Dancing a little jig today...

Its over... its really, finally, actually over.

Per the results on the Post Dispatch web site, with 98% of precincts reporting, Darla Baker, Kim McGuiness, and Rao Kaza are all elected or re-elected to the Rockwood Board of Education! Congratulations to each and every one of them. They fought hard, but always fought fairly and positively. They worked hard, always portraying a positive message. And they won, showing that a positive message and a passionate, dedicated group of volunteers can accomplish whatever they put their minds to.

Congratulations also to the volunteers, their fantastic campaign committee. These ladies and gentlemen worked unbelievably hard to elect these three, working together over the last few months, collaborating in crafting the finely tuned campaign you saw unfold, and getting the word out about these three wonderful BOE members. A job unbelievably well done.

I'd also like to offer my congratulations to Chuck Spohr, Matt Fitzgerald, and Sam Maraldo on their campaigns as well on a race well fought.

I encourage each and every one of my readers to attend the first Board meeting with the new directors this Thursday night. I am so sad that I'm out of town this week, as I really wanted to be there, especially so given the election results. Go and see for yourself the new tone and direction of this Board. I'm sure you'll be pleased.

-- happy as can be,
bab

My vote is in...

I'm going to be out of town on April 8th, so I voted absentee yesterday. I am most proud to announce my votes:

Rockwood School Board Directors:

• Darla Baker
• Kim McGuiness
• Rao Kaza

I have written extensively my reasons for supporting these three candidates, and that support is complete and unwavering. I know each of them personally, and I can think of no one better than any of them to entrust the direction of our school district to. They are far and away the three best qualified and best suited candidates running for this position, and I was thrilled to be able to vote for them.

Proposition 3 (Rockwood School Bond Issue)

• YES

Our schools need this badly. With the changing high school schedule, with needed maintenance improvements, with safety improvements, and more, we need this. Vote for Proposition 3, please. Let's pass this thing by the same landslide that we're voting in the above three candidates!

-- bab

My take on West New Magazine's "Meet the Candidates"

I found the Meet the Candidates article very telling in the March 19th, 2008 edition of West News Magazine. There were 5 short campaign pieces, each written by potential BOE members. I think you can learn a lot about each of the candidates by reading what they wrote, and also by reading between the lines of what they wrote.

Let's start with what Darla Baker wrote. I love her first sentence. "My No. 1 priority is putting children first." I can't imagine anything more important for a BOE member to consider first and foremost. That's why they're there, after all. Then she goes on to discuss how important open and honest communication and collaboration are in dealing with parents, community, staff, teachers, and the rest of the Board. The words she uses throughout her few paragraphs are each full of openness, warmth, and understanding. Just reading what she wrote makes me feel good about her, our district, and what we can achieve together.

Kim McGuiness took a different tack in writing her piece. I know Kim very well, and she is one of the most intelligent people I know. She and I share a lot of the same professional interests, in that we're both very interested in organizations, how they operate, and how people in them relate to each other, and her interest in this subject shows in what she wrote. Her piece comes off as much more serious than Darla's, but both of them are saying the same things. They are both using words like openness, collaboration, communication, community. These are open words, words that invite others to join, words that express a willingness to listen, learn, and share.

Rao Kaza writes similar words and thoughts, though in his own way. Rao tends to speak his mind in a very measured, intellectual way, probably based on his years in business and information technology. He is generally very soft spoken in Board meetings, but his questions and remarks always reflect a thoughtful, reflective  nature. I hear this same tone in West News Magazine. Throughout Rao's piece, he carries forward the theme of Darla's and Kim's positions, that openness, communication, and community are critical aspects of our district and of how Board members should behave.

Each of these three expresses similar thoughts. Reading between the lines, they all value people and their relationships as the main contributing factors to the success of our district. Teachers are valued as people and for their contributions to our students, parents are valued for their contributions in raising their children and for helping turn their kids into lifelong learners, and open communication is valued as the tool to bring everyone together. That's what I take from what each of them wrote.

As a spectacular counterpoint, let's look at what Mary Battenberg wrote. Mary gives a laundry list of items she values as her priorities, including fiscal accountability, responding to patron concerns, equity amongst district schools, and so on for about a dozen more. What is missing in her recitation is a single indication that there are people involved in any of this. The opening paragraph of her statement is filled with activities or priorities, but there is nothing in there that has anything to do with people. In fact, the only person she mentions in her entire position piece is Kathy Peckron, the retiring Deputy Superintendent. For her, the praise is effusive, but again, impersonal. What is entirely lacking in Mary's piece is any indication at all that she considers herself to be part of a community, that she values any sort of input from anyone other than herself, and any hint that she might be willing to listen to parents, teachers, staff, or anyone else before forming her opinion.

Board members are representatives of our community. They are charged with running the Rockwood School District in the best way possible, informed, in part, by listening to input from other interested parties. I don't expect them to know everything, I don't expect them to agree with me on everything, I don't expect them to do what I would do on everything. I do expect them to listen to me, listen to teachers, and listen to each other. Listening is a key part in how relationships are born, and how people work together effectively. If you don't listen, you become an island standing in the way of progress.

On April 8th, I urge you to vote for the inclusive candidates, the candidates who will listen, the candidates who will act with the interests of all in mind. I urge you to vote for Darla, Kim, and Rao for Rockwood School Board.

Rockwood announces Proposition 3

This April, the Rockwood School District will be asking voters to approve a $74.5 million dollar bond issue. I helped create this bond issue, and I can tell you, it is an excellent package, and it has my full support. I urge you to vote for it at the same time you are voting for DRK (Darla Baker, Rao Kaza, and Kim McGuiness).

This proposal is full of absolute needs for the school district. I know it seems big, but that is only a first impression. Construction costs have risen and inflation has taken a bit out of the purchasing power of money, so its not really fair to do a dollar for dollar comparison with the amounts of previous bonds. Taken at its face value, this package offers great value to the students, District, and patrons, since it is focused on upgrading existing facilities when possible, adding new facilities when needed, and improving the academic opportunities for our children.

I'll write more on the bond issue later, but for now, please understand that this package has my full support. I intend to advocate for it through my blog, through letters, and in person, and I will vote for it in April.

April 8th, vote for DRK, and vote for Prop 3!

-- bab

Candidates for 2008 Rockwood School Board Election!!

Hi, all,

It is with great pride and pleasure that I announce my support for

Darla Baker

Rao Kaza

Kim McGuiness

in their bid to become members of the 2008 Rockwood School Board. I have come to know each of them over the past year, and I find them each to be intelligent, thoughtful, reasonable and reasoning, and supportive of each other and of their peers.

Rao Kaza is an incumbent on the board and is fully qualified to continue BOE participation. In Board meetings, he serves as a thoughtful voice of reason, is well spoken, and unafraid to ask logical questions. He probes for underlying meanings, while being polite and humble. I believe he understands that serving on the BOE is a privilege, that his role is to serve the Board and District, not the other way around, and that our children and their needs are paramount. I respect that, and he has my vote.

Darla Baker ran for the Board last year and lost by just a few votes as a write-in candidate. She is a trained early childhood educator, a former teacher, and an insightful person. Last April, she was able to garner almost enough votes to unseat an incumbent, and do so in a matter of two or three weeks. She did this with her ability to create passion among her supporters, her infectious enthusiasm and attitude, and her own passion for helping children. She will be a fine member of the Board, for years to come. Again, she has my vote.

Kim McGuiness is a newcomer to Board elections but not to serving the District. She is one of the best known parent-leaders in Rockwood, previously having served as President of President's Forum as well as being involved with her local school for many years. Kim is also very well known to the current administration, as she is never shy about sharing her opinions on the District with them. One of Kim's many talents is the ability to craft correctly structured organizations, instinctively understand how to appraise and evaluate them, and structure them in such a way that the people involved with them feel good about their participation. She is a natural born leader, possesses a dedication to helping the District and its children, and will add to the voices of reason already present on the Board. She has my vote.

I have complete and total faith and trust in these three individuals. I find them to have the highest senses of integrity, dedication, and passion for the District. I plan on voting for them on April 8th, and I urge you to as well.

If you would like to help, or would like to donate to this campaign, please visit the campaign website. It is continually under construction, as we add position statements, pictures, bios, and up-to-date schedule information for this slate of candidates.

-- bab

Report from January 3rd, 2008 Board Meeting

All in all, a pretty uneventful Board meeting. This summary should be pretty short, as not much was said, and it ended pretty early.

As always, your primary source for the facts of the evening should be BoardFocus.

The biggest issues were:

• NCLB report
• Bond issue approval
• Additional topics

NCLB Report

Kathy Peckron gave a report to the Board on the results of the Adequate Yearly Performance metric, as defined by Missouri, for No Child Left Behind. The basic summary of the report is that Rockwood, as a district, is not in compliance. That sounds a lot worse than it actually is. The overall district is doing great in achieving its NCLB AYP goals. But the way the law is written, if any subgroup (I'll talk about these shortly) doesn't hit their own mark, the entire district is ruled not to be in compliance. For this year, there are three small groups of children in Ballwin and Boles Elementary Schools who missed out on Math AYP, which caused the district to be considered non-compliant.

These subgroups I'm talking about are enumerated below:

• White
• African American
• Hispanic
• Asian/Pacific Islander
• American Indian
• Reduced price or free meals
• Special Education
• English Learners
• Migrant status
• All students

Any student who qualifies for any subgroup is a member of that group. It is possible for a single child to be a member of multiple groups. There is a minimum number of students who need to be in a subgroup before you are held accountable for that group.

So, each year, the state sets an Adequate Yearly Performance metric that all districts in the state must meet. Failure to meet this metric in each and every school for each and every subgroup for which you are being held responsible results in the district being non-compliant.  To make things even harder, the metric is getting increasingly strict each year as we march towards the program's conclusion in 2014. For the year 2007, there were exactly 0 districts in the entire state who were in compliance with AYP. And it is going to get worse next year as the standards are raised again.

One reason for our difficulties, as described by Dr. Peckron, is a large and diverse district. For NCLB AYP purposes, that effectively works against us. District-wide, we are making good progress towards AYP, but we have 8 subgroups for which we are responsible while most districts have 2 or 3. Having so many subgroups increases the chances that just one of them, in just one school, will miss their mark, and make the district non-compliant.

So, what happens if you're not in compliance?

Well, for most of our schools, the answer is "not much". If they are not in compliance, they officially only need to adjust their plans for the next year to help them achieve compliance. Since this is what they would be doing anyhow, this is really not a punishment. On the other hand, for schools who are accepting Title 1 money, which is money paid to the district by the federal government to help low-income students, there are more dire consequences. These include having to send out a letter to your community stating that you are failing to achieve AYP, giving the students the opportunity to transfer to the nearest school that is in compliance, and eventually having the state take over your school if you're out of compliance for 5 years.

This led to a discussion about whether it was worth it or not to accept Title 1 money. Currently, 6 of our elementary schools accept these funds, so these schools are the ones at risk. The money amounts to about $510,000 per year total across the district. For that sum, we put ourselves at risk for these sanctions. If we chose not to accept Title 1 money, as a district, we'd still do the same things to ensure that all students were learning, so nothing would change from an instructional point of view, but we'd have to replace the money somehow to help these children pay for lunches and supplies and we'd be immune from the sanctions above. Interesting conversation for the Board to have.

The conclusion of this discussion was a wish that a representative from the state school board would attend a future board meeting and discuss options and consequences with our board, so that they can make an informed decision (this meeting happed on Saturday, 1/12).

Bond issue approval

Not much discussion or dissension in the ranks, but this was an important decision. The bond issue is going forward, at $74.5 million dollars, to be put to the voters on April 8th, 2008. This, co-incidentally, is the same day that we are voting for our new school board members :) The vote of the board was unanimous, 7-0. Thus have they spoken :)

Additional topics

Steve Ayotte, District Coordinator of Practical Arts, gave a presentation on the future changes to the FAC curriculum. He listed several problems with the current curriculum, including a lack of general understanding of its benefits, a lack of technology usage, and an out of date curriculum. They have set into place a series of improvements, throw their improvement process, to address these issues, and move the FAC curriculum forward. An important change is that the high school and middle school curricula will be coordinated, so that students will arrive at high school knowing what they need to know to succeed, and so that middle school students will not have to sit through repeats of subjects they already know. They are also adding new courses, including a culinary arts program for those students who are interested in becoming professional chefs.

There was a presentation on the Language Arts preliminary discussion. There is a movement to update the language arts curriculum in Rockwood, and this committee is going to be responsible for making it happen. It hasn't started work yet, but they talked about what is going to happen, what their goals are, and when things should start happening.

Finally, there was a presentation on the implementation of Everyday Math through the district. It was acknowledged that this program has been a little controversial. There was a discussion of how teachers were being trained in this way of teaching math, and mention of a parent web site portal, where parents can get information about Every Day Math, including samples, exercises, and games.

Next Board Meeting

The next meeting of the Rockwood School Board is on January 17th. Unfortunately, this is also Marquette Curriculum Night, so I can't make it :( But I'd love to hear about a big turnout from readers there. Time is running short for this board, so they need to know that there are concerned citizens out there watching them, to avoid any last-minute actions by them. Hopefully, by April 9th, we'll have a new Board in place, with new members, and a new power structure.

More on the Board election and about the slate of candidates who has my full and unconditional support will be coming soon.

-- bab

My son and his science experiment

Please enjoy!

-- bab

Why does Rockwood use bond issues to fund construction?

I've heard this question asked a bunch of times, and I did some investigating to find out the answer.

First of all, yes, Rockwood does come back to the public once every couple of years to ask it for permission to sell bonds that it will use for capital improvements to Rockwood. According to law, the money raised from the bond issue has to be used to fund capital improvements to the district and its properties, and cannot be used for soft things like salaries and bonuses.

Each time the district comes back and asks for a bond issue, it tries to make clear that the funds used to repay those bonds are not going to come from a tax increase. The bonds are paid back through the 75 cent debt service levy that is already being paid by Rockwood residents. As long as what we borrow fits inside of the funds available in this levy, there is no tax increase associated with repaying these bonds. (I'm certain some of you out there will tell me how naive this is. I'd love to hear, so comment away!)

There has been a lot of conversation over reducing this 75 cent levy and moving it into the general operating budget, which is funded by a different portion of the Rockwood taxing levy. This would give the district a larger operating budget each year, allowing it to reliably fund maintenance items like technology upkeep, roof maintenance, and so on.

One problem with this is that it would have to be done with a tax increase for the operating levy and a corresponding promise by Rockwood to reduce the debt service levy. It is unlikely that this tax increase, free though it would be, would be passed by voters.

The real trouble with this, which brings us around to the answer to our original question, is that moving the money from a dedicated bond fund into the general operating fund would put that money in grave danger. ("Grave danger?", he asked? "Is there any other kind of danger?", he replied -- name that movie!)

While I respect the office of BOE director, they are politicians. And just like regular people (wait, did I just call them irregular people???), they come to the table sometimes with their own agenda. It could be a pet project for some key donor organization, or it could be something that directly benefits their own children. The point is that once money is all put into the same pot, the temptation is there for board members to use it for whatever they want. So if money were moved from the debt service levy into the general operating fund, even if its sole purpose is for funding technology and maintenance, it would slowly leak out into other projects. And that would leave us right where we are now, a few years down the road, without money in the budget to repair and replace key parts of our Rockwood infrastructure.

It is in everybody's best interests to have maintenance and technology paid for out of the bonds, because this protects those funds from sticky fingers of eager politicians.

-- bab

Summary of the previous 3 board meetings

So, where to begin. Life got busy, between the holidays and a long-term personal/work project I've taken on, so I haven't updated this for a while.

To bring people up to date on what's happening, I'd like to summarize the past few board meetings, hitting on the highlights, controversial decisions, and progress being made towards a bond issue. At the start of each section, I'll include a link to BoardFocus, which is the meeting summary published by the Communications Department. Inside BoardFocus, you can find an unbiased summary of what happened, as well as links to the supporting documents on BoardDocs, as presented to the board.

November 8th, 2008 Rockwood School Board Meeting

• BoardFocus for 11/9/2008

There was a tremendous amount of good news and information presented in the first part of this meeting.

Dr. Larson spoke about a visit he made to a district high school on Veterans' Day. He witnessed an entire cafeteria of students stand and applaud as veterans walked through. This was a wonderful tribute to those who have served from the next generation of leaders, military volunteers, and citizens of our country.

School improvement plans were described for Geggie Elementary and Selvidge Middle as part of the continuing SIP presentations to the board. Both presentations were very good, but Sean Stryhal's, the Selvidge principal, presentation had a few choice items in it. Mr. Stryhal describes how he is striving to create a Learning Community in Selvidge. Administrators work with teachers to create plans and goals, follow up with the teachers to ensure that they're striving towards their goals, and assist them in setting new goals as existing milestones are reached. Learning communities are the larger goal to which all organizational units in Rockwood should strive towards -- this would allow learning to be guided, fostered, and shared throughout the district.

Roxanna Mechem and Richard Blackford gave an excellent presentation on how Rockwood used $1 million dollars from a Teaching American History grant shared with Parkway. This grant allowed teachers from all levels of schools in the district to take trips to different historic sites with the idea that seeing places and items directly involved with American history would allow the teachers to bring the subjects to life for their students. Elementary teachers traveled to Colonial Williamsburg, middle school teachers went to Williamsburg as well, and also traveled to Civil War sites and the Lincoln library, and high school teachers were able to travel to different presidential libraries, where they were able to view and bring back documents that had formerly been top secret.

The next big item on the agenda was a discussion of the bond survey results. The results were interesting, for a number of reasons, not the least of which being the Board's reaction to them.

Please keep in mind that the survey was performed according to scientific and statistical methods, by a company who makes it its business to conduct surveys of this kind, and who has a track record of successfully gauging public sentiment through their surveys. This company does a good job, has lots of clients, and shows good results.

That being said, that main gist of the results were that significantly fewer than half of those polled supported a potential bond issue, and when the size of the proposed bond issue was described to people, their support dropped even more.

The survey, as conducted, was split into three main parts. The first talked about district performance, and Rockwood got generally good grades. People were pretty happy with how the district did things. The second part focused on district-wide improvements, and people tended to be in favor of maintenance, safety, and technology issues, each of which scored above 50% with survey takers. Finally, the third part talked about potential improvements for specific feeder patterns (you can read this as quadrants if you like, although that's a bad word around these parts :)), and there was no significant difference between each area. Nearly every one of them rated under 50% support for area-specific improvements.

In its conclusion, the survey report stated that support for the bond issue is lower than the district might want when going into an election cycle such as this. It went on to say that this was not a reason to avoid proposing a bond, but that this was a reason to carefully present it to the populace according to certain caveats. Quoting from the report:

[T]he district will need to define a plan that is focused, that suggests financial due diligence, and whose benefits are communicated crisply and consistently from the time the proposal is finalized up to election day.

December 6th, 2008 Rockwood School Board Meeting

• BoardFocus for 12/6/2007

The main focus of this meeting was the presentation of preliminary results from the Finance Long Range Planning Committee and the Facilities Long Range Planning Committee. These two LRPs, taken together, created the proposal for the potential 2008 Rockwood bond issue.

The responsibility of the Finance LRP was to determine the maximum fiscally responsible size for the bond issue. It was not their charge to determine the best size for the district, the maximum possible size, of the size that the district should approve, but to give their recommendation of the most fiscally responsible size for the bond. They did that, unanimously voting for a size of $73 million on '08, which would allow $70 million in both '10 and '12.

The responsibility of the Facilities LRP was to take the number given to us by the Finance LRP, as well as the set of projects given to us by the board that they wanted to support, and build the best package of line items to spend that money. And that is what we did. Our committee created a bond issue at $74.5 million that fulfilled the Board's wishes as to the programs, buildings, and maintenance to fund and still stayed (mostly) within our budget.

The unheard leg of the three LRPs with responsibility for crafting the bond issue is Communications LRP, whose responsibility it will be to craft an informational (but not advocational!) campaign for this bond issue. Kim Cranston was asked about her opinion as to the size and contents of this proposal. Her committee drafted a memo to the Board after seeing the survey results in which it stated that it did not believe a $73 million dollar bond issue would not pass, based on the results of the survey. This memo was unanimously agreed to by her committee.

At this board meeting there were 4 patron comments. 3 of them were in favor of the bond, and every one of their comments focused on how much Rockwood needs this bond. Insert sad story here, over and over, about how badly things would be if the district didn't get this money. Well, I need $1 million dollars, but I don't think wishing really hard for it is going to get it for me. There was one dissenting voice, Barry Upchurch, who made a case for not going forward with the bond issue as proposed, and he had actual facts behind his argument. He discussed the raising of property assessments by the county, the hidden tax increase from Rockwood based on the increase in property tax revenues, the backlash from other tax proposals on the same ballot in April, and he proposed an alternative bond issue for significantly less money. He made a lot of good points, and showed a lot of thought behind what he said.

The most important point to take from this is that the results of the survey are being ignored. The district paid money to get answers to questions that it had, it got answers that it didn't like, and it has spent all of its time since then rationalizing why the survey is wrong. I have heard individual board members and members of the Facilities LRP talking about how terrible it was that a survey was conducted, how it is a grave error to ever ask the public questions unless you already know the answers, and how the questions about the size of the bond should have been doctored to give the answer the board wanted to hear.

This just isn't right.

From outward appearances, it seems that these people do not understand what the survey was, how it was conducted, and what it means.

Please don't misunderstand what I'm saying -- I truly want this, or any other, bond issue to pass. I truly hope I'm wrong and my fears are unfounded. The board and the committees are right. Rockwood needs this bond very badly. Without it, many bad things will happen. I fully and completely support whatever bond issue they come up with. I intend to campaign for it, I intend to support it publicly, both here and before any groups I can find, and I believe it is 100% in the best interests of the district.

However, what I see is a group of people who are confusing what they want with what they can  have. This is my concern.

Believe it or not, there actually were other things discussed at this meeting. Most of the details of each of these other items area available through the BoardFocus link at the start of this summary. I'll just mention a bit about a few of the items where I had some sort of strong opinion.

One of the more important issues discussed what an updating of the Science curriculum for secondary students. Rockwood is committing to expanding the set of science courses available to students, preserving the ability of worthy students who are not in honors science in 8th grade to transition into honors science classes in high school, and increasing the number of AP classes offered. They are also introducing a new course in Forensic Science, which uses elements of the other fundamental science courses taught in Rockwood. As part of this curriculum, each student must take biology in 9th grade. This is the one part of the new plan that I don't agree with. I, personally, didn't have any interest in taking biology in high school. Instead, I took 2 years of chemistry and 1 year of physics, and I truly loved those courses. Had I been forced to take biology, a subject I was not interested in, I don't know if my love of science in high school would have persevered. I'm sure they have research showing that biology is important, but hey, so is chemistry and physics. Just my opinion.

They also discussed the secondary science initiative. This is a program that will allow teachers and students to get additional experience in real-world applications of science. Apparently, the dry subjects of science aren't approachable by students without a real-world motivation behind it, and many of the science teachers are currently unable to supply this. This new initiative will address this by providing field trips where students and teachers can actually touch, taste, and smell real science. I'm certainly all in favor of anything that will increase the interest in science of our students, and increase the ability of our teachers to teach this. Science is important to our collective future, so the more interest we can generate, the better!

And finally, Dr. Shari Sevier presented a new course offering for freshmen called the Freshman Seminar. This course was developed as a result of the Pyramid of Interventions committee, which discussed varying levels of intervention into troubled students' academic lives. The purpose of this course, which is offered during the first semester of 9th grade, is to help students adjust to high school life. Every 9th grader is encouraged to take it.

December 20th, 2008 Rockwood School Board Meeting

• BoardFocus for 12/20/2007

I have to admit it, I missed this meeting. My wife took my younger daughter to Wicked, and I took my older daughter to tennis practice, so all I have to go on is BoardFocus and a summary sent to me by a friend.

The big item was that the board created the resolution and ballot language for the bond issue. Each item on the bond is being expressed in terms tying it to one of the three categories of items that drew high public support in the survey -- maintenance, safety, and technology. The hope is that this will make it more likely for the bond issue to pass in April.

The biggest controversy of the meeting involved the disposition of income generated from Sprint in exchange for allowing cell towers to be placed on Rockwood property. Previously, this income had been given to the Rockwood Schools Foundation. I spoke about this Foundation and what it did previously. Mary Battenberg proposed that this income no longer be given to the Rockwood Schools Foundation, but instead be funneled to a fund named for retiring administrator Dr. Kathy Peckron. For the first time in a while, the vote on this topic fell along strict faction lines, with Battenberg, Fitzgerald, Adams, and Strate voting for withholding the money, and Kaza, Devoy, and Banton voting for continuing the funding of the Foundation.

Whenever votes break down along these lines, my suspicions immediately begin to raise and I wonder what is actually happening. The Foundation does such great things, is loved by teachers, students, and parents alike, and operates without regard to personal gain or credit, being satisfied just to improve the lives of teachers and students in Rockwood.  Is there some problem with that?

Next Board Meeting

The next meeting of the Rockwood School Board is going to be Thursday, January 3rd, 2008. According to the agenda, the Board will be voting to approve the bond resolution. Could be fun.

As always, all readers are encouraged to attend Rockwood School Board meetings. They are at Crestview Middle School and begin at 6:00 PM. I truly hope to see you there.

-- bab

Please read the Summary Report from the Rockwood Bond Survey for 2008

I'm going to say some stuff about this survey, and it will make a lot more sense if you read it. Plus, that will let you draw your own conclusions based on what the data said.

Truly, if you haven't already seen it, go read it. This concerns you, your family, and your community. Do yourself a favor and be informed about it.

-- bab

What are these special Board meetings?

A district resident emailed me with some concerns about a special meeting called for the Board on last Saturday. The only description of this meeting was that it was to consider the structure of the district's administration. Given that this was the only description, it was entirely justified to have some curiosity about the purpose and intended outcome of this meeting.

Well, I attended the first of these meetings, and I can tell you that these meetings are a good thing, entirely focused on the future of the district, and a sign of a good administrator looking out for the district.

Dr. Larson requested this meeting as a way of continuing the succession planning for the district as Dr. Peckron retires at the end of this school year. Once she leaves, her position will be open, and he is taking this opportunity to have a discussion about options dealing with how to fill it.

Dr. Larson's Proposal

Dr. Larson proposed splitting the responsibilities for the position of Deputy Superintendent into two different roles. He proposed creating an Associate Superintendent, who would be second in command of the district, and an Executive Director of Curriculum, who would be responsible for the overseeing the current Directors of Elementary, Middle, and High School curriculum.

The Associate Superintendent position would fulfill many of the same administrative responsibilities as Dr. Peckron's current position, but it could be filled by someone with a little less experience. Doing this could keep the cost of filling this position down a bit and would give this person a nice space into which they could grow over time.

The Executive Director of Curriculum position would concentrate the curriculum function in one leg of the org chart, allowing them to focus better on this important job. This would be a new position, but one that is in keeping with the organization of similar districts.

Currently, Dr. Peckron is responsible for both sets of responsibilities, and it is a huge job that she does very well. It may very well be difficult to find someone who can fill both of these roles, and fill them well, so splitting the set of responsibilities makes absolute sense.

This meeting was merely called by Dr. Larson to begin the process of holding discussions around creating this new organization.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting in this process is being held tonight, Sunday, November 18th, at Crestview at 7:00 PM. If you're interested in this, please show up. I'll be there!

-- bab

A Plethora of Posts Promptly

Oh, boy, do I have a lot of stuff to post about. So much, in fact, that I want to tell you what is coming so that you'll know to be looking for it. To be honest, it is to commit myself to writing it as well -- if I've promised it, I have to deliver it, right????

So, this is what is coming over the next week:

• Summary of the November 8th board meeting
• Explanation of the series of special Board meetings
• Summary of each of these special meetings
• Lots of posts about the upcoming Bond issue, including
• Financing, costs, and taxes
• Contents and size of suggested bond
• Why a bond is needed
• Summary of Bond Survey

My goal is to discuss most, if not all, of these things during the Thanksgiving week.

The next Board meeting is December 8th, when the Facilities Long Range Planning Committee is to come to the Board with a suggestion for the Bond issue. If you are interested, concerned, or excited about this topic, this would be a great meeting to attend.

Until my next post,

-- bab

2 Board Meetings to know about

Hi, all,

Just a quick post to remind you about one Board meeting, and tell you about another.

Thursday, November 8th

Tonight's meeting is important, because this is where the Board will first learn of the Bond Survey results. I have no idea what is going to happen tonight, no idea what the results will be, but I do know that I don't want to miss this meeting.

If you are interested at all in the bond issue, its contents, its cost, and whether it should even be put onto the ballot, tonight is the meeting to be at. Check out the agenda, and please show up.

Saturday, November 10th

This is a special meeting of the Board called just this week. Its stated purpose is to discuss the organization of Rockwood administration. Kathy Peckron is retiring at the end of the year, and her retirement is at least one of the topics up for conversation. The agenda is very vague as to what they're going to discuss, but I plan on being there to find out.

The meeting announcement is here.

--bab

Oct 18 BOE meeting -- the gloves come off!

Lots of good stuff from this meeting. The best part of this meeting was the patron comments, of which there were 7. We'll get to them shortly. So here's the summary with a few comments interspersed.

Summary

• Standing committee reports
• Patron Comments
• Superintendent's Update
• Pandemic Flu presentation
• Bond Survey discussion
• Elementary Capacity Committee report
• Enrollment Projections report

Standing Committee Report

As is the custom, before the Board breaks for its closed session (we should talk about these...), they get reports from the Board Standing Committees.

Combined Operations/Community Relations Meeting
Tuesday, October 9th, these two Standing Committees held a joint meeting to discuss the upcoming Bond Issue survey. Two members of the Facilities Committee, Nancy Hanks and I, were invited to attend as well, since our committee is charged with defining the contents of the bond. We met with Ken DeSieghardt, a consultant brought in to define and conduct the survey. We spent about half hour or so discussing proposed questions from Ken, making choices about what questions to include and leave off, and talked about how his firm would be conducting the survey.

The biggest conversation centered around including questions about the amount of the proposed bond issue. I'll explain more about the issue later in this post.

Planning and Student Achievement Committee

Not a lot from them. They discussed the technology proposed for the bond issue, consisting of talking about hiring more employees to support technology through the district, and about potentially moving some of the 75 cents of the Rockwood assessment from the bond debt levy into the general fund.

The one key point you can draw from this discussion is that everyone in Rockwood needs more money. Every committee, every department, every administrator. Everyone needs more money. That has been my biggest realization of late, in working with the Board and its committees -- in the commercial world, companies have the ability to generate revenue to fund their activities, which creates an environment where money is potentially not as tight as in the public sector. If the company is successful, there is an excellent chance that they will have enough money to provide for all the necessities, as well as some luxuries. In the public sector, things are not like that at all. The district lives on a fixed budget, which means they have to make difficult choices every day. Everything they do is underfunded, because the money just isn't there.

Patron Comments

There were 7 patron comments this evening. Each person speaking had a particular problem with the district or Board, and they all spoke very eloquently about their issue.

Schools pushing video games to children

A district father started off the comments with a complaint about a book order form that his child brought home from school. The form had been given to his child by the teacher, along with a letter explaining that the classroom would be given free books if enough students ordered from the catalog. The problem the parent had with this was that the catalog included video games. These video games did nothing to contribute to the education of children, and actively encouraged them to play these games instead of doing something more active. This father very clearly made his point that this kind of advertising didn't belong in the classroom, and he wanted it out.

In my mind, this father raises a very interesting point. Gerald Weinberg, a business consultant author I read, writes about acting congruently with ones words. The district does use a lot of words about doing what is best for children, but their actions don't always match. Strictly based on my own observations, school lunch rooms serve a lot of junk food, there are soda machines on campus, video games are sold at book fairs, and I'm sure there is a lot more that I just haven't seen. Kids repeat what they've been taught, and good eating habits and reading habits would be excellent actions for children to repeat.

Everyday Math Program
A mother came to the board very concerned about the way her child was being taught math. The district has begun to use a program called Everyday Math, developed very recently at the University of Chicago. This program represents a very different method of teaching math, focusing on teaching children non-traditional strategies for doing things like adding and subtracting numbers.

Her child was having problems learning math this way, and the teacher had no alternative teaching method available. It was Everyday Math or nothing.

Quite logically, this mother wanted to learn more about this program, so she looked for her child's text book. There isn't one. Teachers have a book, but students don't. OK, so she wanted to see the teacher's edition. This teacher felt that they had to check with the district before allowing the parent to see this book. After some number of weeks had passed, the teacher refused to allow the parent to see the book, because the district wouldn't let parents see it.

She was quite upset about this, as her child was failing, this particular teaching method was not reaching her child, and she had absolutely no visibility into what the student was being taught, how she could help, or anything at all about it.

Clearly, this is a case of the district falling down on its responsibility to communicate effectively with parents about the progress of their children.

The Board is not obligated to answer, or even address, patron comments, but this comment deserves, and even demands, action. Anecdotally, I've heard from several parents very similar stories. This math program is mildly controversial across the country, as more than a few students are having problems with it. I think we need some answers.

More information about this program is available at a lot of sites on the web.

Rockwood Schools Foundation Funding

The next two speakers asked the Board to continue funding the Rockwood Schools Foundation. They spoke about the great things that the foundation is doing, like giving teachers grants to try innovative teaching methods, creating permanent art structures in schools, and creating excitement in students, parents, administrators, and teachers in Rockwood schools. Both of them asked the Board to continue donating the cell tower easement income to the foundation, to enable it to continue these programs as it grows and expands into a self-funding entity.

Community Support for the 2008 Bond Issue

Two parents came forward to complain very clearly and vociferously to the Board about their actions, behavior, and attitude towards Dr. Larson, teachers, and parents. The message delivered is that there is a growing number of parents who are very dissatisfied with this Board. An example was given of particular behaviors by two of the Board members at a recent Town Hall meeting attended by Dr. Larson. The actions of these Board members were so bad that parents were visibly embarrassed. This behavior and this attitude must stop, or the Board risks alienating even more of the community.

The thing that makes this alienation all the more dangerous is that the community support is critically important to the passage of the 2008 bond issue. Without strong support from the community, and parents such as these two ladies, the bond has no chance of passing. These ladies were both very active in their involvement, have the ear of many district parents and patrons, and can mobilize enough voters to make a difference. If any of you doubt it, just remember how close the election was this spring -- in three weeks, they crafted a write-in campaign that came within a few votes of unseating an incumbent Board member.

It was made very clear that they are willing and able to mobilize these voters again, come April 2008. The actions of the Board would dictate what these voters would do.

Grading and Assessment Policy

Rockwood has been working very hard for quite a while now to define a new grading and assessment policy. This policy affects how children are graded, how homework is figured into a student's grades, and what types of assessments are done to gauge a student's progress. This policy is slowly being phased in throughout the district, grade by grade.

The problem is that the policy hasn't been communicated to parents well at all. I know about it because I attend Board meetings and hear the discussions about it. Few other parents in the district know anything about it.This parent reported that teachers were confused about the policy, as the policy hasn't been defined yet. PTO Presidents were just made aware of the policy last week. He was also curious about what kind of data is available to prove that this new grading policy is effective.

Lots of questions, very few answers, very poor communication.

Superintendent's Update

Dr. Larson reported on a visit to Rockwood by its long-time security consultant, Jesus Villahermosa. Jesus was here for his annual presentations to 6th graders about safety issues. While he was here, he gave presentations to the Facilities Committee and others. Rockwood has an outstanding safety record, but they need to start looking past fire and earthquake kinds of safety issues and focus on the kinds of issues that have been affecting schools lately. Dr. Larson specifically mentioned the lockdowns that have been happening around the country in response to several school shootings. Unfortunately this is the world we live in, so the district needs to be prepared for such occurrences.

Pandemic Flu Preparation Discussion

Tim Woerther graciously offered his time to the Board to give a report on his group, Pandemic Prep. Their mission is to develop awareness across St. Louis of the issues and risks associated with a flu pandemic, and what we can do as individuals and as a district to prepare for such a situation.

The last flu pandemic to hit the St. Louis area happened in 1918. Flu hit cities all over the country, and different areas were affected by it by differing amounts. He compared the affects of the flu in Philadelphia with St. Louis, and showed how the preparations and mitigations performed here lessened the impact of the flu, decreased its mortality rate, and reduced the rate of infection.

During 1918, in St. Louis, to prevent the spread of the virus, public gatherings places were closed, such as school, theaters, churches, and libraries.

We need to create a similar city-wide plan for 2007, including updating measures from 1918 to today's terms, like MetroLink instead of streetcars.

The important next steps that the area needs to take are to choose those tactics that are thought to be effective as preventing or mitigating, decide on a trigger point to implement those actions, and review and communicate the plan.

This is not the first time that the Board has had conversations about a possible flu pandemic. Dr. Larson observed that flu has killed more people than any other disease in the history of mankind. I've never really paid attention to discussions about possible pandemics, but Tim made a very good case. Maybe it is worth investing a bit of time and effort to prepare ourselves for what could be a civilization-changing event.

Bond Survey Discussion

One of Ken DeSieghardt's associates came back to the Board to present the final proposal for the survey. He brought back two versions of the survey. The only difference between the two versions was that one version included several questions feeling out the public about their feelings concerning the possible amount of the bond issue, and the other didn't. Almost all of the discussion centered around whether or not to include these questions, and if so, what should the questions say.

OK, since the Board discussed it in open session, I guess it is OK to talk about it here. The issue is that Rockwood has had a habit of creating bond issues that are in the $45 million range. This year, they have more needs. A lot more needs. They are discussing proposing a bond issue somewhere over $70 million dollars. And the truth is, they really need it. But no one knows how the public is going to react to this number. Will they have sticker shock and vote it down? Or will they look at the quality of items in the bond issue and approve it? No one knows.

So the question becomes whether or not questions about the possibly acceptable sizes of the bond issue should be made part of the survey. On one hand, this question is not usually asked for a bond issue that doesn't include a tax rate increase. On the other hand, Rockwood really needs this bond issue, so if the public won't go for the size bond issue that they're proposing, then we need to know this now so the bond contents can be downsized. Having to do this would be tremendously painful, but passing a bond issue is an all or nothing thing, so everything that can be done to reduce the risk of it being voted down must be done.

After asking a few questions, the Board decided that the questions about the size of the bond issue should be included in the survey. That left the complication of deciding what bond amounts to ask about. Some were in favor of starting very high, like at $95 million and working down, knowing full well that we would never ask for that much, but relying on the hope that it would make the lesser numbers seem more palatable. Others wanted to avoid the excessive sticker shock of starting so high and keeping the questions centered around numbers that were actually possible.

About this time, one Board member reopened the question about whether or not to include the questions at all. She was concerned that the answers that came back might not be what they wanted to hear. At this point, Bill Adams had the line of the entire meeting when he said that fear of not liking an answer is not a reason not to ask a question. Bravo, Bill. Very well said.

The whole point of the survey is to gather what the public is thinking. Rockwood needs this data to know what to propose for the bond, or even if they should propose a bond. It is of critical importance that the information they get back from the survey be the unvarnished truth, because that is what is needed to know how to plot the course to the next election.

Final amounts of the questions were to be left to the survey company's best judgement, as they are the experts, but it will be something like $85/$75/$65 million.

We'll find out the results of the survey at the meeting on 11/8. If I were you, and I was remotely curious about the bond issue, I'd be there!

Elementary Capacity Committee Report

Shirley Broz came back to the Board to update her report from several months ago. The Board had instructed her to go back with slightly different assumptions and redo her conclusions. She did it, and came back. What she reported is that there are several elementary schools that are sorely in need of more space. There are 5 elementary schools that have insufficient SSD space and 4 other schools that lack Adventure Club space. More information is available on BoardDocs.

Shirley graciously came to the Facilities Committee meeting this week and gave us the same presentation that she gave the Board. It was just as good this time as the first time I heard it :)

Enrollment Projections

Formal enrollment counts are taken the last Wednesday of September and January. Rockwood has an official enrollment of 23,332 students, including SSD and VICC. This represents an increase of a few hundred since last year, making our enrollment growth curve basically flat. More information is available on BoardDocs.

Conclusion

That was basically all that was talked about at this meeting. The highlights were the conversations about the Bond survey and the 7 wonderful patron comments. I truly love the courage and passion possessed by parents who speak at Board meetings. Great job to all of them!

The next Board meeting will be on 11/8. This is the meeting where the bond survey results will come back, so I truly and highly recommend that every one of you (ok, both of you) readers attend.

Until next time...

-- bab

Report from October 4th, 2007 BOE meeting

Overall, I thought this was a pretty exciting meeting. The board members talked about some pretty exciting and interesting science initiatives. I’m kind of a science geek, so I was very pleased to hear this. Science education is very important to me, as it is the beginning of the long journey of children towards being the inventors, engineers, and innovators of tomorrow.

Contents

• Bond Community Survey Timeline


• Science Initiative Report


• Library compliance with 4th Cycle MSIP


• High School Schedule Update


• High School Schedule Parent Component Project Team


• Distribution of Cell Tower Income


• Electioneering Regulation (0380) Report

Bond Community Survey Timeline

Kim Cranston gave a report on the progress made in creating the survey being used to gauge community support for the 2008 Rockwood bond issue. As a bit of background, there are current two separate committees meeting to work towards creating the contents of the 2008 bond. The Facilities Committee is working to decide which of the many needed improvements to include in the suggested bond, while the Finance Committee is helping to decide on the suggested size of the bond. Between these two committees, a recommendation for the BOE will be created. This recommendation will be brought to the full Board early in December, where the Board may approve it or suggest changes. That promises to be a fun meeting, so I highly recommend attending. Stay tuned to this blog for an announcement regarding when the bond will come to the Board.

As part of this process, Rockwood is commissioning a survey to be taken by a professional polling company. They want to understand the community wants and desires and to flesh out any particularly sensitive issues before creating the final bond recommendation. The district is doing this to give us the best chance possible of crafting a bond that will have maximum community support, giving the best chance for getting it approved by the voters in April, 2008.

Kim reported that the Operations Committee, the Citizens Committee, and the Facilities Committee would be having a joint meeting on Tuesday, October 9th, to start the process of creating the survey. Out of this committee meeting would come instructions to the polling company about what questions to include. The polling company was going to create a suggested survey and return it to the district by Friday, 10/12. It would be sent out to the attendees at the Tuesday meeting for comments, which are due on Tuesday, 10/16. The comments would be sent back to the polling company for inclusion, and the final suggested survey would be ready for board approval at this next meeting on 10/18.

If you’re curious about the survey, come to the board meeting and see for yourself. I was at the Tuesday meeting where we decided on the questions, and the survey looks really good. There are a bunch of questions about the general performance of the district, some questions about specific projects, and some good follow up questions. If you get called for the survey, please take 15 minutes out of your day and answer. Whether you support the bond or not, your input is important!

Science Initiative Report

This was my favorite part of the Board meeting. As I said before, I love science, so any time we’re going to talk about teaching science to children I’m ready for the conversation.

Mike Szydlowski came to the Board to discuss the research done and to recommend initiatives to increase science achievement and interest (I’m already sold!). The research done consisted of collecting and reading many articles on these same problems, mining these articles for solutions tried by other districts, and integrating the information to form a set of recommendations for our Board. These articles are available on Board Docs.

There were two separate initiatives suggested, for high school and middle school separately. The two proposals were very similar, with minor modifications for middle schools.

The overarching goal of these initiatives is to make science more interesting for students, allowing them to relate the studies back to the real world. Labs, in particular, were mentioned as needing to change to inquiry based, addressing real world problems. While I’m sure this is a completely noble goal and proven through academic research to be effective in helping students learn about science, it seems mildly counterproductive to me. It is entirely possible that my experiences with science are different than most children, since I was very good at the subject and also intensely interested, but I never lacked motivation for learning. My fear is that the purpose of labs may become diluted by introducing irrelevant information into the experience. Labs, as I recall, were done to drill home a theoretical point. For example, the lab about bouncing pucks around an air hockey table, done to illustrate the physics behind inelastic collisions, was interesting in its own right. And the chemistry labs I did were more than challenging enough to hold my interest. What I liked about the labs that I had was that their purpose and goal was unambiguous. The information presented was concrete, without any ambiguity, sufficient to explain the concept, and free from extra information. It let me focus on what I was doing and why. The introduction of real world concepts, challenges, and problems may serve to place the lab into a larger context, but it may detract from the understandability of the point. This leaves you with the tradeoff of a more complicated lab experience available to more students versus a more focused lab to which fewer students may be exposed. I guess if those are the choices, then the former is infinitely better than the latter.

Several issues were raised during the discussion of the high school initiative. The first was that the current Rockwood curriculum is dated, due to the extended cycle of curriculum refreshes. There are new, challenging classes coming soon, but they are not quite ready yet. Another major issue raised was that it was common for students to have more experience with individual topics than their teachers. The example brought out in the meeting concerned the medical industry, where students could be significantly more advanced than their teachers in certain areas. The proposed solution was to offer teachers field trips during summers or on resource days into the field to learn about new and exciting topics. While this sounds very good, as any exposure to newly found information is welcome, this will only help teachers close the gap or put them slightly ahead of their more advanced students. It will not give them the in-depth knowledge of a subject needed to truly teach it. This is worrisome for a subject as important to learn, but difficult to teach, as science in our high schools. Next, they discussed bringing science competitions into high schools, as a way to excite and motivate students. This is difficult to do in high school, because of all the other extra-curricular activities of students and the busy lives of teachers. Currently, teachers who act as sponsors of science-related competitions do so after school, but the suggestion is to make several teachers responsible for this and give them 6th period as free time to do this. They also explored how to put students in touch with real world experience, either through bringing in outside speakers or creating situations where students could explore science in their communities.

The middle school initiative was almost exactly the same, as they were already doing most of these things. The biggest problem that the middle schools have is that the science classes are larger than the rooms can handle. in some classes, there are too many kids to be able to do any labs. The hope is that this can be addressed in the 2008 bond issue, should one be proposed.

Library Compliance with 4th Cycle MSIP

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) is the government body that sets the rules and policies that govern the operation of school districts in Missouri. They publish a regulation called the Missouri School Improvement Program (MSIP) that establishes a 5-year improvement cycle for schools in the state. We are currently in the 2nd year of the current cycle. According to the regulation, schools are reviewed one time during each cycle, and Rockwood is due to be reviewed in year 4 of the plan. Because of this, Rockwood is doing everything it can to fix those areas of the district that are out of compliance with the current, or 4th Cycle, MSIP.

The particular issue being addressed this evening was about library compliance. The MSIP sets certain standards for library size, in terms of area and titles contained, amount and quality of multi-media facilities available. We are currently well out of compliance with 4th Cycle MSIP in Rockwood, and Dr. Kathy Peckron, the Deputy Superintendent for Curriculum and School Leadership, came to the board to discuss how to bring the district back into compliance.

In short, all it is going to take is money. And lots of it… The district currently needs to expand the libraries in several schools, increase the types of media available, and add lots of volumes to the stacks. According to Dr. Peckron, we are $3.2 million dollars short in our current funding levels. In other words, it would take this amount of money to bring us into minimal compliance with this regulation. It would take about $3.8 million dollars to bring us up to a high level of compliance. And once we do bring ourselves back into compliance, would need to increase our yearly funding of libraries and media centers by $400,000 per year, up to $727,440, to keep us in compliance. Clearly this is a lot of money, and we would have to prioritize what changes and improvements were made.

The Board seemed to be pretty shocked by the magnitude of this unbudgeted need. They expressed the fear that there were other similar MSIP-related needs that they didn’t know about. Dr. Peckron promised to bring forward subsequent unbudgeted needs every month, including a middle school math initiative that will be brought to the Board soon. It did seem pretty apparent that the Board was not very happy at this point, since they didn’t know, and had no way to know, what the total amount of these unfunded and unbudgeted needs were.

High School Schedule Update

Susan Hladky brought the Board an update on the High School Schedule update for the 2008-2009 school year. The focus of this report was about professional development days, and how to coordinate the scheduling of these days across the district. Mrs. Hladky brought a couple of options to the Board, based on one of two proposals. Both of the proposals had all 4 high schools taking the same professional development days. Peggy Devoy noted that a survey of parents taken fairly recently unequivocally said that parents wanted entire quadrants of the district to be off together. This made child care for families on professional development days much easier. It seems that this survey was forgotten during the creation of this plan, so the board agreed to try this new schedule for a year and then discuss it the following year with principals.

It still seems that the Board is discounting documented input from parents in favor of a plan that they approved. I hope that they will revisit this decision after a year and reassess the affect of this policy on district families.

Distribution of Cell Tower Income

How many of you knew that there was a charitable organization called the Rockwood Schools Foundation? Their mission, as found on their web page is,

The mission of the Rockwood Schools Foundation is to raise money for innovative educational programs that make a lasting difference in the lives of Rockwood students.

What this foundation does is to solicit grant applications from Rockwood teachers who have innovative ideas about new things to try in their classrooms. The best of these grant applications are chosen, and money is given to these teachers to try out their ideas. I was at their grant presentation ceremony last year, and it was very exciting to see the passion and creativity in these teachers.

One of the main ways that the Foundation is funded is through income generated from allowing a cell provider to place cell towers on district property. The Board approved the redirection of this income to the foundation, to enable it to fund the previously described programs. Through the growth of this revenue and fund raisers, the Foundation was able to fund $120,000 worth of grants over the past 2 years. This year, they have $84,000 of grants to extend, including student scholarships.

The question before the Board is whether or not to continue directing this funding to the Rockwood Foundation. They Board has three options for this funding — continue approving the funding yearly, dedicate the funding for multiple years, or to stop the funding entirely. There is apparently some controversy about which path to choose, controversy that is being kept within the Board currently.

Given the increasing ability of the Foundation to generate its own funding through donations and fund raisers, Rao Kazaa suggested that the district continue its funding of the the Foundation until such time as it is self funding. This is expected to happen within a few years.

The discussion was tabled for now, to be readdressed at the October 18th meeting of the Board.

High School Schedule Parent Component Project Team

This is a group that is working on implementing the new high school schedule starting next school year. This schedule is in response to an increase in credits required for graduation, based on new Missouri law. The biggest issue that this committee has is that this information has not been disseminated to district parents yet. They are developing communications strategies to get this information out to parents, such as parent handbooks, electronic and print communications, and holding parent meetings in each quadrant.

Electioneering Committee Report (Regulation 0380)

After the election fiasco of April, 2007, the Board formed an ad hoc committee to re-examine Regulation 0380, the district regulation describing acceptable and unacceptable electioneering behavior. The issue in front of the Board this evening is only to receive the report of the committee, not to approve or disapprove of its contents. The committee reported its findings in terms of changes to the existing regulation.

Steve Banton chaired this committee, and gave the report. other members of the committee were present to answer questions. Mr. Banton reported that the changes to the regulation were accepted unanimously, with one exception.

The changes consisted of reordering the basic organization of the regulation, moving those activities that are permitted to the start of the regulation, and the prohibited activities to the end. The rest of the changes, save a couple, were mostly word-smithing. The net effect of the word-smithing was to further clarify what is allowed (distributing in student backpacks non-advocational literature written by the district, electioneering by district personnel on their own time) versus what is not allowed (use of any district property or resources for advocacy, including the district email system).

The one statement that proved controversial was a part that was added to help guide members of the Board in avoiding perceived or actual conflicts of interest when applying this regulation. The biggest issue that this re-examination of the regulation was to clarify was how to decide if a piece of literature to be distributed through district channels was advocational or not. According to law, public organizations cannot use any public funds or resources to advocate for or against any candidate or bond issue. This means that the district must be extremely careful about any election literature distributed through district channels, under peril of law. Since, for issues involving Board candidates, the current members of the Board have a rooting interest, they should recuse themselves from taking part in any decision about the advocational content of literature.

The committee suggested language be put into the regulation explicitly removing authority from the Board to make decisions about these issues, and vesting that authority in the Communications Department, in concert with legal counsel, and Dr. Larson.

The unavoidable problem with this language is that Rockwood regulations hold no power over Board members. In fact, fellow Board members hold very little power over their fellow Board members. The committee is free to write any language that it wants, limiting the powers of the Board, but any member of the Board is free to violate that language at will, with absolutely no repercussions. For that reason, half of the committee wasn’t comfortable including this language, since it had no affect whatsoever. Another half of the committee wanted it in there, just to serve as a reminder to the Board of how they should act. Deadlock!

During discussions on this particular language, Mary Battenberg and Janet Strate agreed with the half of the committee that voted against the language. They made the same case — it doesn’t have any power over the board, then why should we have it. Their other reason was that the Board is ultimately responsible for the district to the state, so they would be very uncomfortable recusing themselves from these discussions and decisions.

Mary Battenberg focused herself on another topic that interested her. One facet of this regulation is that use of district email servers “by Rockwood personnel and any others” for advocational purposes is strictly prohibited. Mrs. Battenberg was particularly concerned about the “and any others” part of the regulation being able to send electioneering emails into Rockwood, as happened during the last election. She wanted to make sure that this use of district resources would be prohibited for parents. The only problem with this idea is that the policies and regulations of the district have no authority over the actions of parents in the district. As employees of the district, any teacher, administrator, or staff member is governed by the rules of the district, per their employment contract or collective bargaining agreement. Parents, however, have not entered into a contract or agreement with Rockwood, so they are not bound to their regulations. If I were to want to send any sort of email into the Rockwood email system, short of things obviously unlawful (porn, threats, etc), I can darn well do it.

The only avenue open to the district at this point is to use content filtering to prevent the flow of electioneering information into the district email system, to Rockwood personnel. I can personally testify to the effectiveness of content filtering software, as I’m sure all of you can, as well. We don’t ever see spam in our inboxes, do we? I don’t get more than a few thousand a day, personally. I’ve been on the internet since the late ’80s, I have two blogs, I used to post to professional usenet newsgroups, I take part in online forums — in short, my email addresses are out there for anyone to harvest. If content filtering actually worked, wouldn’t I be using it to eliminate received spam?

The other problem with content filtering is that it can result in completely innocent and appropriate emails being blocked. Imagine if you wanted to email your child’s teacher about election issues in the upcoming presidential election, and you happened to trigger some of the keywords. This can and almost certainly would interfere with your ability to communicate with the teacher. Bad plan, very bad plan :)

No decision was made tonight, but the regulation is going to be taken to Policy Review Committee, then back to Board for a first and second reading, and then a vote. Stay tuned for info.

Conclusion

Well, those were about the only interesting issues brought up in the meeting. I do my best to capture the spirit of what happens, as well as the facts, but it is much easier to understand if you’re actually there. I continue to encourage each and every one of you to attend just one Board meeting. Come, see who these people are, how they interact with each other, how they think. Then you’ll be able to make your own judgements about whether or not my summaries are accurate or not :)

bab

Welcome to another board meeting summary. This meeting was remarkable in that it was not overly long, it was informative, and all parties acted with proper decorum. I hate it when that happens :)

• Operations Committee Reports
  
• Patron comment
  
• Pyramid of Intervention Committee report
  
• Report from Dennis Griffith
  
• Scholarship and College Counselors update
  
• Individualized Learning Center report
  
• High School Intervention
  
• Board policy Updates

Operations Committee Reports

There were reports from several standing district committees. I'll outline some key highlights from each report:

Planning and Student Achievement

• Board certification for teachers is a good thing for the district and for the teachers. District gets better trained teachers, teachers get the training and an increase in pay. Some sense of worry over pay increase if sizeable percentage of teachers are certified.
  
• Investigating 21st century skills. Dr. Larson was charged with creating a plan to look at key 21st century skills that Rockwood students will need in a previous Board meeting.

Operations

• A survey is being created about the bond issue. Questions remain about the first draft, the length of the survey, and a comparison of the surveying companies.
  
• Many schools need improvements in their libraries to stay in compliance with state guidelines. It is going to take quite a bit of money to buy new books, retire old books, increase space, and bring libraries to where they should be. And once they are compliant, it will take additional, continuing money to keep them in compliance over time.

Community Relations

• Talked about bond issue in their meeting
  
• Is trying to create Speakers Bureau (in response to Board request as voiced in discussion over Superintendent's Blog?). They have generated a spreadsheet of all community organizations. Now is deciding what the bureau makeup should look like.
  
• Discussed how to handle requests from outside entities for student names and information. They are allowed to do this, as long as what they distribute meets some specific guidelines that preserve student privacy. Does the district have to honor such requests, can they charge for them?

Patron Comment

There was a single patron comment during the meeting. A District parent spoke about how Policy 6450, Grading and Reporting, was being implemented. According to the implementation directed by the Board, this policy is not supposed to be in effect until 2008, and then phased in over a number of years. According to her comment, this policy is already being implemented in some high schools and middle schools. Her main complaint centered around the fact that this fairly broad and important change was very poorly communicated to parents. It affects so many of our children, yet so few parents even know it is coming. Why?

Pyramid of Intervention Committee

The Pyramid of Intervention is a set of strategies and responses designed to allow teachers to react in a predictable way when rewarding or disciplining students (my own interpretation). In a welcome change, this meeting talked about the rewards system used to praise students who perform and behave well.

The belief of this committee is that younger students need more structure to their days than older ones. This allows rewards to be given to high school students resulting in more freedom in how they can structure their days, increasing from 9th to 12th grade. Assuming students qualify for this set of rewards, they can be granted privileges such as changes to go to the library during class hours, one-on-one teacher contact, and working as an office aide. The specific set of rewards has intentionally been left to individual high schools, to allow them to create incentives that match their existing culture and traditions.

The only troublesome part of this program to me is that they are looking at expanding the set of entrance criteria to this program. One possible criterion may be submitting to random drug testing, which I personally would be 100% against. I'm thinking back to my high school career at Parkway Central, and I would probably have been part of a program like this. I was an excellent student, always behaved well, had a good relationship with my teachers and administrators, and so on. I can't imagine being asked to submit to random drug screening at that point in my life, after working so hard to gain the respect of my peers, teachers, adminstrators, and parents. I think we're risking sending the wrong message here.

Report from Dennis Griffith on Transportation

In case you didn't know, there is a new high school schedule set to go into effect next year. It was caused by a new requirement from the state, increasing the number of credits needed to graduate from high school. To meet these new credit requirements, Rockwood decided to change the makeup and timing of the high school days. These changes necessitated changes in the bus routes, resulting in middle school children now being dropped off as early as 7:00 AM at their schools. This change will require $75000 to pay for additional supervision for these children.

First off, I don't know where this extra $75000 came from. Was this initially budgeted as part of the new high school schedule, or is this some extra expense that the Board has to approve? Was their any way that this extra cost could have been foreseen and potentially avoided by more careful consideration of the new high school schedule? Seems like an expensive thing to overlook...

Second, we're now asking our middle school children to have to wake up even earlier now, to make it to a bus 10 minutes earlier, to stay at the school building longer during what is already a long day for them. Again, this doesn't seem like a wise choice. These children are growing every day (my 8th grade daughter seems to grow about 3 inches a day :)), and they need their sleep. This truly does not seem like a good thing, but the best of a set of poor choices resulting from a lack of foresight.

Scholarship and College Counselors

This was a great report on the success that Rockwood enjoys in getting its students accepted into major, highly competitive universities around the country. The counselors do a great job in helping students learn about different universities, and then helping them prepare for the application process. The district has a college fair, where about 2000 students attend, including over 100 VICC students.

Additionally, the Athletic Directors at district high schools have done an excellent job in helping the recruitment process for our athletes. Rockwood students earned 72 athletic scholarships last year!

Individual Learning Center

This was a report given at the request of the Board. The ILC helps smart but troubled kids succeed in school. Their mission is to help students graduate who might otherwise have failed or dropped out. They were founded in 1996 and are up to 90 students now. Their goals are to increase student completion, attendance rate, and achievement. They have a low student/staff ratio and use a variety of teaching strategies to reach each student. At the end, they spoke of needing a small amount of room in their current building to be repurposed and set aside for them. This would give them additional instructional space for small classes and one-on-one counseling.

High School Intervention

There was a presentation about the High School Intervention policy, which is designed to identify and help those students who need extra help to succeed. Their presentation centered around the different strategies in place to identify those students in need, what kind of information they collect on them, how they communicate with parents, including Infinite Campus, and how they monitor these students' progress.

The presentation itself was very well done, and the program seems to be very well put together. Bill Adams had a wonderful comment at the end, where he praised the principals who take part in this program for treating each individual student as an individual and not a number. The adminstrators know each of the students by name, know things about them, talk with them, and so on. He thought this was excellent work, and I whole-heartedly agree with him. People are not numbers, even when taken in large groups. Individuals are their own person first and foremost, and only part of a group of people as a distant second. I echo Bill's praise for going the extra mile to get to know each student as a person. That's how trust and relationships are built.

Board Policy Updates

The biggest issue here was discussion the portion of the New Member Orientation policy that discusses the rules around absences from Board meetings. As current defined or interpreted, any member who misses three consecutive meetings is deemed to have abandoned their position, and the Board is allowed to replace them. There is an exception inthe case of excused absences, for things like a death in the immediate family, sickness, and so on.

The problem with this interpretation, as discussed at the meeting, is that there is no legal definition for what it means to have abandoned a Board position. Someone could miss a dozen meetings in a row, get replaced, come back, and potentially have a legal right to reclaim that seat. There is actually no legal recourse that the Board has against any of its members to remove them, short of them comitting a felony, moving out of the district, or a couple of other similar reasons.

The Board admitted there was an issue with this, but they couldn't come to closure on it. They'll discuss it again at a subsequent meeting.

Conclusion

And so ended a basically controversy-free Board meeting. I've recorded and represented the few contentious issues I noticed, and there weren't many. On the bright side, this upcoming meeting, October 4th, will be more exciting. The Electioneering Committee completed its work a couple of months ago, and their report is to be brought to the Board. This should be loads of fun for reasons I'll discuss after the meeting.

Thanks for sticking through this update. I know they're getting long, and I'm considering just referencing the BoardNotes document that Rockwood publishes and adding my comments as needed. That would make my job easier, but potentially make it more difficult for readers to follow while jumping between both documents. We'll see :)

-- bab

 

More on Superintendent's blogging and a description of what "blogging" is

I posted about this a while ago -- there was some controversy a couple of Board meetings ago with respect to the Superintendent writing his own blog. Kim Cranston, the Rockwood Director of Communications, put together a great case for why Dr. Larson should have a blog, how it would help communication with the community, and showed how other districts and superintendents are already doing it. I thought I would add a few links to some of the blogs that she found as well as some others, so you readers can check for yourselves on how it works.

Kim Cranston's Links

• Blogging to my Advantage


• Blog referenced from above link


• Blogging With the Doors Open


• Superintendent Bob Lewandowski's Blog


• Bend-La Pine Schools Superintendent's Blog


• National School Boards Association Board Buzz Blog

My Links

• A Blogger's Life in the Leadership Ranks


• A Podcast from a Superintendent

From looking at these links, and the ease through which I found them (a bunch of really simple google queries), it is abundantly clear that districts who are looking forward to the 21st century are encouraging new, modern, effective electronic means of communication between their citizens/customers and the administration. The corollary of that is that Boards who are actively preventing their administration from joining the 21st century may be spending most of their time looking backwards. Is this what we want?

What are blogs?

Blogs, or more formally web logs are a kind of online diary. There are about the easiest way possible to publish your thoughts on the internet in a way that anyone can read them. The thing that differentiates them from email, frequently asked questions lists, and normal web pages, is that blogs enable a two-way conversation. Each blog post has a section following the article where readers can add their own comments to the post. The author can read these comments, reply to them, and carry on a conversation with real, live people.

There are already places on the Rockwood site, like Ask the Supt, where a teacher, student, parent, or patron can send an email to the Superintendent. These, however, represent one-way communication. The asker gets a direct reply, and no one else gets to see the answer. Questions that are asked frequently get added to the Frequent Asked Questions list on that same page. There is nowhere on the site where people can engage in two-way, interactive, personal communication with the Superintendent, other than on this potential blog.

Reading a blog

There are a couple of ways to read what is written on a blog. The easiest way is to just visit the website where the blog lives. There, you can see the content, see past articles, read comments, submit comments, send email, and more. Very easy, as its the same model of visiting a website that we're all used to.

But there is another way.

I'm going to get a little technical for a second, but it won't last long. One other characteristics that blogs have is that they broadcast updates when new articles are added. Using a kind of message called Really Simple Syndication (RSS), they send out announcements of changes to blog comments. On my blog, you can see a small orange rectangle with three short, white arcs on the right side. This is my RSS link. If you have a piece of software called a Blog Reader, you can subscribe to these RSS announcements. Then, when a change is made to a blog to which you're subscribed, you'll be notified, and the new article will be ready and waiting for you in your Blog Reader. I guess you can think of it as a way of building your own customized newspaper carrying articles about topics you're interested in reading about. I follow about 100 blogs every day, consisting of 30-40 new posts daily.

So, what Blog Readers are out there for you to use? The easiest way is to use Google Reader. This is a service provided by Google that allows you to subscribe to these announcements and read the articles that are ready for you. Its a really easy site to use, with lots of help. If you have any problems getting it up and running for you, drop me a note, and I'll help. Aside from that, there are programs that you can run on your Windows, Mac, or Linux desktop that will do the same thing. My favorites are Omea Reader for windows and New News Wire for Mac (I don't have a favorite for Linux, but if you're using Linux, I probably don't need to help you with this!).

Once you do decide to use a Blog Reader, your next challenge is to find good blogs to read. I can help! If you right-click this link and save the contents as a file, you'll download a file to your computer that contains the RSS addresses of four different blogs -- this one, and three from Rockwood. You can use this file to import these blog subscriptions into your reader. Again, any of these tools should give you lots of help in doing this, but the key is that you're looking for some menu entry or link about "Import Subscriptions" or something like that. Import this file, and you'll be on your way! And again, if you have any problems, let me know, and I'll try to help.

Adding articles to a blog

Posting to a blog is easy. Using a fill-in-the-blank text box on a website like blogspot.com, where this blog is hosted, you can write what you want to, add links to other web sites, add images, highlight text, and press Save to create your message easily and in a non-technical manner. I'm sitting in a Bread Company right now, in fact, typing this into my blog. Its really easy, I blog all the time, and anyone can do it.

Contrast this with regular websites on the internet. Formal websites require designers and programmers to work for days and weeks to create the appearance ("look and feel" in technical parlance) and feature set that will be used by its visitors, and then each page needs careful attention to make it look correct for all its visitors. Any website you visit, like Yahoo!, STLtoday, or Rockwood, requires these professionals.

Conclusion

I'm sorry if part of this post got a little technical. Welcome to the internet! You can take comfort in the fact that your kids can probably explain this stuff to you if I wasn't clear about it :) Seriously, blogging is a great way to establish connections with readers all over the district, and even world. I have readers of my professional blog from all over the world -- they send me comments, I answer their questions, and we learn from each other.

Its easy, its free, and its the wave of the future. Rockwood should catch that wave now, or risk being swept out to sea, as just another fish in the big pond.

-- bab