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.

On January 19, 2012, Dr. Wardynski recommended to the board, whom subsequently unanimously approved (no surprise there), yet another step towards his plan for total control of Huntsville City Schools.

From that date forward (technically this started with the hiring of the Pre-K teachers in December), Dr. Wardynski will decide which teachers will be hired, promoted, given tenure, and allowed to progress through the tenure process during their first and second years of teaching. You may view this proposal on the school board’s website.

Previously, the hiring of teachers rested primarily with the local schools and their principles. When a prospective teacher applied to work in Huntsville City Schools, they applied to work at a particular Huntsville City School. They were then interviewed by the principal who typically made the final decision of whom to hire.

Not so any longer.

As with most of the Superintendent’s decisions, he has again offered no clear evidence that this change was needed. I suppose since the board is approving somewhere in the neighborhood of 99% of his recommendations unanimously he doesn’t see the need. Whatever he wants, he gets.

Without question.

(Funny, this, combined with the overwhelming praise being heaped upon Dr. Wardynski by the board of education, sounds eerily familiar. Close to the same percentage of unanimous votes as well as perfect evaluations were given to Dr. Ann Roy Moore as late as 2009. She was fired in 2011. In other words, our esteemed board is quite good at repeating patterns.)

It seems that it would be easy to prove that centralized hiring of teachers in the system is a necessity. After all, conventional wisdom holds that schools on the South side regularly have more and perhaps better qualified candidates applying for positions than those on the North side of town. The constant refrain is, “Title I schools have a greater difficultly in hiring teachers than non-Title I schools.”

Again, this should be fairly simple to prove, if it is actually the case. But despite questions from the public concerning issues such as this, Dr. Wardynski sees no need to provide actual data supporting his claims. A simple phone call to his principals asking for statistics from their last round of hirings is evidently too much to ask.

I’m sorry, but wasn’t he sold to us as someone who bases his decisions upon data and not preconceived notions? We haven’t seen evidence of that in this decision, in the Teach for America decision, in the decision to merge six elementary and middle schools into three, nor even in his budgeting decisions.

It’s as if he’s simply following a script that was written for him by, oh I don’t know, The Broad Foundation. If Dr. Wardynski is indeed making “data-driven” decisions, why is he so hesitant to share that data with the public?

So, we have nothing but anecdotal evidence that there is actually a problem hiring for Title I schools in our district. We have no evidence that the hiring practices, tenure review, and non-tenure review procedures were failing to work. We have no evidence provided that any of the these procedures needed to change, and yet now they have been.

And this reorganization is going to cost the system an additional $141,000 in stipends for the 62 members serving on these committees.

Yes, we can pay a stipend to teachers to make Dr. Wardynski look good, but hiring an additional aide or creating a new classroom just simply costs too much.

Since there’s no presented evidence of need for this reorganization, why might Dr. Wardynski wish to centralize hiring of teachers?

Well, I can think of a few reasons.

• It increases his power and influence in the system.
• It decreases the influence of the principal to develop his or her school, and yet the responsibility of school’s performance still rests upon the principal’s shoulders. They now have the responsibility to perform with dramatically reduced ability to effect change in their schools.
• It reduces teachers to the level of pawns that Wardynski is free to move at will. If he likes a teacher, he can place that teacher in a classroom with predominately highly performing students. If he dislikes a teacher, he can place that teacher in a classroom with predominately lower performing students.
• It decreases the morale of our current principals and teachers further encouraging them to retire or seek employment elsewhere.
• It dramatically increases the cost of recruiting teachers to the system. One of the primary arguments that I and others have made against using Teach for America is that those “teachers” cost the system an additional $5,000 per teacher, per year to recruit. One way to try to negate that argument is by raising the cost of recruiting all new teachers. This is a step in that direction.

There are, as always, many unanswered questions about this new program. Here are just a few:

• How will teachers and administrators be chosen to serve on these committees?
• Will the TFAers hired as a result of the Teach for America contract also face these same committees, or will they be exempt from this process?
• If one of the main reasons for hiring TFA is to address the supposed problem of getting good applications for Title I schools, which Dr. Wardynski repeatedly claims, then haven’t we solved that problem now?
• How will the issues of having one’s peers review one’s work be balanced?
• How will this “super committee” effectively evaluate Special Education teachers who have an entirely different set of qualifications and standards that they are required to meet? (Yes, once again, SPED is an afterthought in our system.)

In short, centralizing the hiring of teachers directly benefits Dr. Wardynski and his goal of directly controlling every aspect of Huntsville City Schools. He receives all the praise if student performance increases. He receives none of the blame if they don’t because you officially cannot hold the superintendent or the board responsible as they have shown time and again.

As Lord Acton wrote in 1887, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

There appear to be no checks on Wardynski’s power at the present time.

__________

As a side note: I’ve received reports that Huntsville City Schools has now officially added Geek Palaver to their restricted list. In other words, if you’re connected to the internet via a HCS network, when you attempt to visit my site, you will not be able to do so. You will receive a warning that is similar to the warning that you would receive when attempting to access sites like Facebook or other “dangerous” sites.

When I first heard this, I really could not stop laughing. My first response was, “I wonder what took so long?” (By the way, HCS is completely within their legal rights to restrict the use of the HCS network in nearly anyway they wish. But it is disturbing when an educational system decides that some knowledge is just too dangerous or subversive to be allowed.)

However the more I thought about it, the more I felt it important to write this short note.

While I have not confirmed this at this time, if it is indeed true, then the software that is used to block sites is also likely logging the MAC Address (a specific and identifiable number for each computer), date, time, and login information used to access the site.

In other words, if you read this site on the HCS network, likely, Dr. Wardynski will receive notification that you have done so. This will likely happen even if you attempt to view the site during a break or planning period.

Yes, Big Brother is watching you.

And as I have laid out above, I am convinced that Dr. Wardynski is capable of developing a Nixonian Enemies List.

For the record, I do not believe that many teachers and HCS employees are reading these posts at work. My site stats that show when people hit the site show that the vast majority of hits come during non-school hours (early mornings before school are particularly busy.) Frankly, they are far too busy in overcrowded and understaffed classrooms to even take a bathroom break many days, they’re not going to take the time to read my posts. But in case someone did occasionally check the site, please know that Wardynski or others in his administration will likely know about it.

I hope for two things. First, that this is simply a rumor. Honestly, doesn’t the superintendent have more important things to do? And second, I hope that any Huntsville City Schools employee who reads this blog will do so away from work. Use your extremely limited time to take a restroom break. My posts aren’t going anywhere. Read them later. Our kids need your experience all the more now that the Superintendent is actively working to get rid of experienced teachers and administrators.

Seriously, is this what we’ve come to in Huntsville City Schools?

The post Taking Control: Centralized Hiring of Teachers appeared first on Geek Palaver.

Dr. Wardynski has been superintendent of Huntsville City Schools since July 5, 2011, or a just shy of five months. It’s been a busy five months for him.

Here’s a quick summary of the changes Dr. Wardynski has brought about in that time.

1. Classroom Sizes have increased along with a higher student to teacher ratio.
2. The Central Office staff, in particular the upper level of the central office, has increased.
3. The Special Education budget has been cut by $7 million dollars to pay for significant increases in the recruitment, selection and professional development of Teach for America teachers and various other of the superintendent’s personal goals.
4. Senior Administrative positions are slated to receive bonuses and have already received raises while teachers salaries are frozen and new teachers salaries are set at the state minimum.
5. Eli Broad Foundation’s Return on Investment is up to $2,310,000.
6. The Superintendent who doesn’t want to close schools has now either closed, slated to close, relocated or merged nine schools without parental input, which is exactly the same amount of schools recommended for closure by the demographer’s report in June.
7. All job descriptions have been suspended allowing for personnel to be moved at will.

Funny, it would seem that he’s following the Broad Foundation’s game plan to the letter. In, “How to tell if your School District is Infected by the Broad Virus,” SueP of Seattleducation2011 suggests looking at a few of the following clues:

1. Schools in your district are suddenly closed.
2. Even top-performing schools, alternative and schools for the gifted, are inexplicably and suddenly targeted for closures or mergers.
3. Repetition of the phrases “the achievement gap” and “closing the achievement gap” in district documents and public statements.
4. Repeated use of the terms “excellence” and “best-practices” and “data-driven decisions.” (Coupled with a noted absence of any of the above.)
5. Power is centralized.
6. Decision-making is top down.
7. Local autonomy of schools is taken away.
8. Principals are treated like pawns by the superintendent, relocated, rewarded and punished at will.
9. Culture of fear of reprisal develops in which teachers, principals, staff, even parents feel afraid to speak up against the policies of the district or the superintendent.
10. Ballooning of the central office at the same time superintendent makes painful cuts to schools and classrooms.
11. Sudden increase in the number of paid outside consultants.
12. Superintendent attempts to sidestep labor laws and union contracts.
13. Teachers are no longer referred to as people, educators, colleagues, staff or even “human resources,” but as “human capital.”
14. The district leadership declares that the single most significant problem in the district is suddenly: teachers!
15. Superintendent lays off teachers for questionable reasons.
16. Teach for America, Inc., novices are suddenly brought into the district, despite no shortage of fully qualified teachers.
17. The district hires a number of “Broad Residents” at about $90,000 apiece, also trained by the Broad Foundation, who are placed in strategically important positions like overseeing the test that is used to evaluate teachers or school report cards. They in turn provide — or fabricate — data that support the superintendent’s ed reform agenda (factual accuracy not required).
18. Superintendent behaves as if s/he is beyond reproach.
19. The superintendent receives the highest salary ever paid to a superintendent in your town’s history (plus benefits and car allowance) – possibly more than your mayor or governor — and the community is told “that is the national, competitive rate for a city of this size.”
20. Your school board starts to show signs of Stockholm Syndrome. They vote in lockstep with the superintendent. Apparently lobotomized by periodic “school board retreat/Broad training” sessions headed by someone from Broad, your school board stops listening to parents and starts to treat them as the enemy. (If you still have a school board, that is — Broad ideally prefers no pesky democratically elected representatives to get in the way of their superintendents and agendas.)

There’s more, but I think this is sufficient to communicate the point. If you’d like to read the entire list, you may do so at http://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/how-to-tell-if-your-school-district-is-infected-by-the-broad-virus/

As I said, Dr. Wardynski has been busy in the past five months. Kinda makes you wonder exactly what’s in store in the future. If this is the type of “future leaders” that Broad Foundation supported programs like Teach for America produces, I would much prefer that they go on about their chosen careers and leave education to those who have committed their lives to it.

The post What Changes Wardynski Hath Wrought appeared first on Geek Palaver.