So it seems that playing in a park with the kids at the beginning of an abbreviated spring break isn’t a good idea for someone trying to work with the Huntsville City Schools Board of Education these days. One must be constantly vigilant or else risk missing out on the “secret” meetings the Board decides to call.

Yesterday afternoon, our School Board met with Dr. Ed Richardson, the special consultant they have hired to give themselves political cover, at the Sun Room of the Holiday Inn in Downtown Huntsville. According to the Board President, Topper Birney, “We cannot do business in private, but this was not a business meeting. This was giving us some information on what changes we had to make. No decisions were made I promise you that.” Am I the only one who doesn’t feel comfortable accepting Mr. Birney’s promise right now?

Either way, I find it astonishing that the school board, whose credibility is at an all time low, would take such a risky step of so clearly violating the law, regardless of what Mr. Brooks, the board’s attorney, claims. Here’s a copy of the Alabama Open Meetings Law. Take a look at it and see if you think this meeting was a meeting or not.

But regardless of the legality of this meeting, the real question for parents who have children in the system is the questionable advice that the board is receiving from Dr. Richardson. Thanks to the excellent reporting Crystal Bonvillian of the Huntsville Times, we have a record of the following statements that were made about the secret meeting:

Richardson also said he wanted to stress to board members to allow the superintendent or a designated board spokesman, like the board president, to address issues publicly.

“These should be the only two who speak for the board,” Richardson said. “That way you don’t have board members speaking out with limited information, or portraying a lack of trust among each other.” [Emphasis Added]

So, according to Dr. Richardson, the only speakers for the board should be the Superintendent, or possibly the board president. No other member of the board should make a public statement. Thus, Dr. Richardson wishes to increase the power and influence of the HCS Superintendent in the future. No longer should the board members speak their opinions to the public.

Funny, I thought the board was made up of elected officials who should be responsive to the public. Please tell me we are not paying for this advice.

Dr. Richardson’s excellent advice continues:

Another focus was on how board members obtain data from system employees. Richardson said the board should get that information from the superintendent or her designee instead of going directly to a principal or other school system employee.

“If the board members are calling those in the ranks, it undermines the superintendent and you don’t have trust,” Richardson said. “And employees have confusion over who they work for.” [Emphasis Added]

Let me see if I can help the superintendent, the board, everyone in the central office, including Mrs. Amy Sledge, and Dr. Richardson understand who they work for. I’m going to try and be polite, so respectfully, they work for us.

Their job, the reason that they are being paid, is to help the community educate our students. Respectfully, if they allow Dr. Richardson’s recommendations to become board policy, they are only perpetuating the same processes that have currently placed our system 20 million dollars in debt. The reason we are in dire straits right now is because the board abdicated their responsibility in supervising the superintendent. Relinquishing their ability to question the directors of divisions in the central office will allow the future superintendent to continue to shelter her or his employees as Dr. Moore has done so for Mrs. Sledge.

This is not acceptable.

To accomplish their job to educate our students, the board and the central office must involve the community not an outsider who has no stake in the outcome of his recommendations. They should especially involve the parents of the students they are attempting to educate. What they absolutely must not do is exclude the people who pay their salaries from discussions of plans about how to best education our children.

Frankly, if the board wanted to have a secret meeting with someone yesterday, it should have been with the parents of the students they’re responsible for to discussion the segregation plans that are currently being implemented in our city.

An appointed official who, even after being fired, still has the ability to abuse our school system, our teachers, and our students, does not need any more power or influence. We elected the board to represent us. They cannot do that by remaining silent and refusing to question questionable activities and decisions made by the central office.

That, Dr. Richardson, is what is unacceptable.

The post Consultant’s Bad Advice to the Huntsville City School Board at their Secret Meeting appeared first on Geek Palaver.

Updated Below

What was only a rumor two weeks ago is now a plan, albeit one that has yet to be shared with parents in writing.

Approximately one hundred parents of special needs children, specifically parents of children on the autism spectrum, attended a meeting with Mrs. Amy Sledge, the Special Education Director for Huntsville City Schools, to discuss the plans to relocate some special needs children to centralized locations throughout the city. This meeting was offered in response to concerns raised at the last school board meeting held on Thursday, March 24, 2011. Characterized as an “Informational Meeting” by Dr. Ann Roy Moore, there was surprisingly little information actually shared with parents.

Please understand that these are simply my notes on the meeting. I am not a non-biased observer; I am completely subjective in my understanding of this plan. If you attended this meeting and have a different understanding of what was shared, please post your thoughts/recollection in the comments below so that I may correct my record. As I have stated, this plan was not shared with parents in writing.

Currently, Huntsville City Schools is planning to segregate special needs elementary and middle school children who are predominately receiving their eduction in a resource classroom (a special ed. classroom) to one of five schools whose principals have volunteered to accept students participating in the Alabama Alternative Assessment.

The dividing line between north and south Huntsville is Governor’s Drive. Students who are living north of Governor’s Drive, and who predominately receive services in a resource classroom, will be placed at the Academy for Academics and Arts Elementary or Middle School.

Alternately, students on the Alabama Alternative Assessment who live south of Governor’s Drive will be placed at either Challenger Elementary, Challenger Middle, or Hampton Cove Middle.

The majority of the high school programs will remain unchanged with the exception that the programs at Johnson and Butler will be combined at Butler. Grissom, Huntsville, Lee, and Columbia will remain unchanged.

Students who receive the majority of their instruction from a regular education classroom will also continue to attend their home schools.

When asked for additional details about this plan, Mrs. Sledge stated that she would produce a document offering details concerning the plan and share it with parents. She did not offer details concerning the mode of communication that she would use but seemed hesitant to simply place the plan on the Huntsville City Schools website. Her suggestion was to share the details with Making Connections and allow them to distribute this information to parents.

It seems remarkable to me that an “informational meeting” would be called and held without providing the crucial information of the meeting to parents in writing. If and when this information is made available by the central office, I will post it here. In the mean time, I highly recommend the following:

1. As Mrs. Sledge repeatedly stated that the system would follow the child’s Individualized Education Program (IEP), I would encourage parents to be aware of both their rights and the rights of their children, and to be willing to passionately struggle for them. As resources tighten, do not take anything for granted. In the words of Tom Clancy, “If you don’t write it down, it didn’t happen.” This is particularly true of the IEP. Make certain that you put your child’s plan down in great detail.
2. If you believe that your child needs an one-on-one aide to assist them in integrating into a regular education classroom, Mrs. Sledge stated that an IEP team should write in a one-on-one aide for the student. (She stated that she had approved four today.) Again, this is a decision that is left up to the IEP team. She stated, “If your child needs a one-on-one, have the teacher to fill out a para-professional request.”

There will be many who will claim that you as a special needs parent are unfairly taking advantage of the system. Remember that they don’t have a clue what they are talking about. Your children deserve an education just as much as theirs. Don’t hesitate to fight for it; they wouldn’t.

Tomorrow night at 5:30pm the school board will convene their meeting in the Annie C. Merts Center, located at 200 White St. To reserve your spot to speak during the meeting, please call Mrs. Gail Kiker, Administrative Assistant to the Board, at 256-428-6940.

UPDATE #1

Here’s a link to the WAAY TV report on the meeting: Parents of Special Needs Students Finally Addressed. I agree with Pedersen’s assessment, “We’ll still concerned. What does this really mean for us? Because there’s still just mass confusion as to what that plan really means for you as an individual parent for your child.” It will be nice to see the plan in writing.

The post Huntsville City Schools Special Needs Segregation Plans appeared first on Geek Palaver.

I posted recently on the combination of Twitter and 24/7 news adding to the feeling of desperation in the world.  A wise commenter posted that it isn’t that the world is getting worse, we’re just hearing about it all the time.  I couldn’t agree more.  And I have an example to prove the point.

Ask the random moderately educated person what is the worst school massacre in America is, and they will tell you one of a couple of things. Depending on their age, they are most likely to say Columbine or Virginia Tech.  A few might pull out the Texas Sniper.  Others will think of some incident they might have been involved in, however remotely.  They would all be wrong.

The reality is that the worst school killings isn’t ingrained on the public psyche because it happened in a time prior to world wide news coverage.  It happened on May 18th, 1927 in the little town of Bath, MI.  And there is a good chance you’ve never heard of it, unless you’ve heard me ramble about it.

Andrew Kehoe was upset about new taxes.  So to get even, he blew up the school in Bath.  He killed 44 people in two explosions during the school day.  He planned the attack for months, getting hired on as the schools janitor and spent 8 months wiring up the school with explosives.  An entire wing of the school failed to explode, or the death toll would have been much higher.  Kehoe also killed himself in the final explosion.  In addition to the deaths, Kehoe destroyed the majority of the school building and town leadership.  The last explosion, done via a car bomb just like in Iraq so even those things aren’t new, killed much of the leadership of the town.

Now this made the news.  It dominated headlines around the country for weeks.  But news was slow, pictures rare and unless you picked up the paper, you didn’t read about it.  News was a very passive thing then.  Today, we’d have live footage from helicopters, kids around the country would twitter about it while fifty people who just “felt bad” because of it opened up fan pages on Facebook.  A group in Iowa would set up a website saying that George Bush knew about it and helped plant the bombs.  Another here in Alabama would theorize on their website that it was really a cruise missile fired from the USS Ronald Reagan.

And it’s that difference that makes today’s world seem to be going to Hell in that proverbial hand basket.  It’s the same one we’ve been in for years, and fundamentally it’s a better and more comfortable basket than ever before but the complaint of a single occupant carries far more weight today than ever before.  I mean why make your friends depressed, when you can depress the whole world, right?

The post The World is Going to Hell in a Hand-basket! appeared first on Geek Palaver.