After 3 grueling hours, my most prominent thought is “I will never run for the Board”. Ironic, since I told my wife just this afternoon that I would consider it. Ha!
In retrospect, I should just have looked at the agenda before even thinking about going. The agenda is friggin’ long! And the meeting reflected that. Several topics could have easily been a stand alone meeting. It will be interesting to see what Jodi Heckle reports on, but for me there were two things, two actually small things, that stuck out.
First, the “Great Schools, Together” thing actually is still alive. It would be hard to know it (that it is still alive), and I wonder how much they will publicize it. To me, I was a bit disappointed that they measured “Parent and Community Engagement” on the sole basis of a very simple survey of the school district website. Yes, read that again. Not only that, but the information covered during the meeting was a summary of how survey participants graded various areas of the website, with most people saying Good (next up was Fair). This is how community Engagement is measured?!? Coincidentally, I just stumbled upon a much more satisfying report that Lynn Peisker put out; it tells how Unit 4 heard what parents are saying about the website and what Unit 4 has done to show how they have listened. It is interesting. The comment about the PTA portion of the school website continues to rub me the wrong way – “the face of the school”. It ain’t.
Second, I waited 2.5 hours to hear about the Climate Survey (shifted to last on the agenda) and it got all of…. what 2 minutes? Basically, Dorland Norris mentioned that the Board and the Administration are going to thoroughly review it and then make it available. Sometime. Dave Tomlinson said (in an email prior to the meeting – he was not in attendance) it would be “released” tonight, but I guess “released” does not imply the public can have it. One crucial statement Ms. Norris made was that (and this was obviously a prepared statement) the District does not agree with Dr. Aber’s conclusions. Of course, we have no idea what those conclusions are (yet) nor how the District disagrees. Gotta love it.
A ton of other stuff was covered at the meeting. Good discussion about the literacy program and how the District receives a fair amount of federal funding that is contingent upon certain Literacy positions being supplied by the District, and how that actually works in our favor since reading is currently one of the District’s weaknesses. A discussion about how Vanguard is going to somehow save us money because if we sign a two-year contract now, we will most likely be able to take advantage of current low natural gas prices and lock in the low rate. Allegedly. Lots of principals were in attendance to talk about how things were going – I remember most several at the end who talked about implementing “block” teaching methods (basically, devoting 80 minutes to Math/science or English/Language Arts), which has pros and cons. A quick show-n-tell of the kind of glass some contractor wants to put in at new construction. Lots of good things covered in the “Great Schools, Together” section, but I had massive brain drain by that point.
And then the Board Members and Administration went into Closed Meeting. How do they do that? Is there an open bar back there or something?
