With Education budgets slashed across the country and an ever increasing burden on parents to supply much more than pencils and glue sticks I cannot fathom how LA can justify this “taj mahal” school. The new complex sets a new bar of excess, for “With an eye-popping price tag of $578 million, it will mark the inauguration of the nation’s most expensive public school ever.”
Of course this extreme spending isn’t limited to California. Closer to home, Newton North High School has created controversy over its price tag as well.
With little fanfare on Tuesday, the city took ownership of the new Newton North High School. What started out in 2000 as a $39 million renovation mushroomed over the years to a $197.5 million new building that includes mold-free rooms, natural light instead of windowless halls and an HVAC system that actually circulates air.
Dimeo Construction is scheduled to take ownership of the old Newton North on July 1 to prepare it for demolition, according to city Chief Operating Officer Bob Rooney. While the new North will open to students in the fall, it will take two decades to pay for the project.
While I do understand that the physical conditions of a building do impact the ability of students to learn; I am not sure the exorbitant price tags on these buildings impact achievement by enough to justify their costs.
“The commissioned report found “poor environments in schools, …, adversely influence the health, performance, and attendance of students.”(Building Minds, 2006, p. 1) Factors such as poor lighting, inadequate ventilation, crumbling walls, damaged ceiling tiles, and inoperative heating and air conditioning systems were reported in AFT’s 2006 research results. The results also included the factors of noise, overcrowding, and air quality, recognizing their link to student learning (Building Minds, 2006).
Many researchers have categorized building factors as either cosmetic or structural. The cosmetic factors, those that can be seen, consistently are linked with improved student performance. Structural factors, including heating and air-conditioning, also are linked to student achievement. Factors that have been noted repeatedly o influence student achievement include natural lighting, paint colors and paint cycles, general cleanliness, air quality, temperature control, acoustical enhancements, safety features, absence of graffiti, and air conditioning.”
But does providing that truly require:
“At RFK, the features include fine art murals and a marble memorial depicting the complex’s namesake, a manicured public park, a state-of-the-art swimming pool and preservation of pieces of the original hotel.”
Or (from later in the article):
Nationwide, dozens of schools have surpassed $100 million with amenities including atriums, orchestra-pit auditoriums, food courts, even bamboo nooks.
We have districts so cash strapped that educators are forced to justify the validity of art class and students share battered textbooks and need to pay fees for all of their extra curricular activities. We also have districts across our nation with talking benches, parks and bamboo nooks. There’s a serious divide in public education made more stark when you compare the opulence in one area to the austerity next door. When do we place the focus back on education instead of excess?
Not with a bang but with a vote. A vote that ensures none of the students in the Haverhill Public Schools will get a quality education. A vote for a budget that on the surface looks to preserve the arts and the variety of classes currently at HHS but underneath has so decimated the programs that is really isn’t worth offering them at all.
We all have in our minds what a music class looks like. I remember my elementary school music classes very well. I remember singing endless songs based on the seasons. I remember tapping the triangle in time to the teacher’s baton, running scales on a xylophone, desperately trying to blow more than buzzing out of a recorder and finally mastering one small piece of Yankee Doodle on the piano. Did I become a world class musician? No. But I did learn a lot from my music classes. These classes also provided variety and relief in a very long day of sitting at a desk attempting to absorb and regurgitate all the lessons provided each day.
Again I think of my art classes and I remember the budget hitting art particularly hard when I was a child. Music was somewhat protected by the fact that I could bang a drum or play the piano or sing without consuming the instruments we used. Art cannot be created without consumption of paper, paint, crayons, markers, charcoals, pastels, pencils, cardboard, glue, feathers, buttons, cotton balls, and a million other things a child might imagine as medium for expression. I would never be exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art but I did make it into many art shows at the Westgate Mall and once I was fortunate enough to perform on stage at the Fuller Craft Museum. I also have a book as a permanent reminder of two wonderful weeks spent working with people from the Fuller Museum – a book where the poems and drawings of all of my classmates were published.
Now I want to look at the current offerings for Art and Music in Haverhill. As I said in public comment on May 20th:
As much as I favor the encore programs as important in providing real world application for the skills we require our students to master in math, science and language I have noticed that while technically we still have all of the offerings of gym, art and music at the elementary level the courses are cut so drastically that I don’t understand why we kept them at all.
For example if one looks on page two of the budget the fy11 request for art supplies and divide those dollar amounts by the total children in the enrollment projection this means we spend per child in elementary $4.10, in middle school $2.50 and at the high school $5.98 for an entire year of art supplies. What kind of art are they doing for under $6 a year?
I challenge everyone reading this to take a walk past the art supplies when next they are in Target or Staples or AC Moore or wherever you might shop. I challenge you to find $6.00 worth of supplies that will allow a child to create art for an entire school year. Using the 2010-2011 calendar and the five day schedule with art on a Wednesday for the purpose of my math, each student would have art 37 times over the year. This means that for an elementary school child every class the teacher has 11 cents to spend on that child. For a middle school child they have 6 and 1/2 cents. And for our high school students who could very well be working on a portfolio to show colleges there is a whopping 16 cents in supplies available each class.
Now one could argue that these are “just the encore programs” and surely the funding streams for the core subjects are more solid. One could not be more wrong.
Take page 12 – the Foreign Language section – and check the numbers. Since Foreign Language is only offered at Haverhill High School, and not all students will take 4 years of a Foreign Language; I am going to assume half of the students at HHS are currently looking to take these classes. The 900 students would then divide the supplies and textbooks totals to get $1.89 and $15 respectively. Adding to this the $1.13 in AV supplies per student and the total supply expense to teach students a second language at the high school level is $18.02 per child for the year.
Examining Math on page 21 we get the following: For Math at HHS (where all 1800 students take math for four years) we get these lackluster numbers. For supplies they’ve budgeted $10.04 per student and for textbooks $11.11 per student. I’m assuming the AP students purchase their own textbooks and from what I remember of buying my own AP Physics books and years of college texts – Math and Science books are the most expensive texts out there.
Lastly, I want to examine Science on page 29. We find the science supplies and the science textbooks budgeted at $15,171 and $5,500 respectively. From what I understand from the Massachusetts DOE materials, science is a core subject everyone needs to take 3 years of a lab based science. Assuming the 1800 kids at Haverhill High School are distributed evenly over the four grades this means we have about 450 students in each grade. So 1,350 students are taking a lab based science at any one time with $11.23 spent in materials per child for the full year. I’m not sure what lab based sciences are able to function on that kind of supply fee ( frogs go for about $4 each!) and there aren’t a lot of textbooks to be purchased for $4.07 per student.
Again I implore the members of the School Committee to harness the energy of parents who are willing to work to help our students. Give us direction and leadership. Send us to Beacon Hill. Present information clearly and honestly. Don’t give us any more pithy rhetoric about doing more with less in this economy. Stop being politicians and start being people, citizens, parents, leaders!
Budget Review is again on the table for tonight’s School Committee Meeting but there’s no agenda to post yet. I’m sure there will be cheers about the Meals Tax vote but considering how much of the School Department Budget is based on wishes I don’t see the funds from the meals tax as a bonus – I see it as a band-aid.
I’m not sure I will be able to attend tonight’s meeting but I will certainly be recording it so I can relax and enjoy the long weekend with an iced coffee and hours of scintillating debate over the budget. Where might I be this fine evening instead of City Hall? Why I will be at Chuck E Cheese crocheting a blanket while my children spend time with their friends for Golden Hill’s Family Fun Night. I looked at both events and decided taking the children to enjoy a night out trumped heading to City Hall – especially since we took the children to City Hall on Tuesday.
The School Committee finally posted their goals on the Haverhill Public Schools Website. I’m not going to comment on all of them and there are some wonderful ideas in this document but a few things stood out:
5. Ensure a stable financial environment with a multi-year budget as presented by the administration.
I don’t know of any administration who can ensure financial stability considering the way schools are currently funded. Every year the State provides less local aid, reduces the reimbursement for Circuit Breaker funding and debates the matter later and later into the year. Federal funding is all in the form of grants and stimulus which have strict rules for how the money can be used. The only guarantee currently out there that I can see is that each year will be worse than the one before it.
6. Create a school system and not a system of schools to ensure that all Haverhill schools operate as one concise, comprehensive system. This goal will result in better coordination, effective expenditure and utilization of human and financial resources.
Whomever wrote that rhetorical little gem about Haverhill being a system of schools and not a school system deserves to stand in the center of town and allow us to throw tomatoes at them. This is dragged out every time someone talks about our schools and has become meaningless through overuse. If the School Committee wants Haverhill Public Schools to become a school system then they must foster community and cooperation instead of pitting schools and families against each other for resources in each budget debate. We need to have more city wide events to bring people together. We need to stop thinking of ourselves in terms of what separates us and focus instead on the goals we’re all trying to accomplish – bring the best education possible to all of the students in Haverhill Public Schools.
9. Continue efforts to make Haverhill High School, our “Flagship” school, a school of Academic Excellence, with attention to updating Textbooks and educational resources, class size, communication, and discipline issues.
Having seen the budget this goal is unreachable. With the limited number of classes for each section a greater number of students will be unable to participate at the level of Academic Excellence. With the decimation of the “encore” programs our Classical Academy is in jeopardy. With no money for textbooks or resources there will be no updating any time soon. With the loss of our Resource Officers discipline issues will not improve. With the class size projections approaching 40 especially at the higher grades I don’t see how that will foster Academic Excellence either. The only flag on our High School Ship is the white one signaling surrender.
I’ve said time and again that when Zero Tolerance is used Zero Thought is applied. NCLB is the Education version of Zero Tolerance. Neither of these policies make sense on their own merits and when combined as they are within our schools the results are disastrous.
For example: I understand and support the HHS policy banning cell phone usage in school. There is far too much distraction and opportunity for cheating to allow phones to be used. I also hope that should an incident arise where a child walks out of the school bathroom sobbing hysterically with a cellphone in hand because she’s just received news that someone in her family is in some kind of peril – that day the phone usage by that student would be forgotten in the wave of support she would receive in dealing with her crisis.
What I can’t understand or support is any policy which negates the ability of those in charge of enforcement to make a judgment call regarding the situation before them nor can I abide by those who hide behind the policy when making poor decisions. Was it truly necessary to have a 12 year old girl taken from school in handcuffs because she wrote on a desk? What happened to the days of detention and having the offender wash all the desks?
Of course those who make the policy on a national level do so as a knee jerk reaction to widely publicized incidents instead of actual data! “The truth is that there is no comprehensive, mandatory federal school crime reporting and tracking of actual school crime incidents for K-12 schools. Federal school crime and violence data consists primarily of a hodgepodge collection of over a half-dozen academic surveys and research studies. This data is often mistakenly perceived by policymakers, the media, and others as a reflection of the number of actual crime and violence incidents, and as credible trend indicators of school crime and violence occurring in our schools.” So why should we expect our local policy makers to act differently? This is mirrored by the recent actions of the local School Committee in making immediate changes in their transportation policy in response to one incident which made the local TV news despite the repeated success of their previous policy on a daily basis.
Then I read this article about the relationship between the Zero Tolerance legislation and the NCLB legislation and the combined effects on our students. You’re going to want some time before you open that link as the pdf is 56 pages. The pdf report made, much more eloquently than I ever would, many of the points I’ve tried to discuss since I’ve been learning about our education system. Here is one such point: “Rather than viewing schools as places where young people should be nurtured, supported and developed to their full potential, zero tolerance treats students as adversaries or threats to be suppressed or even discarded in the quest for good schools. High-stakes testing regards our youth as products to be tested, measured and made more uniform. Each of these policies has too often been inappropriately substituted for meaningful education reform.”
As a society, we have allowed our fear to overwhelm us. Our schools are slowly turning into miniature prison like environments complete with security cameras and metal detectors and we are expecting our children to respond positively to this! Then we add more rigorous and more frequent standardized testing with ever higher penalties for failure for both the student and the school and we expect our children to respond positively to this as well!
Again from the pdf report: “The impact of high-stakes testing on the classroom has been well-documented. Test-driven reforms have had a significant narrowing effect on school curricula, leading to untested subjects like science, social studies, art and physical education being excluded or de-emphasized. Because so much is riding on the outcome of standardized tests, meaningful instruction that supports the development of higher order skills like critical thinking is suffocated and often replaced by “drill and kill” techniques, rote memorization exercises and teaching to the test.” We’ve seen this locally with the budget discussions where the “encore” programs (Gym, Art and Music) are reduced and Social Studies textbooks are pushed to the bottom of the priority list every year because “Social Studies is not yet on the test.”
When you thrust groups of students into an environment which gets more confining and allows less interaction and expression and then bore them with curriculum which has taken the discovery enthusiasm out of learning you are setting students up for failure. Look at private sector employment – think of the “water cooler” moments where adults are allowed to get up and stretch and socialize. Consider how much of one’s day involves taking a minute for a personal email or checking out a favorite blog or shopping site or facebook. Now look at a student’s day and think about how cooped up and stir crazy our children must feel with less opportunity for those “water cooler” moments like recess or art or gym in addition to the immense pressure of grades and testing. Imagine if at the end of every week your boss administered a two hour exam to determine if you were going to get the paycheck you worked all week for!
And how has all of this impacted graduation rates? Have we achieved increased proficiency? Are we really doing right by our students? No. Graduation rates are falling and more people are choosing to obtain a GED instead of a High School Diploma. Again from the pdf report with additional links: “recently-released data show that the nation’s graduation rate in 2006 – 69% - was the lowest it has been since before NCLB was passed. Of particular concern is that the rates for Black and Latino students – 51% and 55%, respectively – dropped significantly from 2005 to 2006. Additionally, in 2008, the number of persons taking the GED test was at its highest level since before NCLB.” Can we please stop legislating our children’s education into the abyss and enact some education reform that is perhaps actual reform and includes actual education?
Listening to the last meeting of the School Committee I was frustrated by Mr Magliocchetti’s need for us to rehash all that was awful about last years budget discussions. As the discussion went on I began to wonder why so much focus on an item in the budget that is relatively cheap. $3 million sounds like a lot of money to me but only represents 5% of the School Department’s overall yearly budget.
Lets think about that for a moment. We have 39 teachers who teach these three subjects. The bulk of the $3 million goes towards their salaries and health benefits. Each teacher makes approximately $65,000 which for someone with a secondary degree and years of experience and the yearly training required to keep up with current certifications in MA is hardly exorbitant. The $9800 in benefit costs could be lessened should joining the GIC work the way everyone promises but certainly not eliminated.
Now I want to look at the number that has me flabbergasted. $82,018. That $82,018 represents the budget for the supplies for those 39 teachers to run classes for the 7,500 kids in the Haverhill Public School System. Doing the math – that represents $11 per child for supplies for gym, art AND music.
This is why parents across the city attend talent shows to raise money to buy instruments. Why parents pack backpacks full of extra glue sticks, crayons, scissors, paper, stickers, yarn, markers, buttons, jump ropes, tissues, and all the other little things the kids need to complete their projects. Why we bake brownies, cookies, cupcakes and whoopie pies for bake sales. Why we then manage the bake sales while our children perform. Why we sit in the cold bleachers watching games and spending money on tickets for entry and raffle tickets for items we don’t need or even want.
I find it amazing that anything gets done at all for $11 per child per year. If we’re looking for places to save money this well has run dry. And those 39 teachers? Sounds like a lot of teachers doesn’t it? I’m sure some people are thinking that we can’t possibly need all 39 of them. They teach 3 subjects between them. If we divide the subject matter up 13 art and 13 music and 13 gym teachers – then each teacher is responsible for 580 children. At the average class size of 28 kids per class they would teach 21 classes of students. Since we use a six day rotation where children in elementary and middle school get each encore class twice each rotation so by those horrid estimates the elementary and middle school encore teachers average seven sessions during each six hour school day. Is this the best way to deliver these services to our children? Absolutely not. How can any child receive the fine arts in twice weekly sessions for less than an hour each session with a whopping $11 per year in materials? While I recognize the economy means we will not get the funding to give children the instruction they deserve – I think the public and the members of our school committee need to understand the amazing value provided by our encore teachers.
At the forum on September 30th one of the questions posed to the candidates was: Sports Fees have reached the level where they have become a barrier to some students participating. Would you vote to reduce them? Why or Why Not?
The question is silly to me, no one wants sport fees. No one on the current School Committee wants sports fees. No one in the Athletic Department wants sports fees. In a Utopian society there would be no sports fees. You can vote to reduce them but where does the money come from? Do we fire a teacher? Incur a lawsuit because a Sped mandate is ignored? A better question would have been: In light of the economy requiring the Athletic Department to charge sports fees how would you help students overcome this hurdle to expand their participation in sports. I found the candidate responses disheartening.
Mr Deroche doesn’t want sports fees because he didn’t have to pay any when he played sports in High School. There were a lot of things that were different when we were in High School. That’s not a basis for how things need to be done today, in today’s economy and reflecting today’s needs.
Mr Sierpina wishes there were a split between what the student pays and what the school pays. This split already exists. In sitting at the budget meetings I listened to former Athletic Director Peter Shanahan discuss how he needed to use the sports fees to close the gap in his budget between what it costs to run the athletics program and what he receives in dollars from the School Department.
Ms Hetel wants the fees to be affordable. She sited a young man who complained about paying $800 to play hockey. That $800 is misleading. Hockey is the most expensive sport to play that is available for our students but the maximum in sports fees he could pay for that sport is $525 – expensive but far less than the $800 stated. Individual sport fees for sports that require busing are $275 with an additional $250 possible for hockey because of the exorbitant cost of rink fees. The city charges the school department a reduced rate for ice time. I’m sure that young man mentioned above has had to purchase equipment for himself along the way but the equipment is then his to keep.
Sports fees are also reduced or eliminated for students who qualify. There is a form available on the HHS website and I am sure they have print forms as well. The various booster clubs host fundraisers already to reduce sports fees for the students. A concert over the summer at Haverhill Stadium is just one recent example of the community working for our students.
A comment was made about students who play multiple sports. There is a per child max sports fee for the year of $600 and a per family max of $800. This is explained on the parent permission form all students must have completed before they can play any sport.
We talk a lot about sports fees and how unfair they are but the reality is playing any sport is expensive. When you factor in maintenance of the playing area, equipment, uniforms, coaches and busing the price tag rises quickly. What I’ve often wondered is why it took so long to institute these fees in the first place! We forget that every extracurricular activity the students undertake costs money. Band kids have been paying fees for years. They own or rent their instruments at their own expense, band also requires uniforms and travel expenses. Being a member of the National Honor Society requires dues be paid. Theatre students scour yard sales and thrift shops to make their own costumes and props. Unfortunately these students are often overlooked because society considers sports a right of passage for young people but other extracurricular activities as a privilege. Sports fees are merely leveling the playing field of financial burden.
