Friday, I got to spend the morning in two of our schools volunteering and helping teachers with computer issues while they taught their classes. I got to witness first hand the difficulty our teachers are facing in attempting to educate our children over the past two weeks. Hostile working environment doesn’t really cover the might makes right approach of the superintendent these days.

A Difficult Start

The opening of the school year has been an extremely difficult one for our teachers. They’ve been put in the impossible situation of having to teach their overcrowded classrooms without textbooks, without the promised computers for at least a week, without working, reliable, stress-tested networking support.

They’ve been reprimanded for not using the computers enough, despite the fact that the computers and the network they’re connecting to are not working properly.

They’ve been reprimanded for using paper.

They’re being monitored down to the level of pings coming from a classroom. Principals are receiving threatening calls from the central office insisting that they bring more teachers and students online, even though as I’ve mentioned, many classrooms did not have computers/iPads available until Friday of the first week, and even though the network regularly fails as a result of the number of people attempting to log onto the network as required.

They’re being required to stop their classes so that the Superintendent can film propaganda films, and interrupt classes to take a photo-op bus trip, to show how much they love the new technology.

You know, I’ve come to realize that if you’re doing the right thing, you rarely have to force people to speak well of it. Wardynski’s need of propaganda, which will be shared at the board meeting on Tuesday, proves that all is not as rosy as the Superintendent would have you believe.

Monitoring Email?

There are suggestions that even email is being read by some unknown and unnamed consultant firm working in a “War Room.”

Please keep this in mind if you are contacting your child’s teacher about anything via email: You’re “private” discussion with your child’s teacher is likely being read by a consultant of the district. This consultant likely gets paid to identify problems, so if you indicate in anyway that your child is not perfectly normal (god help us), it’s a fairly safe assumption that someone’s going to notice.

You should not assume that what you think is a private conversation actually is. If you want to discuss anything that you’d like to remain confidential, schedule a meeting with your child’s teacher and meet her/him in person.

Hostile Working Environment

This is the impossible situation our teachers are operating in as school begins.

And yet despite this hostile working environment, our teachers are meeting the needs of our kids. They are managing to guide their students through these turbulent times. They are managing to help our students adjust.

Our teachers, despite the lack of textbooks, networks, computers, and support from the central office, are managing to teach our kids and help prepare them for their futures.

They’re doing this because they care for our kids and their future. They want to see our schools succeed. They want to see our community to continue to grow in wisdom, insight, and understanding, you know, the products of education that cannot be evaluated by a standardized test.

These are the qualities of education that Dr. Wardynski seems either unwilling or incapable of understanding, and yet these are some of the true markers for a well-educated person.

Project RED

Dr. Wardynski, however, just continues to defend this reckless transformation by citing such works as Project RED. Project RED is another propaganda piece from three private organizations–The Greaves Group, The Hayes Connection, and One-to-One Institute–who benefit from selling contract services to help convert districts to digital systems.

In short, the “evidence” Dr. Wardynski is citing to support his reckless actions is nothing other than a simple PR stunt masquerading as research. Project Red is not research. It has not been peer reviewed. It should not be considered authoritative in any way.

So why would Dr. Wardynski cite such dubious evidence in support of this transition? I can think of four reasons:

1. He didn’t bother reading it before he mentioned it at the last board meeting when he was calling Mr. Wittenborg’s suggestions “absurd” and “ludicrous.”
2. He didn’t think anyone else would bother reading it for themselves since it was, in his words, “quite a tome.”
3. He knew it didn’t matter anyway since the board had already approved his recommendation to transform how the district’s classrooms operate a mere two and a half months ago.
4. He knew that there isn’t any empirical evidence supporting this level of transformation on a district wide level.

The truth is probably some combination of all four of the reasons, but the fourth one sounds really familiar to me. When it was announced that six of our elementary/middle schools would combine into just three schools, one of the first questions I asked was, “what evidence do you have that shows that merging high performing schools allows for a continuance of that high performance?”

His answer: It doesn’t matter if I have evidence or not, if the schools don’t merge, they will be closed.

Might Makes Right

The man holding a gun to your head doesn’t need to provide you with evidence that his ideas will work. Might makes right.

His responses to Mr. Wittenborg were exactly the same.

His treatment of teachers is exactly the same.

His disregard of parents is exactly the same.

I’m right because I’m strong. And you will do what I say, or I will destroy you, your schools, your teachers, and your children.

These are the classic responses of a bully.

It’s an excellent example of the implementation of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine here in our home town. If you want to remake the world into one where people lay aside ideas they would never consider laying aside before, wait for a crisis (or manufacture one), and while the people are confused, panicked, and disoriented, swoop in with a plan to take over, privatize, and strip mine for profits.

A lot of people have gotten quite rich off of our “broke” district over the past fourteen months.

The problem is that with every penny we give to Microsoft, HP, Pearson, TFA, and all the rest of the Broad supported organizations that Wardynski fights tooth and nail for, our children suffer.

They suffer in ever increasing class sizes. They suffer in decreasing services. They suffer when classrooms are disrupted on the whim of a superintendent who wants some good press, or videos, or decides two months before classes start to completely change everything that happens in the classroom.

A Time To Stand

And yet our teachers press on despite the hostility they face. The press on because they love children and because they love and believe in the power of education.

We need to support them by standing up for them. We need to be their voice in our community. We need to make sure that their voice is heard in the board meetings.

Because no one else is doing it.

Teachers are fighting every day and night to help our children learn. The least we can do is speak out on their behalf.

This Tuesday (yes, Tuesday) September 4th at 4:00pm the district will have its second budget hearing for the 2013 budget. Following that, at 5:30pm, will be the bi-weekly board meeting. During this meeting, the superintendent will present his propaganda film on how amazingly the digital transition is going.

If you have questions about the computers, you should be there. If you have issues with the computers, you should be there. If you think the digital transition is the most amazing thing ever, you should be there. If you believe it was reckless to implement such drastic changes over the period of two months, you should be there.

If you believe that our teachers are doing an amazing job in an impossible environment, you should be there to speak for them.

The one thing that a bully fears is when those he is bullying stand up and say no more. It’s time to stand.

The post A Time To Stand Against Might Makes Right appeared first on Geek Palaver.

Last night, by an unanimous vote, the board approved the 2012 budget. The budget had to be presented to the state by September 15th, so they moved the called board meeting to after the budget hearing, added the approval of the budget to the agenda, and then approved it after taking just a single question from the public which was, “Could I get a copy of the final budget?”

The copied one that had been shared was missing a few of the slides. Mr. Spinelli promptly and generously gave the member of the public his copy. (As an aside, I had a pleasant conversation with Mr. Spinelli after the board meeting. Generous is an appropriate adjective; he was quite generous with his time with me after the meeting. Welcome to Huntsville, Mr. Spinelli, and excellent work preparing this budget in such a short amount of time. It was an impressive feat.)

The budget hearing was quite interesting. It seemed to me that much of the discussion and presentation was a direct response to my blog that I published about 30 minutes before the meeting began. (I know that seems conceited of me, but bear with me for a moment.) When Mr. Spinelli was taking the board through the budget for the second time and he got to the revenue section, he pointed out that part of the special education funding was coming from the federal government and that the actual budgeted amount for special education was nearly $20 million rather than the $14 million that I wrote about yesterday.

So yesterday at 4:30pm, I wrote that the 2011 budget called for $19.8 million for special education. Then at about 5:15pm during the budget hearing, Dr. Wardynski and Mr. Spinelli make a point of saying that this year our special education budget is $20 million. The actual numbers are as follows:

• $14,163,983 in instructional expenditures for special education in 2012
• $4,927,081 in federal funding from IDEA-B funds for 2012
• Thus, the total expenditures for special education for 2012 is $19,091,064. Let’s just call it $20 million.

So, everything that I wrote yesterday is pointless, right? We’re actually spending almost the exact same amount as last year. Right? What was I complaining about?

Well it’s completely true that the IDEA-B law is providing almost $5 million in funding for special education. But the thing that neither Dr. Wardynski nor Mr. Spinelli shared with us or the board last night was that the federal funding for special education in 2011 was almost exactly the same.

In 2011, as you can see in the chart below, the federal government sent $4,923,331 to Huntsville City Schools for special education funding.

So, yesterday, I asked about our priorities based on the reduction in funding for instruction and the reduction in funding for special education in particular. Dr. Wardynski implied that there wasn’t a reduction in funding by claiming that the 2012 budget calls for $20 million in federal and local spending.

But, as you can see, the reduction in funding is still there, because the 2011 budget included $5 million in federal funding as well. The 2012 budget, that the board approved last night, still shows a reduction in funding of at least $3.5 million dollars from 2011 (assuming that I should include the gifted eduction funding so that I’m comparing apples to apples).

So did they structure the discussion in the budget hearing in response to my post? Who knows, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they have approved a budget that cuts instruction by $6 million. What matters is that they have approved a budget that cuts special education by $3.5 million.

The superintendent and the board have recommended and approved a budget that calls on special education to be responsible for 30% of the total savings in 2012. The superintendent and the board have begun to balance the budget on the backs of special needs kids.

The post Balancing the Budget on the Backs of Kids appeared first on Geek Palaver.

On Thursday, September 1, Dr. Casey Wardynski and the board held the first of two Budget Hearings for the Huntsville City Schools proposed 2012 budget. (The second and final one will be tonight at 5:30 after a brief called board meeting.)

During this meeting, he stated to the public and the board that “the budget, again, is a statement of our priorities. It is the alignment of finances of the district with the activities of the district.”

Concerning this, he is absolutely right. Our budget shows our priorities. The question is, what priorities does it actually show?

Consider this slide which is slide 13, “Expenditures by Program – Instruction” from the 2012 Budget Hearing presentation offer by Mr. Spinelli on Thursday:

This is an impressive figure when viewed without context. It’s amazing what a difference context makes.

You’ll notice that there isn’t any data from 2011 or 2010 on this slide. If you want to know where the system’s priorities are, you have to be able to see how the money is being moved around. Especially when there is a limit to the funds available to be moved around. So where are the 2011 numbers.

Luckily enough, I had downloaded them from the Huntsville City Schools website. You can download it here: Budget_Hearing_FY11_9-10-10.pdf. In 2011, Dr. Wheeler’s presentation included the numbers from the previous year. Here’s the matching slide from the 2011 presentation. This was the 2011 proposed expenditures budget for Instruction. (You know, the only reason the system exists.)

So what do you notice there?

For starters, you should notice a sharp downward trend in funds being expended on instruction. From 2010 to 2011, the system cut almost $5 million. In 2012, the budget calls for a cut of $6,222,921. In two years, the instructional budget, again the only reason the system exists, has been cut by just under $11 million dollars.

Let’s look a little closer at these numbers. The total general fund expenditures from 2010 to 2012 has been reduced from $191,014,710 to $176,799,180. In other words, we’ve seen a cut in the general fund of $14,215,530. Of that cut, Instructional Expenditures represented 77% of all the cuts made.

It would seem that one of our priorities in Huntsville City Schools is no longer instruction.

New teachers’ salaries have been cut to the state minimum. Teachers’ raises have been frozen. Teachers are being hired to work part-time temporary positions, and we’re celebrating it.

Mr. Spinelli and Dr. Wardynski were praised for reducing the deficit by $12,169,715 this year. Half, 51%, of those savings are from instructional cuts which total $6,222,921.

We no longer have instruction as a priority in this system.

Just for clarity, let’s look and see if those cuts to instruction have been made equally and fairly. Surely they have, right? Right?

Special Education had a proposed budget of $19,849,256 in 2011. I suspect, but do not know, that this amount includes funds for Gifted Education as well. The proposed budget for 2012 is $14,163,983. This number does not include Gifted Education, so when we include the $2 million budgeted for that, we get $16,351,280.

From 2011 to 2012, Special Education has received a $3.5 million dollar cut. Special Education has received 56% of the cuts made to instruction this year.

No other single group comes close to that. The next largest cut is to Career Technical at 35% which is quite interesting since a significant portion of our 3,000 students with an IEP are often seeking a career technical degree as well.

So, by itself, Special Education is covering 29% of the deficit reduction planned for the year. When you throw in Career Technical, that percentage grows to 46%.

Special Education and Career Technical students are the ones being asked to pay for the mismanagement of our system.

How’s that for a statement of priorities?

One last point.

In 2011, Dr. Wheeler published a breakdown of the General Administrative budget that showed the budgeted amount for the Board, Superintendent, and various other central office positions. Here’s the slide:

In 2012, Mr. Spinelli did not publish a separate slide detailing this information, but he did publish the total administrative costs:

As you can plainly see, the Administrative costs have increased each year over the past three years. Over that period the central office budget has grown by 5%. While Dr. Wardynksi made a point of saying that this budget includes the salaries for positions that have not been filled yet, I bet it doesn’t include the $100,000 were paying Dr. Moore, nor the $114,000 we’re paying Dr. Wheeler, to sit at home.

Instruction has been cut by 10%

A budget is a statement of priorities, Dr. Wardynski. I think we can clearly see where your priorities are. You believe in expanding administrative salaries while balancing the budget on the backs of those who cannot speak for themselves.

As I have asked before, how can you justify this?

The post “A Statement of Priorities” The Wardynski Budget appeared first on Geek Palaver.

On Thursday (9/8/2011) there will be a Special Called Board Meeting at 5:00pm to discuss “human resource items.” This meeting will be followed by the second Budget Hearings meeting for the FY 2012 that is scheduled to begin at 5:30pm.

Since the first Budget Hearing meeting lasted all of 44 minutes (or $5.5 million per minute), I would expect that everyone will be home tonight by about 6:30pm. Unless, that is, people start asking questions.

Along those lines, I’ll have a few questions that I’ll be posting later today concerning the budget, but until then I wanted everyone to know about the meetings. Dr. Wardynski has correctly stated that our budget is our “statement of priorities.” Please come out to show him what your priorities are.

As always, the meeting will be broadcast on ETV (Comcast 17, Knology 99-it has recently moved from 71), and at the Huntsville City Schools website. I will also be live-tweeting the meeting @russwinn. You can follow on Twitter or on the Geek Palaver Facebook Page.

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If you’re in the mood for something more enjoyable, take a look at the “Huntsville Favorites” Blog Carnival being hosted this week by Heather’s Hints. Stop by and celebrate all things Huntsville!

The post Huntsville City School Board Meeting Today at 5:00pm appeared first on Geek Palaver.