I was planning to write about my adventures in opting out of the STAR Enterprise test next, but it seems that the board and the superintendent with the assistance of The Huntsville Times reporter Challen Stephens has decided that today, without any prior public discussion of the issue, was a good day to announce to the city that we should “Get Ready for the Rezoning of Huntsville City Schools.” As such, the discussion of opting out will have to wait a day or so.

Today Mr. Stephens, as a mouthpiece for the superintendent and the board of education, told the city that, “it’s time to redraw school zones throughout Huntsville.” He went on to write:

But change itself should not come as a surprise. Huntsville almost two years ago hired a retired Army colonel to fix its school system, and the board made a point of asking him to end the 43-year-old court order to desegregate city schools. Rezoning is a small part of the plan to do just that.

It’s a shame that Mr. Stephens decided to reprint what basically amounts to a press release from the board announcing this as if the decision has long since been made about rezoning. But he went further by claiming that no one should be surprised by this necessity because we all knew this was coming when we hired Wardynski and the board made achieving unitary status one of his priorities.

This sounds awfully good on paper; it’s a shame that there’s so little truth in this statement.

No Mention of Rezoning

You see, I’ve attended all but three board meetings held during Dr. Wardynski’s tenure. The three that I missed, I watched from home or on the DVD recordings available from ETV.

I’ve heard every single public discussion concerning unitary status that has occurred at a board meeting. Every single one. And you know what, not once since Wardynski was hired has there been a single public mention of rezoning during a board meeting.

Not one single mention.

So, I’m not sure what Mr. Stephens is basing his claim that “change itself should not come as a surprise.”

When the district, when the superintendent specifically state that rezoning will not occur, I’m sorry, but it does tend to come as a bit of a surprise, no matter how the Times might wish to spin it.

Wardynski Told Public No Rezoning

On January 14th, Dr. Wardynski met with the public to discuss moving Grissom High School to a new location just behind Sam’s Club on South Parkway.

During this meeting, Dr. Wardynski was asked a question about rezoning that he responded to fairly (for him, anyway) directly.

Q: Are you considering rezoning with the new Grissom?

A: No. If there is [any rezoning], it will be for currently zoned students, not transferring students.”

Dr. Wardynski went on to say that he “will not have students transferring across town – students will go to new schools at Johnson or Butler in their home school zone.”

As I said, for him, this was a fairly direct and to the point response to a direct question. It’s a shame that Mr. Stephens was evidently unaware that Wardynski had long since told us that there would not be any rezoning of Grissom High.

So yes, it does indeed come as a surprise that rezoning is now being presented as a necessity.

And really, since evidently not even the board has seen the final plan (which is nearly impossible to believe, by the way), I do have to ask how Mr. Stephens knows that “Rezoning is a small part of the plan to do just that.”

And again, if the board hasn’t seen the plan yet (as the article claims), how does Mr. Blair know that “the current plan would not rezone Blossomwood into Lee High?” How does he know that “I think Huntsville High stays pretty strong” (quite a reassuring endorsement, isn’t it)? How can Dr. Robinson claim, “I’m not seeing anything that gives me a great deal of concern?” (And really, can anyone name anything that Wardynski has done that has given Robinson “a great deal of concern?”)

What we have here is another attempt by Wardynski to use “the press” and the board of education to push his agenda on the city without any public input at all.

Even though there has been zero mention of rezoning in a public meeting, even though Dr. Wardynski himself assured the public at the town hall meeting that there would be no rezoning, we’re already being told that anyone who has a problem with this “plan” simply hasn’t been paying attention.

It seems that it is instead the Huntsville Times that hasn’t been paying attention. Isn’t that actually the only job the paper has? Shame they refuse to do it.

This is Our City. These are Our Schools.

This city belongs to us, the people. It doesn’t belong to the Huntsville Times. It doesn’t belong to the Huntsville Board of Education. It doesn’t belong to Dr. Wardynski. It belongs to us.

It’s time to remind Dr. Wardynski, the feckless board of education, Mr. Brooks and the Times that this is our city.

If you wish to do this, you may wish to speak during the public comments section of the board meeting scheduled for Thursday night at 5:30pm. If you wish to speak on this or any issue, you have to sign up before the meeting. The easiest way to do this is to email Debbie Jennings the Superintendent’s secretary at debby.jennings@hsv-k12.org. Tell her that you would like to be placed on the citizens’ comments list representing yourself to speak to the issue of rezoning.

You should demand to see the rezoning plan. You should insist that the public have input into developing the plan.

The district employees and the board of education work for us. They owe us specific answers without pushing for acceptance of the “plan” before we’ve even seen it.

The post Rezoning Without Involving the Public appeared first on Geek Palaver.

Yes, I am a something of a broken record, asking the same questions over and over. But occasionally the Huntsville City School’s district leaders say something new that changes the playing field.

On March 22, Frank Spinelli, the CSFO of Huntsville City Schools, and Dr. Wardynski’s personal friend whom he brought with him from Aurora, Colorado last August, finally decided to respond to a request that I had been making since March 7th.

Specifically, I was requesting from him a copy of the initial LEAN Frog contract for an audit that was conducted from October 2011 through February 2012. This was the audit that Wardynski claimed proved that he was a strong leader and everyone who opposed his ideas were just whiners.

This was the audit that was supposed to change everything.

Except, all it really did was allow Wardynski to redirect attention away from himself and his decision and point the finger at others.

Case in point.

You would think that asking for a copy of a contract would be a simple thing to do. After all, the second contract with LEAN Frog that was approved on February 25th is readily available online. In case you don’t want to download it, that contract was for $152,761 and is scheduled to be completed by September 25th.

A third contract with LEAN Frog was approved tonight to revamp the Human Resources department. I suspect that that contract will be posted on the district eBoards site tomorrow. We’ll have to wait until then to find out how much that contract was for, though, since there was no discussion of the costs of any of the approved contracts during the board meeting tonight.

Nope, the only person who discussed money tonight was me in reference to the first LEAN Frog agreement that covered services from October 2011 through February 2012.

According to the District’s Check Registers, the district paid Mr. Headrick of LEAN Frog a total of $28,790.00 during those five months.

Here’s a listing of the checks if you wish to look for yourself:

• November 2011: ;$2,890.00 (Pg. 20)
• December 2011: $5,760.00 (Pg. 25)
• January 2012: $5,760.00 (Pg. 3)
• January 2012: $5,380.00 (Pg. 9)
• January 2012: $6,480.00 (Pg. 16)
• February 2012: $2,520.00 (Pg. 10)

Since this is about 5 times less than the contract they’ve already published, you would think that they would be happy to share it with the public as required by Board Policy 102-1 Access to Information.

But no.

Spinelli decided instead to stonewall. It wasn’t until I sent my request concerning this contract to both him and the entire board of education that he decided to respond.

Here’s the text of an email that I received from Mr. Spinelli on March 22, 2012 at 6:23pm. This email was sent from Frank Spinelli (frank.spinelli@hsv-k12.org) to myself, every member of the board of education, Dr. Wardynski and J. R. Brooks, the school board attorney.

Mr. Spinelli wrote:

Mr. Winn, the district does not have any documents responsive to your request.

Also, the district had been advised by the school board’s attorney that Alabama bid law does not require bids in this type of contract, Ala. Code Sec. 16-13B-2(a)(2).

Frank

That’s right. Mr. Spinelli was telling me that the very audit that unearthed all the “incompetence” that Dr. Wardynski liked to nearly brag about, was paid for without a contract of any kind.

And evidently, there were no “documents responsive to your request” to be had covering the writing of nearly $30,000 of district checks.

Surely this is a mistake, right? Surely Mr. Spinelli is not saying that he wrote six district checks over a period of four months without a contract approving the expenditures of those funds, right?

Now, the second part of Mr. Spinelli’s email concerning Alabama’s bid law was in reference to my request to receive evidence that the bid law was followed in this contract. Unfortunately the Alabama State Code that Mr. Spinelli referenced in his response to me does not exist.

There is no code section 16-13B-2(a)(2). This is, however, an Alabama code section 16-13B-2(b)(2) which states:

Purchases made by individual schools of the county or municipal public school systems from moneys other than those raised by taxation or received through appropriations from state or county sources.

Thus, Mr. Spinelli seems to be trying to tell me that the funds that were used to pay for the first LEAN Frog audit were not actually public funds. (I don’t know this for certain because Spinelli is refusing to answer my questions yet again.)

He does not say where the money came from to pay Mr. Headrick, but I have an idea about that. Back in July 2011, Dr. Wardynski told a group of Special Education parents that he would be “getting an audit” that he would use to evaluate the special education department with. The implication was that this audit would be paid for by The Board Foundation that had “trained” him in how to be a superintendent.

I am convinced that The Broad Foundation paid for the LEAN Frog audit, and if that does indeed turn out to be the case, the “findings” of that audit should be examined quite closely. For as seen during the give and take between Wardynski and Bryon Headrick on February 16th, the LEAN Frog report was couched in such a way to make Wardynski look as good as possible as a “strong leader.”

Doing so would certainly be worth $28,790 to a man like Eli Broad who is worth hundreds of millions, wouldn’t it?

So with all this in mind, I decided to ask the board about these things tonight:

On February 25th, I began asking Dr. Robinson for a copy of the contract for the services that Mr. Headrick of LEAN Frog offered to the district from October 2011 through February 2012. Since his audit was ushering in, in Dr. Robinson’s words, the removal of “business practices that permitted fraud and negligence,” I was curious how much this new culture was costing us.

In accordance with Huntsville City School Board Policy 102-1 Access to Information, I wrote Mr. Marc Seldon to ask for a copy of the contract with LEAN Frog that allowed the district to pay him $28,790.00 from October 2011 to February 2012.

Mr. Seldon, before being placed on administrative leave, directed me to Mr. Spinelli.

On March 7th, I wrote Mr. Spinelli asking for a copy of the October to February LEAN Frog contract.

Mr. Spinelli finally responded on March 22nd to say, and I quote:

“The district does not have any documents responsive to your request.”

I wrote back to ask him how the district was able to write checks totaling $28,790 to LEAN Frog without producing “any documents responsive to my request?”

He has not responded to my questions.

And so, I’m here tonight to ask the board as I have already asked in emails that have been sent to you, how can nearly $30,000 in checks be written on the district’s checking account to a vendor without a contract?

How does this total absence of checks and balances insure, Dr. Robinson, that we are indeed changing our “business practices that permitted fraud and negligence?”

Did the funding for the October – February LEAN Frog contract come from the Broad Foundation?

As Sue Peters of Seattle asks, Why should Mr. Eli Broad have more say in my children’s schools than I do?

And finally, per Dr. Robinson’s suggestion for the kinds of questions she thinks I should be asking, “What is the impact these actions are going to have on the education of our children?”

Having a district that spends nearly $30,000 without any documentation seems to be bad for our children, don’t you think?

I, of course, received no response to these questions.

That’s right. There were no cries of outrage that I would make such ridiculous accusations. There was no denial. There was no explanation offered of any kind other than Dr. Robinson’s frustrated stares. I guess that she didn’t really want me to ask “what impact these actions are going to have on the education of our children,” after all.

What exactly is Wardynski and the board trying to hide? What could they be afraid of? Why aren’t they required to follow their own policies regarding releasing public information to the public?

It would be nice if some of the news organizations who were present tonight could ask this question. Wardynski and the board have taken to ignoring me of late.

Maybe someday we’ll get the truth.

The post No Documents Responsive to Your Request appeared first on Geek Palaver.

As has become Dr. Wardynski’s habit at board meetings of late, this past Thursday night during the presentation by Mr. Bryon Headrick of Lean Frog concerning the lack of efficiency in the business practices of the district prior to 2011, the superintendent offered the following comments. Although these comments were made following the assessment of the business practices, his comments were dominated by a discussion of the educational practices of the district.

Exactly how one relates to the other really isn’t clear to anyone other than Dr. Wardynski, yet he certainly made an attempt to taint teachers with as much blame for the state of the district as he directed toward the business end of the district which was actually reviewed by Mr. Headrick.

He never misses an opportunity to blame teachers for things beyond their control. I will be referring to these comments in several coming posts, so I thought it fair to post them here in unedited form. Please read and refer back to them as needed during future posts.

Wardynski: [Speaking to Bryon Headrick of Lean Frog at the conclusion of his "Non-Instructional Operations Work Systems Assessment Results" presentation.] So before you depart the scene, where are we with those four items?

Headrick: I think we’re already seeing the strong leadership. Just the fact that we’re seeing the current administration address items. We still have needs regarding human capital flexibility that have to be addressed. And we still have to train and develop people. And we still have at this point a need to identify operational performance measures so that we can start holding people accountable to them.

Wardynski: And as we do number four, operational accountability, what are we likely to see as within our culture?

Headrick: You’ll drive continuous improvement.

Wardynski: No. I was getting at a different point.

Headrick: Oh.

Wardynski: Apprehension?

Headrick: Oh. Uh, yes. Anytime you create change, you’re going to see apprehension. You’re going to see resistance. You’re going to see people delay and try to hinder or undermine the change. The Huntsville City Schools System will be no different. There will be people who actually try to undermine being held accountable.  I mean this is a new standard. If you roll that out, some people are going to be worried.

Wardynski: So, um, we’ve got business practices and we’ve got educational practices. Uh, it’s amazing the mirror of each other in this district. The educational side, we went from a picture in August in which folks waited until ARMT and graduation came out in August to do an autopsy of the previous year’s education. To the first nine weeks of schools, our first benchmark assessment, which gave us exact information on the reading level and numeracy skills of our students at a national level of competency. So, benchmarked against what would loosely be call the common core standards.

Uh, disparity was startling. We’ve got schools that are by ARMT (Alabama Reading Math Test) are pegged out at 80% proficient, 90% proficient, 70% proficient. When you go to national levels of accountability, and you do it in the process of educating children, you find that we have schools that are 30% proficient, 17% proficient. Um, so first, you have to hold them accountable and then you have to have high expectations.

The accountability in education come in when you begin looking at how fast are we moving students in a classroom. So first benchmark sets the baseline.  Second benchmark, which was completed end of February, end of January, gives us our second data point. We already know that as a school district. We haven’t shared it with the public yet because we want to make sure people took the first benchmark seriously. By the time we got to the second, we had already gone through a round of virtual school date site, uh, site data reviews in this very room. We do a VTC with each of our schools and everybody else in the district can listen in. And see where we are school by school with discipline, with student performance, grade by grade. Uh, after we went through a round of that, it was clear we were serious about monitoring performance in education.

Benchmark two came in, and we saw some pretty good growth. We have classrooms that moved from 19 from kids being at the 19th percentile in the nation up to 30th in nine weeks. When you measure and you hold people accountable, amazing things happen.
So that’s happening on the educational side. We didn’t wait, uh, for an assessment there. We already knew what the issues were and implemented those immediately in September.

Uh, the third benchmark is due, Barbara when?

Cooper: I’m sorry, March.

Wardynski: March? So March will be our third benchmark, and once we have that in, we’ll be publishing that classroom by classroom, school by school. So parents can look and see which classrooms are moving and which ones aren’t. And we have classrooms that are going backwards. That school is being closed. The board voted last time we met to close the Seldon Center. That school is going backwards. Actually the kids are moving in the wrong direction. Uh, so, we were well justified in calling for the closure of that one.
We have other schools that are doing amazing things. Many of our classrooms, amazing things are happening. So on the educational side, accountability and measurement, we’re bringing in writ large.  And I can see us heading in a direction where it will happen monthly.
Now, what is, what’s the word? Apprehension?

Headrick: That’s a soft way of saying it.

Wardynski: In the Army, we call that whining. [Greeted with laughter and smiles by several of the board members.]
And what it looks like is we’re teaching to the test. Why all this testing? Well, for those who don’t understand, the reason for the testing is, you can’t hold people accountable until you finally do test. Which would be August, er March with the findings coming out in August. That’s way too long to find out we had a classroom that was moving backwards instead of forwards. Um, can you teach to the test? So we’re teaching to tests. Uh, the methodology we’re using is a computer adaptive test. Every child is taking it on a computer, and every child is likely to be on a different question at a different level. Because computer-adaptive means, they’re immediately moving to a level of their knowledge and just beyond to find out where we’re exhausted their abilities. And then it zeros in on exactly where are we. And for every child, that’s a different place and a different time on that computer. It takes eight (8) minutes to twelve (12) minutes to do this. So we’re not wasting a lot of time. But we would be wasting a lot of time if we didn’t know where our kids were.  Cause we’d be covering things they’ve already got. Or we’d be moving ahead, and they haven’t gotten the things they have to have as a foundation. So this business of measuring is not unique to the business processes, it’s vital to education. And we began that in September, and we’ll continue to do that.

So where’s there apprehension, I strongly encourage staff to become comfortable with this process. Because we’re going to know where our children are, and we’re going to make sure they’re moving forward.

And in the classrooms where that’s not taking place, we’re going to become very interested in those classrooms. And if there’s classrooms where extraordinary things are happening, we are interested in those. Because those where things are going wrong need to go look at those where things are going right, and there’s plenty of examples of things going right.
So on the business side, the measurement, what does that look like in apprehension?

Mr. Spinelli is charged with the business activities of this district. I brought, I recommended him to this board, and this board selected him on my specific recommendation based on his abilities. Um, on any given day, any number of people with apprehension are claiming any number of things. Um, we haven’t got a lot of time for nonsense. The kids need to be well educated. We’ve got a lot of work to do. Uh, my CFO is doing an excellent job, and he has my full support.

Um, we will be coming to the board subsequent to this presentation in the coming days with recommendations regarding employees who need to be apprehensive, who have not done their job, who needed to do their job and have cost our children vital years of educational opportunity.

But apprehension will not stop us. Claims of harassment, claims of sexual harassment, all sorts of nonsense, will not stop us from giving our children what they need. And I know our board certainly won’t tolerate it.

Uh, but the apprehension takes many, many forms from missing documents, to calls to the media, to complaints about oversized district overhead and GNA, and so forth. So at this point, I just wanted to draw that out and say, strong leadership is critical because with weak leadership, the rest will fall apart. And, I think that’s it for you Bryon, right?

Headrick: Yes.

As I mentioned, I will be commenting on these comments in future posts, including one going live tonight.

The post Wardynski’s Business Practice Comments appeared first on Geek Palaver.