many, the fact is out of the 3,000,000 teachers in America very few are involved in the illicit behavior. An AP story reported 2500 cases over a 5-year period, which averages out to about 500 per year. That ratio is so small my calculator cannot figure it without going to overflow mode. Just because the ratio is extremely low does mean we should not address the problem. However, it does put in proper perspective the extent of the problem.
Goader,
I hear what you are saying. But one is too many. April
Goader's point about what the parent should have done reminded me of some of my own experiences.
I had years of experience trying to get the District to honor my son's IEP since 1987. Problems didn’t start until 1990 because the first teacher was very professional.
Some sites were very professional. Some sites had personnel that were not professional. Dealing with unprofessional personnel is difficult.
In the fall of 1996, we were at a new school. It started out well, with all of the supports and services according to the IEP in place. Things got progressively worse. One of the reasons I knew things were not well was because of his increasing self-injurious behavior of chewing his cuticles. My son can not talk. He can not hear. He is visually impaired. I must interpret his behaviors as a communication. By this time in the progression of things, he daily was given band aids because he was bleeding. He shredded his clothes, which was a new behavior.
I was accustom to being on my son's campus, as on campuses before and after, for various reasons. Trying to find out how we could make things better was one of the reasons. On a few occasions, I was called there by the school secretary to come pick him up. One should note who made the call. Not the teacher. Not the ESE specialist. Not the Principal. Not a person of authority that was responsible for the implementation of the IEP. The secretary. “Come get your kid. He is unruly”.
I did not know what a functional behavioral assessment was at that time. Apparently, neither did the professionals. I did not know what a positive behavioral support plan was at that time. Apparently, neither did the professionals.
While I was frequently on campus , “checking into” the office was not a routine. Remember, this was in 1996. The office was located in the center of the school. No one had ever said anything about my need to “check into” the office before going to his class room. Had I been told to do so, I would have been very compliant. I am a rule follower. Checking in was never brought to my attention for months. In December, I happened to be sitting in the office one day around noon because I knew my son would be coming there to get his medicine. He would be coming from the lunch room with his one to one aid, a related service that was written into his IEP because the IEP team had determined he needed it in order to access his curriculum. He came in. He left. No adult was with him. I followed him to his class room. I was subsequently told that the aid could not be with him all of the time and that he goes to lunch by himself. Imagine a deaf, visually impaired non speaking kid. Now imagine a middle school lunch room. This had been going on because I trusted the professionals.
Along with several other reasons, I voiced my displeasure again about how the IEP was not being followed. I wrote a letter of complaint and asked for a meeting. I did not know the IDEA laws then like I know them now.
The next day, I met with the Principal. I ended up with a finger in my face and a threat that if I came on campus again without checking into the office I would be charged with trespassing. Like I ever wanted to go back. In fact, my son did not.
So much for parental involvement. I am not one to take this kind of stuff easily. After six years, I had had enough. Sometime in the spring of 1997, I wrote 169 letters and mailed them in one day to chosen District personnel. As a dutiful parent, I spent the next years learning the laws and being involved in addressing my son’s education. I was lucky I had the intellectual and emotional capabilities along with the time, the money and the fortitude to advocate for my son. Some parents don’t.
One ongoing expenditure within the District that dwarfs much other publicly-criticized spending has had little publicity: The Lawson Project. The implementation and ongoing customization of this ERP system for Payroll, Finance, and H.R. has cost millions and millions. It could be argued that this money could have been spent on much more productive items to help both employees and students. Productivity has decreased; more employees have to work overtime, consultants are still being paid to fix problems and manually alter files just to get each check cycle out. In-house career Rossac employees have been dead-ended for career advancement in favor of hiring more consultants who know Lawson because there is no time to train and "experts" are needed immediately to fix the problems with it just to get payroll out each week. Who has it really helped, other than those who have gained financially from all the spending?
Could someone be held accountable for this? Could someone look into how the decisions were made to spend all this money on something that essentially is just a back-office function that was accomplised for decades by in-house programmers just fine, without spending millions on this third-party software that is still being customized to accomplish the things that the old in-house system already did? The old system wasn't flashy and wasn't web-based, but when you get right down to it, does anyone care how their checks are produced, as long as they get them? How can the money that has been spent be justified? How has it helped anything, most especially students and teachers?
Perhaps someone should look into the possibly personal reasons that some administrators had for pushing this Lawson Project, and also perhaps it should be looked into to see what personal connections one or more board members might have had to what consultant group was hired to implement the project to begin with. Please! So much other spending "waste" that people get excited about and makes for "titillating" stories in the newspapers adds up to peanuts by comparison to the expenses Lawson has necessitated in the original software, the consultants, the hardware and system upgrades necessary just to run it, and on and on it goes. Freedom of Information gives access to all emails and communicatiion of all involved parties...board members, administration, consultants (especially "American Industrial Consulting"). Where was...is...the Oversight that a School Board should be performing when it comes to the big things like this? Thanks.
Look into S.I.L.K.
This scheduling program is still in development. Why do we buy programs that are never vetted for the demands that a district our size puts on them.
We are bringing this program on line without the necessary stress testing. The goal is that everyone will use it to schedule students. Will our bandwidth carry it? Will our sites be able to do simple tasks like print the schedules - at the same time? I've worked for principals that could schedule kids without a computer so maybe this new batch of principals can only point and click.
Don't forget the computer driven SCANTRON grading system. Another questionable program we buy while the company develops it. It is not complete. It appears to be a tool for the state and testing department because the results can not be imported into any teacher electronic grade book! Sure the software can be used to correct FCAT-type teacher-made tests but what teacher has the time to create the tests in the necessary format?!
Were any board members fully and truthfully briefed about these purchases BEFORE hand? Did they only get select information?
I agree with Anonymous. "Silk" is at best nonfunctional. The placement of students into levels of classes is done by a "computer." Human beings just type in the data and decisions are made by "Silk." The grading routine is also quite questionable. It used to take a few minutes to grade weekly scantron papers, now it takes over an hour to key in answers to teacher made tests, grade the papers and then get "downtown" to release the students grades. Oh yeah, there is only one form of semester exams given in 22 High Schools and the testa are given over 4 days. And this is with additional demands placed on teachers time (6/7, IEPs, FCAT defenses, copy machines that don't work, "this school uses more paper than any other school," elevators that break nearly every week etc.)
I thought we were under a dwindling budget. If we can spend MORE than a teacher's salary to pay someone who "knows things" to write a "wellness plan", then things aren't as bad as they are being made to seem. What was the number? $54,000?
To me, it is as simple as this; we are here to give our STUDENTS the BEST education possible. That is why we exist! That means every extra penny and every last penny should go into the classroom, not to pay "specialists" or "special friends" for nonessentials.
A "wellness plan"? Are you kidding me? Put DVD players, computers from this century, new desks that aren't broken, school supplies, smart boards, support staff, projectors, books, etc. into the classroom so the children can learn! My school has either none of these things or only some of these things on limited supply.
That large lump of cash, spent on a "wellness plan” could have paid for an additional teacher in Hillsborough, actually nearly two, which we all now know we are in desperate need of. One teacher to 150 or more high school students can only last for so long before the consequences of such poor decisions catch up with us all.
I just came across your website.
I am not a local Education insider, but two of my sisters teach at Hillsborough public elementary schools, my dad helped found one of USFs colleges in the 60s, and my brother is a professor there now. In short, we value education.
I have a Masters degree, the rest of my family has PHDs.
The advice of my family upon my son upon reaching school age last year was to avoid the local public school system, at all costs. So I my 6 year old attends a private secular school, and my other child will go there too when he is of age.
The family consensus is that the local public education system is more about perpetuating the status quo (for many reasons: pension, job security, fear of the unknown,
etc) as opposed to EDUCATION.
My family will not play the charter school lottery game, nor will I play the AP shell game where a select few can enjoy the privilege of a private school, without paying for it. Nor will I finagle a way for my children to attend a better public school that is not my neighborhood school.
You know what, I just want my children to receive a good education. "Everything" else is secondary.
If my children have children of other races in their class, great, if not, great. If my children perform in the upper percentile on a standardized test, great, if not, great. I really want my children to become well-rounded educated citizens that can improve this old world one day. You can't memorize what it will take to do that.
Can just educating our children become the Hillsborough School Board's priority?
9:52
AMEN! Too bad there wasn't a voucher system in place to help us pay for the choices we make (and are willing to live with!).
I watched the school board meeting this morning before going to work (yes, I have no life). I want to commend you on taking on the issue of the health consultant position that was filled without advertising the position. You were careful to say it was not an indictment on the candidate chosen; rather it was a call to follow protocol.
No matter how it turns out you have set yourself apart as someone willing to address the tough issues. As for your comment on being reactionary, I hope those who respond here do not take that as a sign their comments are any less important. Whether you are perceived as reactionary will be in the eyes of whoever is judging you. If they disagree with you then you are reactionary and if they agree you are prescient.
Ms. Griffin. Please read this post.
http://specialedmotel.blogspot.com/2007/11/why-not-use-hammar-and-chisel-on-stone.html
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