The children had another exciting evening with the babysitting staff used by the School Department.  This might sound sarcastic but they really enjoy going and playing and every time we’re on the way home they tell us how much fun they had, that they met new friends and that they are tired (their red cheeks attest to all of it!)

We parents were treated to a presentation by a very confident and well spoken sixth grader who talked about her participation in the VIP program and what she and her peers are doing to combat bullying.  She made great points about changing our culture so that bullying isn’t seen as cool and standing up for yourself and for others.  “Don’t be a silent bystander!”

The main presentation was given by Katie LeClerc.  She was young and tech savvy which was refreshing since I expected more technology bashing and instead she was helpful in encouraging parents to conquer their phobias and learn the technology to both help your children and themselves in keeping kids safe and being involved in what they are doing.  She also made the excellent point that kids under 13 had to lie to get a facebook account and therefore facebook really isn’t responsible for that.  She also made the point that when you put things on facebook they belong to facebook and aren’t really very private at all – even with your privacy settings maxed so please post accordingly.  Many colleges and companies will Google you or check your facebook profile as well – so if you don’t want your education or employment opportunities gimped please think before posting.  MsLeClerc encouraged parents to use the tools available to block options on their children’s phones and computers to stop text picture messages and inappropriate internet usage and to monitor what their children are doing online.  Essentially she recognizes parents need to be involved and informed regarding their children – how revolutionary!

There was the obligatory reference to the Sex Offender Website for our area.  I still think these websites create a false sense of security for parents.  Not all sex offenders are known.  Not all sex offenders are easily recognizable from their web profile.  Not everyone looking to hurt your kid is a sex offender.  Not all sex offenders register like they are supposed to.  Some folks forced to register on this website are just kids who made dumb choices regarding their teenage dating careers and really shouldn’t be lumped into the sex offender category.  And frankly, I’ve discussed this before, stranger abduction/abuse is a very low percentage of all abduction/abuse – you’re far more likely to be hurt by someone you know and trust than by some random criminal.  Its very sad but that’s the way it is.

We came home with some helpful handouts of mixed veracity.  The overwhelming sheets which made up the “Guide to Understanding Online Chat Acronyms” were somewhat helpful and somewhat laughable.  They were also somewhat inaccurate.  The problem with acronyms is that each place one chats online uses some basic universal acronyms and some dialectical variations.   Then they also padded the list with silly things like “BISFLATM” just to be all inclusive I guess.

Another handout with an article about fifth graders working to combat bullying was more interesting because it drove to the heart of the issue.  The technology is just another medium for bullying – stop the bullying at the root and there won’t be “cyber bullying.”  These kids were refreshingly honest and forthright.  All the typical tell your mom/teacher/bus driver stuff just gets the kids bullied harder in school.  Kids know this – so they are unlikely to report anything or they wait until its so out of control and they just can’t cope any longer.  Giving them real tools to use to diffuse bullying situations is much more helpful than turning kids into tattlers who just garner more of the bully’s ire!

A handy dandy glossary of internet related terms was provided.  I haven’t seen a BBS or a modem in a decade but who knows maybe they are still hot stuff somewhere?  I also noticed RSS was missing in their definitions despite the site who provides this educational material having a prominent link to their own RSS feed.  Also notably missing were Cookie and anything to do with tweeting.  Actually, in retrospect, nothing about Twitter ever came up despite that being related to texting and easier to follow by strangers than facebook.

The last handout is a Teen Internet Safety Study from 2006.  Mostly the study boils down to kids use and love the internet.  Kids think they are a lot more private and safe there than they really are.  Kids also know their parents don’t have a clue what they are doing online.  I’m not really surprised.  This is why the kid computer in our house is centrally located and monitored and we haven’t given our 8 year old a cell phone despite her entreaties that all her friends have one!  My hope is that when our children earn the privilege of a phone they will be more responsible with it than if they had just been handed it like a toy.  We also talk often about what a wonderful tool the phone is and how it can be misused much like other useful tools such as knives and automobiles and the internet.  Is it enough?  I don’t know but we work very hard to balance the lessons required to make our children into responsible and independent people with keeping them safe and happy.

Cyber-Bullying seems to be the new hype item to scare parents.  Just this weekend the Eagle Tribune published this article about some new legislature to combat the ever-growing cyber bullying happening in school.  The Hunking School is hosting an information session on how parents can recognize and prevent cyber bullying on March 22nd with Katelyn LeClerc.  The Parent Academy at the end of the month will cover cyber bullying in its “Safety and Security” presentation and School Committee Memeber Joe Bevilacqua asked for an agenda item at a meeting in February to discuss this growing problem.  And googling cyber-bullying brings up an almost endless list of links to places dedicated to stopping the epidemic.

Certainly text messaging and facebook are being used by kids to bully each other.  The problem isn’t with the text messaging or the facebook posts but with the bullying and the kids.  Take away the medium and you won’t alter the message!  When I went through middle school and high school there were no cellphones or internet but there was plenty of bullying.  Kids wrote notes and stuffed them in lockers, they wrote on each other’s lockers with markers, yelled at each other across the hallways, whispered in their friend’s ears and giggled or snickered at their victims or prank called people’s houses.  There was violence and depression and detention and not a lot of actual education about why this was bad – certainly it was treated by many as a right of passage to be bullied in school.  Unfortunately not much has changed in many respects except that the kids have flashier toys to perpetuate the bullying.

From the Eagle Tribune article: “Parents will have to realize that they’re responsible for their children’s actions, and if they’re learning this at home and the children bring it to school, there will be repercussions for that,” Murray said. this is as close as they come to the root of the problem.  Unfortunately, the parents who are the worst offenders – the ones who are just adult bullies – won’t suddenly have an epiphany and become responsible parents because they got a note from the school.  These parents will see this as just more persecution and either blame their child for bringing home unwanted attention or blame the victim for coming forward with a complaint.

Sadly, bullying isn’t looked at as a serious problem by most people.  This is evident in our media bias.  Think of the sit-coms and cartoons popular on TV and how many of them have a bully/victim dynamic as one of their main comedic elements.  Here is an article on bullying regarding the Drew Carey Show and this Tvtropes wikki on sitcom archetypes cites many other good examples.  Because the shows always place some kind of redeeming moment for the bully we’ve been desensitized into thinking all bullies aren’t all bad.

Look also at the double standard society uses to judge success for our children.  We expect our children to do well in school and go to college so they can have a successful career but we still call the top performing academic achievers “geeks” or “nerds” who are often “bookworms” and “teacher’s pets.”  We need to stop stigmatizing our children’s successes!

Then there is this pervasiveness in society whereby we can’t be content with our own lives without somehow disparaging someone else.  This need society possesses to keep up with the neighbors and to have everything bigger, better, newer has plunged the country into the worst recession in decades.  We’ve tied so much of our self worth up in what we have or wear or drive and we’ve passed that down to our children.  If their little classmates don’t have the right toys or designer clothes then they are somehow not worth being friends with and subsequently end up teased by their peers.  Already the need for conformity has hit my home – my Kindergartner and third grader are always asking for things because “everyone else in my class has them.”  I struggle to find a line between teaching them the values important to me and making them complete social pariahs at school.

Do I have the answers to this problem?  Not with the current societal conditions.  But I believe that everyone needs to take more personal responsibility for their decisions and actions and realize how much their children are watching and learning from them.  We also need to intervene on the behalf of children and other adults who are being bullied.  We need to stop putting our heads in the sand and pretending no one else’s problems effect us.  One major factor that allows bullies to continue their reign of terror is that not enough of their peers stand up to them and say enough is enough.  Bullying will only be reduced at the peer level or with parental involvement.  Laws won’t make bullies stop.  Giving the victims the support they need to stand up for themselves by standing up with them is the best start we can give this issue.

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?

The February 11^th meeting of the School Committee was a turning point for the newly elected members.  The gloves came off this night leaving no doubt in my mind that we’re in for two years of the same bickering only with new faces.

The first item of contention was Mr. Magliocchetti’s placement of agenda items requiring a report from the Superintendent.  Apparently he is in violation of School Committee Policy since items requiring a report from the Superintendent need to be the will of the Committee as a whole and not just one member.  This policy is for a good reason, as the Mayor did mention that if all seven of them posted an item requiring a half hour report the meetings would be out of control with regard to the length of the meetings.

Personally, I wish Mr. Magliocchetti would take it upon himself to attend some of the meetings that Dr Buchanan has with the Administrators to get this information and then pass it along to his fellow committee members in the spirit of communication instead of forcing the administrators to come to the meetings to essentially cover the same information twice.  Then when Mr. Magliocchetti requests a list of wants and needs for the future and alternatives to the current system I would also appreciate it if he would not dismiss those wants, needs and alternatives with comments about how we need to address the current situation.

The second item of contention was the transportation policy.  This item will be discussed at length in my next post.  The true colors of our current committee showed brightly here!

Lastly, we spent almost half an hour on meeting minute approval and the appropriateness of executive session.  What a fiasco that was.  In making a motion to make certain executive session minutes public Mr. Sierpina gave confidential information at the public meeting.  Even if the School Committee had voted to keep those minutes confidential there is no way to un-ring that bell.  Now that the issue is public knowledge the Eagle Tribune has reported on it here.

Mr. Magliocchetti also stressed during the discussion about executive session minutes that the “rat” on the School Committee who leaks executive session materials to the newspaper needed to be uncovered and censured.  No one commented on this at all!  Is Mr. Magliocchetti channeling 1950′s gangster movies?  Certainly his vocabulary contains more eloquent ways to make his point about the leaking of information.

I’m also disappointed in the newspaper coverage of the meeting by the Eagle Tribune.  With the variety of subjects discussed only the possibility of Andover renting space in the Bartlett School Building made it to press.  No mention was made of the public comment from Fred Simmons regarding the unions banding together against privatization of the night custodians at HHS and the turnout of union employees.  The room was full!  Not even a picture of the kids from Hunking Middle School giving their presentation from the special two day leadership skills conference sponsored by Delta Dental made it to our paper!

On a positive note, I would like to commend the committee’s eagerness on supporting a fee for the return of confiscated cell phones.  I know Mr. Nangle balked at the $20 fee as being a tough amount in a grim economy but that’s one fee I bet few parents would pay twice.  Besides, the fee is not much compared to the cost of cell phones and cell phone plans.  Texting is not a cheap add-on!  There’s also a very simple way to avoid ever encountering this fee – put your phone away when in school.