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