School Board Meets at its new time and day in TRIS LMC

Click on the link below to view the agenda for tomorrow's school board meeting. This is the first meeting at the new time and day of 6:00 the second and fourth WEDNESDAYS of the month. As it deals with approval of the preliminary 13-14 budget, it is being held in the TRIS LMC to accommodate the numerous folks who have comments on that, I presume. I am unsure as to why the change was made after numerous attempts by board members over the years, yours truly included, who had kids in high school music, which always has concerts on Mondays. This forced one of three scenarios. People missed their kids concerts, people left the board meeting early in an up-yours to the administration or people rushed the meeting along so it would be done before the concert began. None of these are optimum choices for board members. I heard that they lost one of the board applicants because of the unannounced change, with apparently little or no discussion in public.

I am surprised the district changed to Wednesdays because of the "unspoken" rule of avoiding Wednesdays because that is the designated religious education night as well as some religious services are held that night. That completely eliminates those people who volunteer at their churches as religious education instructors or who wish to attend Wednesday services as school board candidates. Hmm. This does not affect me, but there are a lot of people it does eliminate who are happy to volunteer their services on a regular basis. Smooth move, district...

Finally, the change to Wednesdays has not exactly helped the problem of the district's inability to post the detailed packets in a timely fashion so that people can study the materials and call the right people with their questions prior to the board meeting. People like, I dunno, reporters or board members or citizens who are curious as to what that budget they plan to approve tomorrow looks like? Get on the stick people. There is no reason to wait until the last minute to publish these documents. It makes you look inept and unprofessional that you cannot produce documents in a timely fashion so that there can be a meaningful dialog during the meeting with both citizens and board members. I'll let you know when I see the agenda!



http://www.ecsdnet.org/documents/Board%20Meetings/2013-2014/July%2024%202013%20agenda.pdf

Voucher Schools Scamming the State;Public Schools and Students At-Risk Suffer

I have always opposed the private school voucher program as devised by Wisconsin. Voucher schools do not have the social contract with their young charges and their parents that public school are required to provide by law. That contract states that public schools will provide an education for Wisconsin children ages 4-21. There are few qualifications that remove a child from public education, and even then, the law of the land has required that school districts must provide alternative education for students that are expelled so they may get their diploma or its equivalent. Enter voucher programs for students living in poverty who live in poorly performing school districts. On its surface, such programs seem to be shining lifelines for parents who care about the quality of their children's education. Delving deep into its structure reveals that the Wisconsin voucher program has failed to live up to expectations on any number of fronts one wishes to scrutinize. I'll talk about three of my pet peeves here.

The first issue I have with voucher programs lies in the qualification of religious private schools for the program. Separation of church and state and all that... I believe I have discussed my second concern  on this blog in the past. The fact that our lazy legislature allowed these voucher programs to exist for over a decade before making them accountable to the same NCLB standards that public schools must answer to always appalled me. Then, in 2011, they finally required voucher schools to take the WKCE and, lo and behold, the voucher schools performed at or below their public school counterparts (http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/education/campus_connection/are-private-voucher-schools-failing-to-deliver-as-promised/article_c3c0e074-7866-11e1-9849-0019bb2963f4.html). God in Heaven! All that state aid stolen from public schools flushed down the proverbial pipe.

The article in the link below illustrates just how truly awful this statistic is, and exposes the real reason the voucher program as it exists in Wisconsin should be designated unconstitutional.  The article discusses how voucher schools will accept public school students with disabilities or emotional problems, keep them until the third Friday in September, when the headcount of all Wisconsin public schools is taken for the all-important state aid determination. Once the voucher school has kept the "problem" student long enough to qualify for the state aid, they explain to the parents that the school can no longer keep their kid because of all the disruptions he or she causes in class. Who among you think there was ever an intention on the part of the voucher school to make a concerted effort to educate such students? If so, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. But I digress. Voucher schools are allowed to deny admittance to students for whatever reason. They are private and may not be told who they must accept. I suspect voucher schools would never have accepted some of the students they accept through the voucher program without the six grand in funding dangling in front of them.

After the dust settles in October, when all the "problem" kids have been kicked out of private voucher schools and dutifully returned to a public school that has a social obligation to provide for them a proper education, two things happen that stick in the craw of most tax-payers. The first thing is that the funding for the student remains with the voucher school for that year. More precisely, since the kid will be absent from the voucher school enrollment at the January head count, the voucher school will end up with about half of the state per-student funding for giving the student a chair to sit in for about one twelfth of the school year (three weeks). Meanwhile, the struggling public school that takes the student that has been booted by the voucher school will only get half the state aid for providing 11/12 of a year of instruction. This doesn't even begin to address the emotional upheaval for the student who is already delicate to begin with for having to attend two schools in less than a month. Usually these students qualify as students at risk of some kind, whether it be disability, poverty or emotional and social needs. Many more resources are required to educate them so that they reach their potential, but our government doesn't care. This is known as an "unfunded mandate." Both state and federal governments rightly require a proper education for at-risk students, but don't put their money where their laws are. So the additional funds necessary to educate at-risk kids comes from the general education fund, further depleting an already perilously low coffer. Allowing voucher schools to kick out at-risk kids in September is tantamount to stealing from the public schools, not to mention despicable and deplorable treatment of a fragile kid, which I find far more offensive than the tax theft. Using our most vulnerable citizens to line the pockets of private schools is atrocious and our legislators ought to feel some kind of shame about this practice, though I doubt they will.

The corollary to this voucher school practice of accepting troubled students only to expel them three weeks later follows. If you allow this practice unchecked for years (as it appears has been happening), the at-risk student population of public schools becomes enriched while that of voucher schools is depleted. So, if a voucher community has an average at-risk student population of 50%, the public schools of that community may see the at-risk student population of 75% whereas the voucher schools see only 25%. At-risk students often struggle with achievement level on the WKCE but even though voucher schools selectively remove students with the potential of performing poorly on the WKCE these voucher schools only performed at or below their public school counterparts on achievement testing. Let that sink in for a few minutes. One conclusion one may draw from this data suggests that not only are public school holding their own against voucher schools, but they are exceeding their achievement levels while meeting their moral obligation to all students in their district. Thank a teacher next time you see one. And if you know a legislator, ask them to think about this inescapable conclusion.

http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/voucher-schools-don-t-always-take-special-needs-students/article_ed6d5e54-03a4-5e3b-8454-1176f39fd993.html

Estimated State Aid for Evansville Schools Increases a Whopping $65,184 Next Year

I saw the article in the Wisconsin State Journal regarding the state aid estimate decrease for Madison Schools (http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/state-aid-to-drop-in-more-than-half-of-wisconsin-school-districts-b9945589z1-213909491.html). My mind immediately went to "and what about Evansville?" I searched for Evansville's info which I found in the link below. This link is also featured with the State Journal article. The list is arranged in order from largest loss in aid to largest increase in aid, so it's pretty hard to find a specific district. It's always a good place to start when discussing school budgets.

Evansville stands to gain about $65K in state aid next year, but this figure is meaningless out of context. Until we know what will happen with the revenue cap, this tells us nothing to aid in establishing a budget for the district. If Scotty doesn't increase the revenue cap as he intimated he would when dickering for school vouchers earlier this spring, the increase in state aid will simply mean an equivalent decrease in local contribution, or property taxes supporting public schools. This would probably make the property owners of Evansville gleeful, until they find out their kid is in an overcrowded classroom with insufficient guidance. If the revenue cap is increased by the alleged $150 per kid, Evansville stands to be able to spend an additional $270,000 or thereabouts next school year. This breaks down to about four and a half teachers when one includes the benefits package. Each person quantifies school budget increases and decreases in their own personal way. I always think if it in terms of teachers. IT folks might think of how much hardware or software that money would support and Student Services likely thinks of this in terms of how much PT or OT this could provide for the district. If $65K of it is coming from the state, $200K or so will be coming from local contributions. This probably won't endear the district to anybody paying property taxes in the city limits. But when you amortize it over all the property in the district (valued at about $673,000,000 last year), it amounts to about 30 cents per thousand increase in property tax, or about $60 on a $200,000 home.

The problem is that the amount owed on the high school referendum from 2002 escalates every year. Next year, the amount due is $3,012,472, or $157,777 more than last year. These monies are not subject to the revenue cap, so taxes paid to cover district referendum debt is added to the taxes owed under the revenue cap. Again, calculating the additional tax owed using last years approximate property value in the district will add another 23.4 cents per thousand to the tax bill, or about $47 on that theoretical $200,000 home. Now we are staring down a potential increase of 53.4 cents per thousand on top of about $11.81 per thousand mill rate, a 4.5% increase. Is this a reasonable increase? In light of the economy, some would say such increases should reflect the CPI, which is nowhere near 4.5%. Others would say the district has suffered for three years now and needs some make-up funding. Still others would say the district hasn't practiced due diligence in finding economies in all areas and shouldn't be allowed to increase the mill rate more than twice the CPI.

Some of my sources say that business manager Doreen Treuden anticipates a mill rate lower than last year. To be fair, I am unaware of what assumptions she made to come up with that conclusion, but I was told it included an increase of $150 per student in state aid and unknown revenue cap changes. The state aid increase released today is more like $37 per student. This bodes ill for Evansville. I hope to begin attending the meetings again in July, although the change to Wednesdays is going to be a challenge. I'm not sure why they did this, but maybe more board members will be able to attend their kid's concerts, which are almost always on Monday. Stay tuned for budgetary developments!~Melissa

http://sfs.dpi.wi.gov/files/sfs/Jul_over_PY_Final_%25diff.pdf

Do you sometimes get the feeling that our government is schizophrenic?

The decisions of SCOTUS, as we lazy folk like to abbreviate the highest court in the land, have baffled me a bit this week. Earlier this week, I was somewhat aghast that they labor under the foolish delusion that the states that needed help with setting up fair voting registration and gerrymandering law for all their citizens had learned their lessons in "nearly fifty years." And yet, the US still doesn't allow Japan to have a military force. If they are attacked, the US has to fight their battle. It's been 70 years and we still don't trust them to be able to wield an army without trying to take over the world. Ask the people of color who get followed until some cracker finds a violation they can be charged with if they think the deep south is ready to fairly administer voting rights to them. Hell, I knew somebody I worked with in Milwaukee who got pulled over on the way to work (6 AM). The cop passed him going the opposite direction, did a u-ey and pulled him over for a broken tail light. Hoping to see something juicier in the process, I'm sure, and making my co-worker late for work. He was devastated and felt very embarrassed. I told him he wasn't the one who should feel embarrassed. Driving while black is what this experience is called in Milwaukee, and other places I'm sure. The Trevon Martin case is an extreme example of this bias: privileged groups threatened by the mere presence of a minority. But of course, all the people in charge of voter registration are enlightened folks and would never suppress a vote.

So this was my thought process as we careened toward the DOMA decision: Surely this court will never overturn DOMA. And this morning I was so blasted happy to see chains beginning to fall away. Naturally, there are drawbacks because states that don't extend equal rights to LGBTQ citizens do not have to acknowledge a couple's marriage in a state that does. There are legal conundrums this will cause, but it is surely going in the right direction for mankind's quest to treat all with dignity and respect. I am happy to be able to say the SCOTUS surprised me with its decision. Given what's at stake, I'm glad these two decisions came down as they did. The citizens in places that have not been historically kind to those of color still have the ability to file complaints for voting irregularities. The very essence of eliminating law that screams "you are less than" to all LGBTQ citizens helps restore my faith in humanity. The vulnerable LGBTQ youth no longer have to endure people rationalizing their bigotry and hatred with DOMA. The haters will still be around but they no longer have federal law to hang their hat on. Carry on, Supremes!

Achievement Gap in Madison: Money not the Answer.

Click on the link below to read how the new Superintendent for MMSD has spent her first few months studying a documented problem. Please note that, ala our own new superintendent, she has not spent the time since she was hired trying to argue that there is not a problem (open enrollment anybody?), or blaming any number of entrenched problems in order to minimize the effect it has had on the district. The title for the electronic version doesn't have the impact of that the paper version has: Money not the answer. Restructuring the resources already available is the answer, according to the consultants.

I have always had a serious issue with blaming lack of achievement on poverty. Students can come from economically disadvantaged homes that are headed by adults who recognize and support education as one of the tried and true mechanisms to overcome dire circumstances. Alternatively, students can come from economically advantaged homes that are led by parents that are emotionally and/or physically absent in the pursuit of the almighty dollar. Or, worse yet, parents who believe money can solve every problem. Which student do you believe will naturally excel in school? For better or worse, kids strive in many ways to please their parents in an effort to become them, which is the scary part of parenting. Every move you make is scrutinized by the little urchins and one false move will undo years of training, or at the very least ruin your credibility for a long time. This fact makes counting to 10 all the more important when dealing with the umteenth time your toddler asks "Why?"

I hope Dr. Cheatham has outstanding success with the MMSD. The bone structure is sound and she just needs to flesh out the programs to better meet the needs of the students.

http://host.madison.com/news/local/education/analysis-madison-school-district-has-resources-to-close-achievement-gap/article_41219e55-b96a-577d-9e28-427d0b3ceaa2.html

No School Board Meeting Until the End of July: Create a Strategic Plan, ECSD!

Having a six week gap between School Board meetings at the end of the fiscal year is an unusual development for the ECSD school board. It has not occurred in the seven years since I have been scrutinizing school board activities. There has always been a meeting the last week of June to close the fiscal year and to pass a preliminary budget. Due to the inability of the administration to present an acceptable budget to the board last year, there wasn't a working budget model going into the new fiscal year in 2012. That failure forced the administration to bring every significant expenditure to the board for approval until a preliminary budget was approved in mid-July. Since they were facing a deficit situation, it was certainly something the board should have been overseeing anyway. The administration was less than pleased by what they perceived as the board "second guessing" their professionalism. That topic is a post in and of itself. This year the district has circumvented the established process by not having the "end of fiscal year close-out meeting." I have a feeling that these meetings were a waste of time anyway. Too many variables comprising the budget remain volatile in June. The final expenditures aren't set in stone until June 30, so trying to extrapolate for the board the exact results for the end of the fiscal year is a waste of the business manager's time, the board's time and the administration's time. As for significant expenditures between July 1 and whenever the final budget is adopted (October 31 is the drop dead date, methinks), they should be dealt with on an as needed basis anyway in lieu of an adopted budget.

This new process seems to be a win-win-win for everyone. It could lead to less community outcry because there will be fewer unfounded budgetary "crises." There are sufficient economic challenges for the district without manufacturing crises due to budgetary unknowns at the state level. Take a breath. The backdoor deals going on at the state level right now could produce between 90 and 270 thousand dollars in additional revenue for the district (between $50 and $150 per pupil increase in revenue cap). Of course, this all depends on the ones in charge keeping their end of the bargain, for which I shan't hold my breath. The levels of vindictiveness and immature "payback" demonstrated at all levels by those in charge staggers the mind. There is no longer even the hint of trying to present an equitable facade. On one level, it's refreshing to see that rare bird of truth in politics. It's just so damned infuriating that the focus of their substantial efforts has been ultra-conservative policy as opposed to significant economic improvements. Indeed Gov. Walker, indeed. It's patently obvious that you are more concerned about a presidential bid in '16 than in the economic health of Wisconsin.

The political upheaval which has enthralled public employers has especially rocked the Evansville Community School District because of its lack of a long term strategic plan. All successful businesses have strategic plans. A strategic plan is the compass to guide leadership in wise decision making. Such plans create a route to achieve the vision and are regularly revisited to make sure all parts of the company are aligned. The considerable time and effort put in by the board, the community and the administration to create the vision two years ago needs to be honored. The end goal of that process was not the vision statement but rather a strategic plan. Development of the plan was thwarted first by Act 10, then by Heidi's retirement and then by Jerry's hire. A strategic plan would have helped dampen the magnitude of the winds of change. The leadership would have had a clear path by which to achieve the vision of excellence. This in turn would have minimized the knee jerk reactions the district made while being buffeted from crisis to crisis for the last two years. With no lodestone, the board had to make decisions based on administrative recommendations, an administration that was lame duck for a year followed by one that was led by a rookie for a year. Strategic plans are valid in both times of want and in times of plenty. Just as a plan can shelter areas of community core values in times of trouble, it can enable a district to focus spending in flush times in order to reach the vision of excellence. Now is the time, ECSD. Go forth and strategize!

She's baaaaaaaack....

Flag day marked exactly two months since our serious car accident. My memories of why the accident happened remain stubbornly trapped in the recesses of my mind, which I have taken as a sign that it's best I don't remember what happened. I am grateful beyond words that the semi driver was unhurt and my husband and children sustained only minor injuries.

My own injuries defy logic considering it was a "van vs. semi" accident. I have various foot and ankle bone breaks and a broken hip, all "subsequent" to dislocations of my ankles and hip. I'm guessing osteoporosis isn't a big issue for me. The rapidly deploying airbag cracked three ribs, "cause you're so short, mom" according to my tall daughter.  I took a substantial hit to the noggin, which many would note to be the hardest part of my anatomy. The only symptom to remain there is a damaged nerve that runs the muscle that pulls my right eye to the right, sticking me with perpetual double vision which we manage using an eye patch or a piece of tape over my glasses, depending on how many folks I will encounter that day. It can be disconcerting for folks to see my eyes pointing two different directions. I have been that person, wondering which eye I should meet with my own gaze. Perhaps there is some karma involved here. The high priced neuro-opthamologist explained this injury so well to me I happily paid the higher deductible. He got extra points for using low tech diagnostic tools and showed me how to tape my glasses with a specific kind of tape so I don't lose all my right peripheral vision like I do with the eye patch. He said it can take 18 months for a nerve to heal and we just have to wait and see. Worst case scenario is that the nerve doesn't regenerate and they have to do surgery to pull the eye so it looks forward instead of to the left as it does now. In that case, it will never look to the right. I hope that won't be the case, but would consider it a small price to pay for all of out lives.

I get stronger every day. I have learned to use a walker for short distances. I would like to make it to the pool this summer as I think that would be good therapy for me. I see the ortho guy in a few weeks so maybe I can go to the pool after that. I'm hoping to upgrade from the Herman Munster boots he put me in a month ago to the "lite" version. Literally. I was so dang happy to get my casts off a month ago, I failed to realize the boots weighed as much if not more than the casts. The advantage is that I can remove them to air out and clean my feet. Also, my nerves are soothed by the boots.  By the end of the day, I am so tired of dragging around those boots. I air out my feet for an hour or so and cuss about putting them back on to sleep. I even tried to sleep without them one night and I was so worried about violating orders that I couldn't sleep. Who'd a thunk I was such a stickler for the rules?

Thanks to everyone who has helped our family during this challenging time. The Blue Shark family, Boy Scout troop 514, Becky, Mindy, Sue, Heather, Stephanie, Cathy and the many people who have brought food and sustenance to us and delivered me to my appointed rounds. We are so blessed to live in such a caring community and I look forward to paying it forward.