Friday, July 27, 2007

Letter to the Editor of West News Magazine

As I mentioned in my last post, I had a letter to the editor of West News Magazine published the end of July. They don't keep the letters archived as weeks pass by, so I've added the text of the letter to the bottom of this post.

In this letter, written as I sat in the BOE meeting, I express my disagreement with the single patron comment voiced in that meeting.

Please read this letter. If you agree with it, then join me in supporting Dr. Larson. He's been an important influence on Rockwood during his time here, and it would be a shame to allow factions of the board to engineer his exit.

Editor:

I'm sitting here in the Rockwood BOE meeting, where a district parent just made an impassioned plea to the board to work out an orderly exit strategy for the current superintendent, Dr. Craig Larson, and begin an immediate search for a new superintendent. While I heard his message, I could not disagree with it more.

Dr. Larson has been an excellent superintendent during his entire tenure, promising improvements in the district's financial and academic performance and then delivering on it. His ability to initiate change has been adversely affected, however, over the last 6 months. Dr. Larson and his actions have not changed -- what has changed is the makeup and character of the board. Previous to this, the board was willing to listen and work with the superintendent. Now, they seem to be at odds most of the time. Dr. Larson doesn't seem to be the problem. That only leaves a change in the board...

So my suggestion would be, instead of buying out and replacing Dr. Larson, perhaps portions of the board should adopt a more professional attitude and remember how to work together. There is no requirement that we like those with whom we work, but we must respect them. This is what adults do. We still have the opportunity to get two more years of excellent service from this outstanding man, and we would be foolish to waste it.

When the time is right, a year from now, ask Dr. Larson to use his years of knowledge and contacts to lead the effort to find the best replacement candidate possible. I'm sure he will approach this challenge with the same energy, drive, and excellence that he has used over the rest of his career, both in Rockwood and before.

-- bab

Report from Board Meeting of July, 19th, 2007

I attended the board meeting this past week, and was very pleased to find it much more orderly and well behaved. Only a few things of interest happened:

Operations Committee Report

Bill Adams gave a report from his Operations committee. He spoke about a potential need to build more classrooms to support the new high school schedule, given that there was a chance that more space would be needed for particular kinds of classrooms. They intend to poll the teachers and students during the first few weeks of class to see what the interest is in future classes to allow them to gauge the kinds of classrooms needed.

The interesting part came in when they were discussing how they might pay for these new rooms. In most cases, capital improvements such as these would be paid for out of a bond issue. Bill felt that the need to have these new rooms might be more immediate than what could be paid for in this manner. It was mentioned that Rockwood could fund this construction out of its reserve, and then use a bond issue to replenish that reserve.

My concern about this is that funding the project this way would seem to be like a family dipping into its long-term savings to pay for something that it couldn't otherwise afford. While this is possible to do, it makes the financial situation of that family seem more shaky than it might otherwise appear. To Rockwood, its financial solvency is what allows it to get good interest rates on the bonds used to fund projects. Anything that makes us look less financially sound could drive up the price of borrowing money, which would increase the costs of these projects.

Additionally, it seems that the board is betting on the passage of the bond issue to pay back this money. What if the bond fails to pass? Then we are left with classrooms, which we needed, and a potentially less stable financial situation.

Like a family, it would seem wiser for the district to hold these funds for emergencies.

A Single Patron Comment

After the first discussion, the board retired to a closed session to discuss unnamed matters. They returned after an hour or so, and began by hearing patron comments. There was only one. A district parent spoke about his great respect for the board and its duties and actions, and went on to notice and describe the difficulties that the board and Dr. Larson have been having with their relationship these past few months. Then he got to his point:

Paraphrasing the statement:

Dr. Larson is due to leave in just under 2 years, as his contract expires. Dr. Peckron has announced her retirement at the end of this year. Dr. Scatizzi left a while ago, and his position was never refilled. Wouldn't it make sense if the board brought in a mediator to negotiate a buyout of Dr. Larson now, send him on his way in early fall, and hire a replacement immediately? That would allow someone to already be in place when Dr. Peckron leaves, giving a better transition of power from one administration to the next.

This statement struck me as being pretty peculiar on its surface, so I thought about it a bit.

First of all, the logic here seems to be very flawed. If Dr. Peckron is leaving and Dr. Scatizzi's position is unfilled, why would you want to create another vacancy now? Wouldn't it make more sense to use the experience and contacts of Dr. Larson to fill Dr. Peckron's position and give that person a solid year on the job to act as an aid to the new, incoming superintendent? Given that there are few, if any, qualified candidates to hire at this time of the year, exactly where are the potential new superintendent candidates going to come from "in the early fall"? To get a good candidate will require waiting until after the first of the year, when the administrators begin searching for new positions.

Secondly, getting back to my first point about fiscal responsibility, it is going to cost money to remove Dr. Larson. The board is going to have to authorize an outlay to him well into the 6 figures. Is this really the best use of this money? I'm reasonably certain that buying him out will have no net effect on the quality of life for teachers and students in our classrooms, whereas spending this money to help buy new books or teaching materials, or improving the lives of our teachers would help academic life.

(Look for a letter from me on this subject in West News Magazine in its next edition.)

Now, a plan that would seem to make sense, and wouldn't cost the district the extra buyout funds, would seem to be to start a replacement search for Dr. Peckron's position after the first of the year. Since Dr. Peckron is the ranking expert on her position, she should play an active role in this, along with Dr. Larson and a committee of other interested parties. This would allow the district to start her replacement on the job as quickly as realistically possible, and let the new hire begin to gain on the job experience here, which would be helpful to the new superintendent a year after that. Once that position was refilled, then the following winter another job search could begin to find the best replacement for Dr. Larson.

This plan has the advantage of truly offering a sensible transition plan, instead of the plan raised at the board meeting.

One Very Positive Note

The Board invited a presentation from a group of educators who had been working with young students who were operating at or just below grade level. The leader of this group mentioned that Bill Adams had challenged him to create a program like this in a meeting in January, and they were back to report their results.

During the summer session, this group of teachers taught these students computer skills and spent extra time instructing them about science, engineering, and math. The teachers who made their presentation to the board gave example after example of real progress made by these students, at times relating experiences of over 20% improvement in performance. This was a tremendous success story for these youths, and these educators deserve our strongest congratulations.

Next Board Meeting

The next meeting of the Rockwood School Board is on August 2nd. For more information, see the Rockwood website. I strongly encourage all Rockwood parents to attend -- you can't make an informed choice without knowledge. Please come, observe, and learn.

-- bab

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Report from Electioneering Committee, July, 12, 2007

I had the genuine pleasure of attending a meeting of the Electioneering Committee of the Rockwood School Board this past week. This board is chaired by Steve Banton, with Peggy Devoy and Mary Battenberg as members as well. At this particular meeting, only Steve and Peggy were there of the 3 board members, due to another commitment of Mary's. Also in attendance were several parents, the board lawyer, Kim Cranston (Director of Communications), representatives of the RNEA (teachers' union), and a few others I've missed here. As far as I could tell, there were only 2 non-members present.

Meeting purpose

The purpose of this meeting was to discuss the use of email through the district-owned domain, rockwood.k12.mo.us, for purposes of advocating election issues, including bonds and BOE candidates. In a previous meeting of this committee, they discussed use of other Rockwood resources for electioneering.

What brought this up?

This whole issue came up because of some events that transpired during the past board election season in April, 2007. Without going into explicit details about who did what and why they did it, the events in question involved emails sent by employees of Rockwood into the district email system and from the district email system, and potentially emails sent by BOE members into the email system (more about this last detail later). Even though there was a policy in place, it seems that this policy was ignored in the heat leading up to that election, and potentially reinterpreted after the election in a manner clearly not in the spirit of the rules. To prevent that from happening again, this committee was tasked clarifying the guidelines.

The discussions

The discussion centered around the ownership of the rockwood.k12.mo.us domain name, what the allowed use of the email system was with respect to advocating election-related issues, who the policy applies to, with a slight detour into consequences for violating these rules.

The underlying fact behind all of this, agreed to by all, is that rockwood.k12.mo.us is wholly owned by Rockwood. Every employee of the district is bound by the district's acceptable usage policy to refrain from electioneering using district-owned resources. This applies whether the resource is real, as in the case of copier or facilities, or virtual, as in servers, email systems, and the intra-net. This policy is necessitated by court rulings stating that public institutions cannot advocate election issues using public funds or things purchased with public funds. The lawyer explained this quite clearly, and it made perfect sense.

There is a special relationship, however, that teachers and their union have that allows for a different set of rules. This relationship is governed by a separate memorandum of understanding that the union has with the district. The teachers' union interviews and makes decisions about which of the candidates to support, and they are allowed to distribute this information to their teachers via email. They have done this in the past, and it only now seems to have become an issue. The representative of the union was pretty emphatic that this behavior was allowed, and the committee listened to his statements carefully.

Another point of contention was how these regulations and policies would affect district parents and other non-employees. They talked about this for a while and went around and around a bit. Part of the discussion centered around the use of filtering systems to refuse email containing keywords, like election and the like, but Mr. Banton quickly explained how that would be completely impractical. There is too large a chance of false positives, causing email between parents and teachers to be refused. Personally, I'm pretty sure that the district doesn't send me a paycheck, I'm pretty sure I have no business relationship with them, and I'm pretty sure that their regulations don't apply to me. I'm allowed to send email to anyone I please. They do have to keep the language in the policy to prohibit non-employees from using the email system for these purposes, to satisfy the letter of the law, but that part of the regulation is unenforceable on non-employees. Unfortunately, this leads directly to another problem...

So what do you suppose should happen if a member of the BOE were to send electioneering emails into the district email system? These are the people who set the policies that others should follow, these are the people who are supposed to set the example for all others to follow, these are the people for whom you voted (well, some of you, anyhow). The BOE members are not employed by the district, so they fall into the non-employee category, same as parents. So, yeah, they're not supposed to do it, but there is nothing that the district can do if they violate that part of the policy.

However, ethically and morally, there would be no excuse for a member of the board doing this. It would be ethically wrong, morally wrong, and would set a very bad example if a member of the Board of Education were to violate the very same policies that they put into place to govern the actions of those under them. These people were elected by the public to represent their interests to the school district, and they should be held to a high standard of behavior. Were I to discover an act like this, I would believe it to be my duty to expose such an ethical violation. You can't gain the respect of people if you live by a different set of rules than those that you've imposed on them.

If any board member happens to have done this, I truly hope that they feel shame, great amounts of shame. Unfortunately, the kind of person who would ignore their ethical responsibilities like this would also likely not have enough of a conscience to feel that shame.

Next Steps

There really were no definite conclusions reached tonight. This was a working meeting and, as such, created as many questions as answers. As issues were raised and discussed, changes were made in the prospective wording of section 0380 of Rockwood's policies. These changes have to be made and published to the committee so that they can be approved in their final form. The next meeting of the committee is on August 9th, where they should finalize some of the language of the policies and clarify some of the intent. After about 2 hours, the meeting was adjourned.

Side note

I enjoyed attending this meeting. Mr. Banton conducted it with quiet authority, respect for all participants, and a collaborative attitude. The committee members conducted themselves as I would expect an organization of professionals to act. There was discussion, there was listening, and there was critical thought. It was my pleasure to be a part of it.