Some of the items on tonight’s board agenda:
We’ll discuss the state Department of Education’s accreditation report on our district’s Special Education practices. You can read the report here.
We’ll vote on approval of the proposed 2016-17 school calendar.
We’ll hear an update from the district’s sustainability committee.
We have a work session scheduled to continue our discussion of secondary boundaries. My guess is that we will probably have to wait until the election of a new board member to settle the question of what our secondary school boundaries will be. I submitted a letter to the board listing some “grandfathering” issues that we could discuss. It’s hard to do any kind of extensive grandfathering in conjunction with our boundary changes, especially since we need to make sure we populate the new schools we are opening, but there are some limited circumstances where I think some exceptions to our usual rules would make sense.
The full agendas are here and here. Please chime in with a comment on anything that catches your attention.
6 comments:
This election is all about the boundary vote. Paul Roesler will vote for the east side power grab aimed at bringing in the good white kids and shipping out the poor black kids. Maybe the West and North get out the vote and slow down this political agenda. Who is checking the east side for stuffed ballot boxes?
I agree with all of your suggestions regarding grandfathering people in.
It is very well thought out.
Northwest is one word though. It is never spelled as two separate words like North Central and South East are.
Thank you for all of your hard work!
Wow. I have to say, reading the DOE's special education accreditation report was really validating. It will be interesting to see how things shake out. As I have said for years, those doing the heavy lifting with special education, the teachers and paraeducators by and large really work hard and want the best for the students. The administration has a culture of retribution, retaliation and just plain wrong doing.
Auditors don't use the term "pervasive and substantive" unless there is a real problem at the highest management level. It's not used when, for example, a teacher or other employee makes an error in judgment in a particular case.
The real questions are (1)why has management allowed this situation to go on? and (2)is this lack of financial management limited to just the special education issue or is it repeated in other areas as well?
In light of the management shortcomings that are now confirmed, the board should not blindly assume that the district's other financial problems are caused by having too many small neighborhood schools or other factors outside management's control. Instead, the problem appears to be good old fashioned incompetence.
It's hard to feel confident enough to support a bond issue given this report.
And don't let high management avoid responsibility by finding a middle level manager to take the fall for this problem. It's the lack of high level management which caused this situation.
Chris,
While the "Iowa Department of Education Accreditation Final Report Iowa City School District dated June 13, 2016," rightly recognized as a strength that teachers, paraprofessionals and staff were committed to providing services to some of ICCSD's most vulnerable students, I found the redacted report profoundly disturbing to read. This will be a test of whether policy governance works.
If permitted by the Iowa Department of Education, it would be beneficial, among other changes in practices, to have the "implementation advisor," who is required to be approved by the Iowa DOE, report independently and publicly to the entire board each month or even more often about whether deficiencies are being corrected, etc.
Thank you.
Anonymous June 14, 2016 I went to Paul Roesler's campaign web site and read through a few of the pages. No surprise there. This is another brainwashed drone who does best at reciting slogans such as "no segregation", "balanced", "equity",... They sound pretty good on paper but when asked how to implement, they either blink their beautiful innocent eyes or they say "we are going to bus the crap out of every kid in this district" My worst fear though, is not that he is naïve and stupid. My fear is he actually has an agenda and will carry a vote and stick it to the parents who don't have the means to fight back. When doing so he will either laugh in secret, or worse, he really believes he is doing these families a favor.
Post a Comment