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?

In this opinion piece by Massachusetts Education Secretary Paul Reville he explains that the manifesto titled “Every Child A Winner!” inspired the 1993 Ed Reform: “We meant that all students — each and every one — should be able to succeed at high levels.  By adopting the Common Core, we’ve set a clearer, higher target for educational success.“  His opinion seems to revolve around achieving said success by repeating such non specific ideals as:

We should accelerate the implementation of our new “Innovation Schools” model, which has already resulted in the creation of two cutting-edge schools just six months after the passage of the governor’s legislation. We need to continue implementing our six regional “Readiness Centers,” which bring educators, school districts, colleges, and other partners together to address core educational priorities. In short, it’s time to move beyond setting standards to implementing educational strategies which will help our students achieve our high expectations.

Just reading that gives me a headache.  We can implement and innovate on the cutting edge all we want but without textbooks, teachers, supplies and facilities all the innovation on the planet can’t implement learning.

Looking at the results of almost 20 years of reform I can’t say any child has come out of this a clear winner.  Now the Massachusetts Department of Education is backpedaling and attempting to spin its adoption of Common Core Standards as  raising the Ed Reform bar to the next level.  According to the Mass DOE press release last month: Launched in June 2009, the Common Core State Standards Initiative is designed to develop and implement a single set of national standards in ELA and math to define what every student should know and be able to do in order to be fully ready for post-secondary education or a successful career. Massachusetts played a leading role in the development and review of the standards over the past 13 months. Curriculum experts and educators from across the Commonwealth reviewed and submitted comments on drafts that were incorporated throughout the development process to ensure that the expectations set in the final versions met or exceeded the state’s strong standards for students.

Here we are taking our broken system (much like the health care debacle) and inflicting it on the rest of the country.  Then we adopt this new version of what we already do and call it innovation and reform.

The real motivation behind adopting these standards is monetary.  Just six days after announcing the adoption of Common Core Standards the Governor also announced Massachusetts earned a finalist position in the second round competition for Race to the Top funding.

What will Massachusetts do with this money?  The last time I read their RTTT application their primary focus seemed to be data warehousing.  The link t0 the most current application at the bottom of Governor Patrick’s press release is broken.  Of course receipt of this money is set to be revealed in time for the new school year in September – just in time for the government to use it to supplant existing funding as they did with the previous stimulus monies.

Data warehousing would be a great tool if we were giving our students every opportunity and yet they still weren’t successful.  Until we no longer have classrooms without textbooks, sports teams without equipment, schools sharing nurses and class sizes in the mid 30′s it doesn’t take someone with a PHD in education to tell you why students aren’t achieving.  So while our Ed Secretary wants us to believe every child is a winner… I believe the real winners are sitting on Beacon Hill hoping for more money to waste in the name of education and innovation.

Our family moved to Haverhill in 2002 and the lack of a decent recycling program should have been my first clue that something in town was amiss.  Trash removal is expensive.  Trash storage is expensive.  Capping a landfill is expensive – have we forgotten about this additional trash related cost? A mandatory recycling program combined with the new trash pickup rules limits the amount of trash added to landfills and makes people more aware of the waste they are generating.  This is a good thing.

I wish I lived on a planet where people did good things simply to do good things.  Instead I live on a planet filled with people who only do good things because there’s either something in it for them or they need to avoid negative consequences.  In the case of recycling and being more responsible about what is thrown away the negative consequence is a fine.

Our current recycling program has only been in effect for a couple of weeks and already a member of the City Council is looking to push Haverhill backwards into our pre-recycling days.  From the linked article:

Ryan said he believes the city’s new single-stream recycling program might be the cause behind the new changes in city ordinance. He said he’s planning to discuss if the city was able to afford the program to begin with and not “quietly stick it to the homeowner and business owner.”

“It’s a great program if you can afford it but we can’t afford it,” he said.

I don’t see how we can afford to not recycle and how allowing the community to continue to throw everything in the trash is cost effective long term.  We moved here from Brockton where we were allowed to put out two barrels of trash each week and as much recycle as we wanted each week.  If you went over your two barrels you could purchase special bags at the grocery stores to put your extra trash in.  To my knowledge these trash rules did not ruin anyone.

I see the fight about trash as more than just monetary.  Putting these rules in place forces people to look differently at their habits and culture.  This kind of introspection makes people uncomfortable.  To realize that for decades you’ve been a wasteful person who is actively harming the environment can be painful.  I’m not going to advocate for living completely off the grid as the Amish do – but I am going to advocate for being as responsible as possible for the choices we make and the items we procure and later dispose of.

I’m a realist and a bit selfish.  As people we have a fixed set of planetary resources that are stretched to meet the needs of an ever growing population.  As an American, I live in a horribly consumer centric and disposable society.  If consumers can’t grab it off a shelf, use it, and toss it into a barrel – then they don’t buy it.  This gratuitous wastefulness needs to stop.  The only way to curb the constant trash is through making people think with their pocketbooks over the problem.

Culturally, we don’t look very far into the future at the situation we’re passing down to future generations.  Look at the oil use or the national debt if you’d like examples of how obsessed we are with right now – to the detriment of next year or the next 10 years.  Trash is just another example of our shortsightedness but our community trash use is something we can change for the better with these rules.

Adopting the rules also adds to our city’s overall financial health through paying less to the trash companies and receiving monies for our recyclables.  Yes, change is uncomfortable and for some more expensive – but we all benefit from a cleaner, healthier and more responsible city.

I’m certainly not a fan of the MCAS but I can’t say that adopting the Obama’s Common Core Standards will make me any happier about the current state of education for our children.  Massachusetts currently has one of the highest standards in the US so it is surprising that Governor Patrick would acquiesce to the national standards and give up this piece of local prestige.  I’m also disturbed by the willingness of states to give up their rights on such an important issue for the opportunity to compete for an ever smaller piece of funding.  This is just selling out the education of our children for table scraps from Washington!

The political posturing up on Beacon Hill will probably take much of the summer.  My guess is this is a deliberate attempt to take focus off the budget issues that plague our state and let everyone pretend they are doing the best they possibly can for the children.  I especially love this little gem mid way in the article:

Reville sought to tamp down worries that the adoption of national standards would mean an end to MCAS. He said whether the state adopts a new assessment to match the national standards is a “separate” discussion and that Massachusetts is “under no obligation” to do so.

Really?  So we’re planning to adopt the national standards and then make the children still test to the old standards?  We’re under no obligation at all to see that we’re actually teaching to the standards we’ve promised to adhere to?  Then why make the change at all?

While we’re discussing the new Common Core Standards and how Massachusetts fares maybe we should also look at some of the other states.  Perchance we can learn something from California as their standards are “clearer, more thorough and easier to read than the common core.”  Or use Pennsylvania as a cautionary tale of where we could be.

What isn’t discussed in the debate about education is the way our school rating system is structured in Massachusetts and if this will change.  If a charter school fails to meet its charter then the charter is not renewed and the school is closed.  If a public school fails to meet its obligations to students and is failing then we toss more money at the school and allow it to restructure.  The schools which are performing the worst get extra resources and then when the scores improve the resources are taken away.  What exactly is the benefit of success under this model?

RTTT has attempted to push this in the other direction by rewarding those schools with the best plan going forward for achievement and rewarding the schools with the highest achievements.  Unfortunately education doesn’t work this way either.  As long as we are required to educate all of the students in our state regardless of their capacity or desire for such formalized education it is impossible to apply a one size fits all assessment of the success of such a system.  We need to stop treating the education of our children like the herding of cattle!

What’s the plan for the permanent replacement?

Certainly, Haverhill is going to need to dangle a mighty large carrot to find someone to replace Dr Buchanan.  But did we have to set the bar quite so high by handing the interim, James Scully, $150k per year with 26 vacation days and 17 sick days?  Apparently there was more money available in next years budget than we thought!

I do hope we find a quality individual but I have to wonder what we will cut to accommodate the extra $50k per year (the difference between Scully’s salary and the $200k quoted in the article.)  Will we lose another teacher at HHS?  Kill one of the few remaining after school programs?  Raise sports fees?  Also, what a slap in the face to our outgoing superintendent that we were never able to cough up cash to pay him despite the many hats he wore but suddenly there’s an extra $60k (the difference between Dr Buchanan’s salary and the $200k quoted in the article) hanging around to up the ante for the incoming superintendent.

I’m not getting a good feeling about the upcoming search and appointment.  Ultimately much hinges upon this next year for our students.

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!

Inquiring about the benefits offered to the members of the Haverhill School Committee I was pointed at this section of Massachusetts General Laws.

(d) “Employee”, any person in the service of a governmental unit or whose services are divided between two or more governmental units or between a governmental unit and the commonwealth, and who receives compensation for such service or services, whether such person be employed, appointed or elected by popular vote, and any employee of a free public library maintained in a city or town to the support of which said city or town annually contributes not less than one half of the cost; provided, the duties of such person require no less than twenty hours, regularly, in the service of the governmental unit during the regular work week of permanent or temporary employment, and provided, further that no seasonal employee or emergency employees shall be included; except that persons elected by popular vote may be considered eligible employees during the entire term for which they are elected regardless of the number of hours devoted to the service of the governmental unit. A member of a call fire department or other volunteer emergency service agency serving a municipality shall be considered an employee, if approved by vote of the municipal legislative body, and the municipality shall charge such individual 100 per cent of the premium. If an employee’s services are divided between governmental units, the employee shall, for the purposes of this chapter, be considered an employee of the governmental unit which pays more than fifty per cent of his salary. But, if no one of said governmental units pays more than fifty per cent of said employee’s salary, the governmental unit paying the largest share of the salary shall consider the employee as its own for membership purposes, and said governmental unit shall contribute fifty per cent of the cost of the premium. If the payment of an employee’s salary is equally divided between governmental units, the governmental unit having the larger or largest population shall contribute fifty per cent of the cost of the premium. If an employee’s salary is divided in any manner between a governmental unit and the commonwealth, the governmental unit shall contribute fifty per cent of the cost of the premium. An employee eligible for coverage under the provisions of this chapter shall not be eligible for coverage as an employee under the provisions of chapter thirty-two A. Teachers and all other public school employees shall be deemed to be employees during the months of July and August for purposes of this chapter; provided, however, that employee contributions for such health insurance for those two months are deducted from the compensation paid for services rendered during the previous school year. A determination by the appropriate public authority that a person is eligible for participation in the plan of insurance shall be final. Nothing in this paragraph shall apply to Worcester county or its employees.

So from what I read above as long as an elected official receives compensation – in this instance in the form of a stipend – for their position they must be granted health benefits and pension benefits.  Unfortunately this still doesn’t answer my original question of where the motion is by the City Council providing the stipend.

I’ve also unearthed another question that I must scour past budgets and meeting minutes to find an answer to.  At some point members of the School Committee may have voted to raise their stipend and if that is true then I must question their authority to do that for themselves.

Back in October I learned that our elected committee members earn more than just their stipend.  I had forgotten about this until I saw the line item in this year’s budget to cover the health insurance for our committee members.  It was again at the forefront of my thoughts when the Mayor spoke at the last school committee meeting encouraging those members to adopt the new Value Option health insurance program that is currently being offered to all our municipal employees.

I did a bit of Googling to try and ascertain what the going rate for a school committee member was in the Bay State before I made too much of these benefits.  I didn’t find a lot online but I did find this in the Massachusetts General Laws:

Section 52. The school committee shall serve without compensation, except that a member of a school committee of a city, town, regional school district or superintendency union may be compensated for his services by a majority vote of the city council in a city having a Plan D or Plan E charter; in a city not having a Plan D or Plan E charter by vote of the city council, subject to the provisions of the charter of such a city; in a town by a majority vote at a town meeting; and in a regional school district or school superintendency by a majority vote of the voting member towns authorized at their respective town meetings, the amount of such compensation, in each case, to be set by the respective cities, towns or groups of towns. No member of a school committee in any town shall be eligible to the position of teacher, or superintendent of public schools therein, or in any union school or superintendency union or district in which his town participates.

So I started looking to see what plan our city fell under (Plan A) and what the language was in the charter or what ordinance was passed by the city council to provide for the compensation of the school committee.  I was unable to find specific language in either our city charter or any of the ordinances since passed to shed any light on my search although I did find plenty of information on the stipends provided for the City Council and on the responsibility of our School Committee.  If you would like to browse our charter and local laws you can find both here. That link is provided by the City of Haverhill website here.

My next stop will be the City Clerk’s office.  Wish me luck.

Tonight’s School Committee meeting will be the last one of the year to deal with the 2010-2011 budget.  If there’s anything you’d like to say about the budget this is pretty much the last chance open forum on the issue.  If you would like to see the proposed budget they’ve posted a link to the very large pdf here.

The last School Committee meeting was pretty much a rubber stamp approval of the budget by the Committee and then a round of pats on the back for everyone.

A few parents got up to speak.  They were frustrated with the cuts in the budget and felt people didn’t know how badly programs are affected.  I wonder where these parents were all year.  I certainly never saw them at any of the other meetings I attended over the school year.  Parents can’t just show up at budget time and expect the committee to just pull money out of air for their children’s programs!  We need to band together and fight how this fiasco is being funded at the state level if we want anything to change in our town.  I can’t be the only one emailing my representatives and looking for people to speak to on beacon hill!

Along the way someone on the committee was bright enough to figure out that they sounded awfully obnoxious with all their comments about how well they did this year; so they then each took 20 minutes to bemoan the state of the economy and how that made this an awful budget to work with.  Education in Haverhill is in dire straits.  Those poor children are missing out.  None of us are happy with this budget.  Services are at a bare minimum across the board.  Once they felt they’d been appropriately contrite the meeting moved along to new business.

The Mayor proposed that those non union employees of the Haverhill School Department including the School Committee adopt the health plan they are currently trying to convince the unions to accept.  This was met with a surprising amount of contention.  The committee felt the employees should be notified and asked if this is something they want to happen.  Apparently the committee doesn’t understand how executive decisions are made when unions aren’t involved.  No one I know who is non union ever gets a say in benefit changes.  The companies simply say “Here’s your new insurance plan.” or “Here’s the new rate for your insurance plan.”  or “Here’s the pay cut we’ve instituted.”  While I can appreciate letting people know that as of X date your plan is changing… I don’t understand having endless discussion on the topic – especially if this is the plan you want all of the unions to adopt!

Another disappointingly business as usual meeting of the Haverhill School Committee.

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.