I’d like to examine the cuts made on the recommendation of School Committee President Shaun Toohey to keep the Crowell School open but first I’d like to point out the expenses that were added back to the budget and a few items that were missed that need to be added.

In keeping the school open there were $150,000 in personnel expenses added to the budget.  There were no lines to account for the additional utility and maintenance fees.  There were also no additions for a stipend for a Principal or an Assistant Principal.  There is no addition for a library/technical ESP to account for the two days of prep periods for the teachers that the children don’t have Art, Music and Physical Education.  Currently the library at the Crowell School is staffed and maintained entirely by parent volunteers.

To accommodate the above additions and bridge the rest of the budget gap the following cuts were proposed:

Eight Elementary SPED ESPs are to be eliminated – this is a risk because if the IEPs of our students don’t allow for these cuts or if new children are placed who need these services then the positions must be restored or our district faces serious litigation fees.

A $10,000 further reduction of the utilities section.  I don’t understand how we can add a school back to the system and reduce our budget for lighting and heating and providing phones and internet.

A $50,000 further reduction in maintenance.  Again how do we add a school and reduce the budget for maintaining the schools equipment?

A $150,000 increase in medicaid money.  This is a thorny issue because with medicaid reimbursement dropping and the chance that the money could be kept by the city always looming over our heads I am uncomfortable relying on this unknown.  Also this money is generally kept for an offset of unpredictable SPED expenses and tapping it for general education purposes is risky.

A $100,000 request in a reduction of City Charges for unemployment.  This is the one cut I am in agreement with.  The number assessed this year is significantly higher than previous years and the Auditor should look into this.

Then the proposal further discusses the pending Meals Tax vote and how that money could be used to add back five elementary teachers and a half day kindergarten teacher should it pass.  This is yet another unknown that should be looked at after Tuesday’s vote not before.

Ultimately I don’t believe the changes listed above help create an accurate and balanced budget based on the needs of our students.  I believe these changes are on paper only to justify an emotional decision made by the school committee to keep open a school we no longer need.

I went to the meetings Monday and Tuesday to hear the discussions on the proposed budget.  I even came home with my own souvenir copy of 80 pages of agony to pour through over the last week.  I then took the time to talk to as many people in the school department as I could fit into my week despite having some heavy commitments at the Crowell School.

Monday the Principals presented their class size projections, the plan regarding the switch to a 5 day schedule and the cuts in teachers from k-12.  The School Committee led applause for the Principals for doing so much with so little.  Unfortunately the applause was short lived.  As soon as the committee was presented Tuesday night with the line item cut sheet they learned it included the closing of the Crowell School.  They immediately rescinded their support by making a motion that the budget would not be considered as long as closing the Crowell School was included.

Everyone from the schools walked out of the room at that moment.  I cannot blame them for their frustration.  This was not an easy budget to prepare and none of them are happy with any of the cuts made; they likened the experience to Sophie’s Choice.  And I’m going to post here what I said at public comment Thursday night regarding the Crowell controversy for those who missed it:

I question the decision made at Tuesday night’s budget meeting at Haverhill High School to remove the closing of the Crowell School as a cost savings.  I am a Crowell Parent and I am now ashamed of this fact.  Should Crowell remain open in September I will not allow my son to begin first grade there.  The decision is an insult to the principals who struggled with many hard decisions and is the committee’s way of saying the 1% of students who attend Crowell School are more important than the 99% of students who attend the other schools across the city.

Furthermore, with 7 classrooms available in the Golden Hill and Walnut square schools I can no longer support the argument that we need Crowell for overflow space.

I’ve also heard that there is no plan for the buildings.  Unfortunately I do not believe that to be true either.  While I do not condone all of the ways the issues have been presented on both sides of this issue over the years I have come to understand that the plan since Golden Hill was built in 1993 was to slowly move all of the children and close the Crowell School.  Since this is not palatable to the members of the school committee they have instead insinuated there is no plan and insisted the funding be found to maintain their pet neighborhood school.  If the will of the committee and the public truly were to maintain neighborhood schools Golden Hill would never have been built and Fox, Smiley, Burnham, Cogswell and Bartlett would all still be open.

In the directive given to the administration when preparing this budget the top two items were student achievement and class size.  By keeping the Crowell School open the class sizes will increase more than they already have because we will have to add to the 30 teachers already eliminated and student achievement will not respond well under greater class sizes.

If it truly is the will of the committee to save THIS small neighborhood school then perhaps the School Committee is willing to back up the power of their convictions and lead the charge regarding health care concessions by reducing the line item on page 30 where the Haverhill Public Schools has budgeted $80,000 for the health insurance premiums of school committee members.

A former city-councilwoman spoke after I did to clarify that it was 1991 when the parents lobbied hard for the new schools to be built with the understanding that the smaller schools would be sold to become condominiums and contribute to our tax base.  While 5 of the schools were indeed closed thus far none have been added to our tax rolls.

During the meeting Ms Kosmes clarified the budget line changes they made to get to a balanced budget.  I will be picking up a copy of that paper as soon as possible so that I can see if those changes will truly benefit our students.  I also have some questions I’m hoping to get answered by my next post.

I was very surprised, as was the Eagle Tribune, that nothing was directly discussed regarding the letter that surfaced yesterday making very serious allegations about Haverhill High School.

I was dismayed at Mr Toohey’s comment about the burden of subcommittee work.  The last time I checked the position of School Committee Member was a compensated part time job with great responsibility to the students and City of Haverhill.  This job was not thrust upon these people like a draft notice – each of them very purposefully spent time and in some cases money to convince the voters in Haverhill they were willing and able to do this job.  Don’t tell me its a burden.

To that end, I wonder how successful the Superintendent will be in getting the School Committee to attend the special one day seminar he wants to hold to educate them on the new standards before the Race to the Top team comes in to evaluate the district.  Everyone was very nice about saying they would attend but when the day comes I wonder how many will actually show up.

I’m also endlessly disappointed in the things our School Committee members don’t know.  Mr Magliocchetti’s endless quest to “learn about education in Haverhill” really should have begun before he started campaigning and should be at a much more comprehensive level than it is currently at.  I seriously think these are just exercises in seeing who he can get to perform for him each week at the meetings.  If he truly wanted understanding he could go into the schools and meet with a wider audience of administrators and teachers and bring his findings back to the School Committee.

I wholeheartedly endorse the small “trial” audit with Futures Education.  I can’t believe it took until this meeting for someone on the School Committee to ask if references had been checked!  Couldn’t they have asked that in a phone call or email much earlier in the week?  These people were supposed to be vaguely prepared to vote on this issue at this meeting and yet I always feel like they are seeing each issue for the very first time each week – this does not inspire confidence in their ability to oversee the education of our students.

We received an update from the folks at Whitson’s regarding the food service program.  I have suggested to the District Parent Council that they do a Parent Academy on food service and nutrition a few times this year – now that Ms Danehy has also made the suggestion at this meeting maybe it will happen!  My daughter has their lunches every day and repeatedly when I ask her what the best part of school was as we’re walking home from the bus she tells me “lunch – it was so yummy I ate it all up!”  So either I am the world’s worst cook and she can’t wait to get a decent meal or the lunch program is pretty good.  I am dismayed when I sometimes sub lunch duty at Crowell Elementary at the volume of food thrown away by the students.  For this I blame the parents – since the kids toss homemade lunches as well as school lunches.  Teach your kids to be good eaters!  Stop sanitizing their food completely and teach them to try new things.  No one can subsist their whole life on Chicken and Fries or bland crust less sandwiches with apple slices.  We live in a country with an immense variety of fresh foods available all year and yet we don’t appreciate or take advantage of this fact.  Instead we turn to overly processed prepackaged conveniences with little to no health benefits and then wonder why we’re faced with an obesity epidemic.  Sending home the paper with the kids’ BMIs on them won’t change anything at all – although I am curious to see these papers go home and the firestorm that will erupt around them.

Mr Sierpina brought up the obvious elephant in the room which is closing the Crowell Elementary School.  Apparently he hasn’t visited there in a while to understand that the 85 kids listed on the class totals aren’t the only kids being serviced in that school.  At Crowell one “empty” classroom does speech therapy, another does preschool testing and yet another is filled with mats and trampolines and other obstacles to do another kind of special ed testing.  He also doesn’t realize that until the 5th grade left Golden Hill Elementary overcrowding in that school was so high that students were receiving instruction in the hallways and in closets converted to teaching areas.  Adding three classrooms full of students and three classrooms of testing/therapy to Golden Hill will return us to that level of overcrowding.

When discussing what we’re currently doing as a district to provide safety nets to our at risk kids in the middle school and high school Mr Magliocchetti cited the wonderful program of foreign language tutoring done by Aaron Pinet and his classmates.  Mr Magliocchetti wants to see more of these programs as they are a no cost solution to some serious problems facing the district.  While I agree that mentoring and tutoring by older students is beneficial to both parties I do not want to see these programs used to the exclusion of all other forms of safety nets.  It is unfair to place the burden of keeping at risk kids in school and performing well solely on the backs of our high school students.  Every single successful safety net program has parental involvement and support – what are we doing to involve and motivate parents to keep their children involved and motivated?  What too are we doing as a society to encourage students to be proud of their interest in learning?  Lastly what are we doing to educate everyone that should a child’s aptitude and interest take them on a path outside of college and onto a trade – that this too is ok?  College isn’t inherently better than trade school and in our current economy with the horribly inflated costs and time involved in getting a college education the students selecting trades are coming out ahead economically on a scale not before seen!

Have a wonderful weekend and I will be enjoying the Comedy Night at Michaels this evening.

Time and again I have asked the same question regarding the School Committee and the public’s desire to close the Crowell Elementary and Walnut Square Elementary Schools.  “Do we have enough space to accommodate the children in light of all of the building happening around Haverhill?”

I was told that the loft apartments downtown are not targeted to families but to the young and hip 20somethings.  My counter to that is “I was young and hip at 20something… then I became a parent!”  We cannot ban the people who move in downtown from having children.  Even if only a small percentage of those people become parents it will make a large impact on our classroom sizes.

Looking around the city I am seeing single family homes bulldozed and duplexes erected in their place.  Some of these duplexes have four bedrooms and when the people move in I see toys and bikes in their yards.  In one extreme example there was a small brown dilapidated single family home on the corner as you go along Boardman Street towards the cemetery.  That home was torn down and two duplexes are currently being erected in its stead.  Where one family once lived there will now be four.

The development on Seven Sisters has the potential to add many large homes to Haverhill.  I cannot imagine that none of these homes will have children in them.  And that none of these children will go to the Haverhill Public Schools.

I have been told that studies were done 10 years ago that showed the trending of populations downward and that closing schools was recommended.  Many schools have been closed – there are only two left to close: Crowell and Walnut Square.  However I believe that study needs to be redone to take into account all of the building and development in Haverhill.  As we move new businesses into the area some people might follow their work, as we create loft apartments with easy train access we will attract more people to our town, as we create 4 bedroom duplexes we will encourage more families to call Haverhill home.

This morning I read an article in the Eagle Tribune about the water supply.  Will we have enough water to accommodate the growth in Haverhill?  And the first paragraph in the article is:

HAVERHILL — As the city continues to grow — with estimates of close to 75,000 people in the next two decades — leaders are trying to figure out how to provide enough classroom space, police protection and water.

You can read the rest of the article here.

The leaders don’t know how they will provide classroom space?  The same classroom space I keep being told is not an issue?  Our growth is catching up with us despite our attempts to ignore it.