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.
Its been mentioned that the only reason I spoke as vocally as I did at Thursday’s meeting – and the only reason I brought a prepared speech is that the time I spend on the podium serves only to bring publicity to my personal campaign for School Committee.
While speaking to a public committee isn’t something one can generally do in private I’d like to address a few misconceptions.
If anyone looked at all of this and thinks I decided to throw Crowell under the bus for political gain they are very wrong. I’ve maintained for years that if I felt the administrators had finally proven there was room at the nearby schools to accept the Crowell students I would support the decision. This wasn’t an easy process and I’ve followed it to the best of my ability for four years now. I will spend the time to show anyone who asks how I came to the conclusions I did.
The only reason I ran for School Committee in 2009 was because I feel very strongly if you’re going to criticize anything you need to also be willing to roll up your sleeves and offer to help make it better. While I have considered running again in 2011 because I do not believe things are any better on the School Committee I’m also considering removing both of my children from the Haverhill Public Schools. If I make that choice then I will not run again in 2011 but I will stay very watchful of the progress of the committee and the schools to determine if my children would ever return.
I’ve been told I don’t care about the students, teachers and community. This isn’t true. Through everything that’s happened, I’ve tried very hard to consider both sides and see the district wide impact of these decisions. I do not ask just how my child would be affected by the changes and let the world be damned. All of the people who will be losing their positions as a result of this budget are important and have relationships with students, parents and their fellow teachers.
I bring a prepared statement whenever possible. Certainly I’ve spoken at the podium without having anything prepared. I’ve stood mid meeting to add a point I felt was both vital and overlooked by those running the meeting. When I make public comment I often spend days working on what I will say at the meeting. I’m not a public speaker; I’ve taken the mandatory public speaking classes in High School and College but those classes were long ago and I’ve almost never spoken in public since then. My intent is to get to the podium and speak without losing track of the topic at hand, without forgetting an important point, and without repeating myself. How often have you listened to someone speak and tuned them out after a short time because they just seemed to be talking in circles about nothing? If I’m taking the time and effort to stand at that podium and speak I don’t want to be tuned out for the same reasons!
As for not being supportive. I’ve donated a lot of time and money to the schools. I’ve volunteered since my daughter started kindergarten doing whatever I could to help out. I’ve been at almost every bookfair, field day, school store and concert – often missing the moment when my children performed because I’ve been helping at the volunteer station. I’ve participated in numerous school fundraisers, donated items to be raffled, attended as many “Family Fun Nights” as possible, solicited my friends and family for fund-raising for the schools and have provided supplies directly to my children’s classrooms when asked.
Should I run for office again, or should I ask you to vote – or not – for a specific candidate for an office in the future please do remember my position on the issues. Remember what I said and to whom. Remember the work I put into researching the issues before I make my decisions. Remember the work I’ve put into helping make the schools better. Remember so that you can judge my actions on their own merit and not on what’s left after they’ve been ground through the rumor mill.
A few days ago I discussed school choice and why I made the decision to keep my kids here in Haverhill and fight to make the School Department here stronger. In reading today’s news I wanted to followup on some of the items from the other post.
Groveland did not pass the override to provide $350k in funding to the Pentucket Regional School District. I’m not surprised. Parents make up a small fraction of the voter pool. People like to forget that their own education, or their children’s education or their grandchildren’s education was funded by people who did not have children currently in the system either.
I hear a lot around town about the HHS renovation. I hear much also about the lack of funds for a roof at Tilton, flaking paint, poor landscaping, lockers that need painting, and fences that need fixing. Generally I don’t hear about the other town’s problems. I found the comment on the above linked article to be telling: Part of the buzz around Groveland is that they don’t want to spend money on capital school improvements either. “Memo to all those folks who want to build an $8 million addition to the Bagnall School by taxing the Groveland citiziens with a huge override: take a look at Monday’s vote, it won’t pass!” (I quoted Sachemmon – the spelling and grammar are hers)
Now that the override has failed – Merrimac also said no to the override; West Newbury was the only town to support extra taxes – what will the Pentucket Regional School District do? The options are limited and are the same ones we’ve debated in budget meetings here in Haverhill. Pentucket plans to lay off teachers and support staff. Course offerings have been lessened and enrollment numbers are being watched at the elementary level to see if any cuts can be made there. Unfortunately, the upper grade levels will probably feel the greatest loss from these cuts. I find the comment by “Gone Fishin” interesting as the points he makes are ones I hear over and over about Haverhill: Failure abounds in the school’s leadership, the town’s government, the teacher’s union and society as a whole.
While Haverhill’s School Department budget crunch is just beginning – North Andover’s seems to be winding down. When the dust clears they will have lost: “Under the Finance Committee’s proposal, Hottel said School Department layoffs will include a part-time special education teacher, roughly seven classroom aides and one social worker. Hottel said there will be no major cuts to educational programs and no layoffs of classroom teachers under the Finance Committee recommendation. Fee schedules also will remain in place, he said.” Nine jobs lost, no major cuts to educational programs – I have to wonder what that means … major is really determined by those who won’t have programs to go to in the fall, and fee schedules will remain – Is the DESE criticizing North Andover as it does Haverhill for charging fees to students for programs? I guess even affluent towns are feeling the recession!
Methuen’s mayor has decided to turn funding of the a new high school into Methuen’s very own Hale Debt Fiasco. He’s taking the tax increases from building three grammar schools that the people are already paying and extending them out beyond the 2018 end date to some as yet unnamed date. I had to double check the article to make sure they weren’t discussing HHS when they quote Manzi saying: “The chief complaints about the high school are the open concept, outdated science labs, and parts of the building that are not up to code. Failing to fix the building will threaten the school’s accreditation, Manzi warned.” Of course this all hinges on not having budget shortfalls that cost Methuen public safety. Councilors are hearing the city will lay off police officers and firefighters as it deals with budget cuts, “so I don’t know where we’re going to get money to put into the (high school) stabilization fund,” Cronin said. Its like deja vu all over again!
Lastly, lets check the grass in Andover, where a former Superintendent laments about how that town is handling its budget woes. He also mentions the need for a strategic plan for the schools – something we hear about at our own School Committee Meetings. In his call for a strategic plan, Ken Siefert even speaks to the need to conduct an audit! We’ve heard much about audits during the last few School Committee meetings as well.
Life is similar all around the Merrimack Valley; and I’m going to guess that other than the weather, life is similar throughout much of the United States. Certainly we can do better here in Haverhill – I believe in the city even when it doesn’t believe in itself. But do not assume we’re an anomaly of budget woes and school department issues and tax burdens for those items fertilize the lawns of our surrounding towns too!
The 16th and 17th of April were spent at the DCU Center in Worcester in an effort to get Kamal Jain onto the Republican Primary Ballot in September as he will be an amazing State Auditor! Our goal accomplished, I’m going to give a small post mortem of a very surreal two day whirlwind.
Friday midday saw me packing my luggage into a van and taking the drive out to Worcester for the Massachusetts Republican Convention. Once we had dropped off our luggage at the hotel and some supplies at the DCU we were to pick up more supplies from a nearby building. Dropping off the luggage was easy – the people at the Hilton Garden Inn rock! Dropping off supplies at the DCU was not so easy. Arriving at one entrance to pick up credentials to allow us access to all the necessary campaign related areas, we were told to go to another area – that had no one even remotely Convention related in it. After finally locating the people with the credentials they were unconvinced that campaign teams were different than delegates and we almost didn’t get our credentials until 5pm. In retrospect that isn’t as far off from when we were given access to the areas anyway but at the time was a major setback to our carefully planned day.
We donned our credentials and successfully delivered the contents of our van into the DCU Center and headed off to pick up more items. The next few hours were spent loading and unloading vehicles, delivering supplies, hanging signs and running. Yes, I actually ran without anyone but the clock chasing me!
Our goal for the evening was all preparation for the following day done and everyone at the hotel showered and changed for the pre-convention party at 8:00. Some of the more important folks made the party on time – like oh the candidate and his campaign manager – but I was a little late. Did I mention how wonderful the staff at the Hilton Garden Inn were? I’m going to mention it again then. They were wonderful! There was good food and good folks and lots of political chatter which I’m horrible at but I really believe in our candidate so I did my very best not to embarrass him or myself.
After not nearly enough sleep we headed over to the DCU Center for the convention itself. The volunteers spent a couple of hours finishing our preparations and then it was showtime. The keynote speaker was Scott Brown. Then the Candidate for Secretary of the Commonwealth, William Campbell, spoke.
Kamal Jain spoke third and my task here was to advance the slides so the correct slide showed at the correct time with his speech. For those of you who are interested you can read his campaign day speech here.
After both Auditor Candidates gave their speeches the delegates voted. We patiently listened to them approach the podium by county and read off the totals for each candidate. Kamal’s campaign manager dutifully plugged the numbers into her spread sheet and we watched the percentage points work towards the magic number that would trigger a primary vote in September: 15%. The live numbers indicated we had accomplished our goal of getting Kamal onto the ballot. The “Official” totals read a number of minutes later indicated we had not. A lengthy recount followed, which I will not detail here – but understand that I have much sympathy for election officials everywhere - and finally resulted in Kamal Jain earning a spot on the primary ticket.
I would love to have more to speak to regarding the other candidates and the convention in general but while the author of this post saw more of the panini vendor than the podium – I saw more of the recount room than anything else once the Auditor nominations were done. Once the final tallying was finished we had to scurry about and collect the detritus of our campaign lest the DCU center keep our damage deposit. Signs hung carefully the night before had to be removed, delegate gifts left behind needed to be picked up and basically anything we brought with us had to be repacked and taken home or stowed in the proper trash and recycle bins.
When my husband plucked me from Classic Pizza in Bolton, MA after some trouble with the van I began to fill him in on the story of my weekend. Each time I tried to wrap my brain around a cohesive time-line I could not believe I had left our driveway for this Convention Adventure only 33 hours earlier.
Friday morning I will be joining my friend Kay on an excursion to the DCU Center in Worcester to support Kamal Jain in his quest to become Massachusetts State Auditor this September.
If I was surprised, and I was, to find myself excitedly attending her “coffee with the candidate” a few months ago – then you can imagine how I must feel about being a campaign volunteer. Just last week my husband and I took the kids to the Jain Campaign Headquarters in Worcester and helped assemble a mailing for supporters. We were dutifully rewarded by the sincere thanks of Kamal and his campaign team and an added dose of pizza and soda for all.
I have enjoyed learning about how a campaign works on a state level. There is certainly much more involved than my local run for School Committee. Instead of the 50 signatures I needed to be on the ballot, Kamal Jain needed at least 5,000! And all of the signature papers needed to be submitted to the individual cities and towns for verification of registered voters and then turned in to the state. There are 351 municipalities in Massachusetts where supporters had to collect and verify signatures! That’s a lot of support and a lot of legwork. This is also just one small part of the campaign process.
This weekend I will participate in another aspect of campaigning. I will be at the DCU center for the Republican Convention in Massachusetts to help Kamal earn the percentage of votes from the delegates required to ensure his place on the ballot. In order to be on the ballot as one of the “Major Parties” in addition to the signatures of the voters you also need the support of at least 15% of the delegates at the convention. The candidate with the majority delegate support also receives the endorsement of the party – which is very helpful in fund-raising and campaigning.
I never realized the amount of money needed to conduct a campaign. Everything costs money. Even volunteers cost money by the time you’ve supplied them and fed them. Campaigns require signs and paper and stamps and envelopes and pens and food and name tags and t shirts and bumper stickers and business cards and web space and dozens of other things. This election is a mini boon to the Massachusetts and specifically Worcester, MA economies! There will be people traveling to Worcester, staying at the hotels, eating at the restaurants and shipping in campaign items like flyers, signs, shirts, stickers and other goodies.
Of course all of this means that between being away last weekend for a fun scrap booking retreat and being away this weekend for the convention that there are fewer posts from me for now. I will have a full accounting of the weekend’s events and I will spend some quality time with my DVR to re-watch and write about the fiasco that was the April 8th meeting of the Haverhill School Committee during the upcoming school vacation week! Your patience – dear readers – is appreciated!
I was thinking about something I was told during election season: “Parents don’t vote.” and I wonder if that’s true or if there just aren’t enough parents to really shake up the elections in any one town.
Haverhill has approximately 7,500 kids in the public school system. If we went on dangerously generous assumptions that those kids all came from two parent single child homes where each parent was a registered voter then there would be 15,000 parent voters in Haverhill. With a registered voting population of 44,000 people parents would be 1/3 of the voting block. Not good odds and this is the best case scenario.
Now if we look more realistically at our numbers of those 7,500 kids I’m going to bet for every single child home there’s a multiple child home so lets assume those 7.500 kids come from 3,750 homes using the stereotypical 2 child household as an average. Now the population of Haverhill is rumored to be nearing 70,000 people subtracting out the 7,500 students and a few extra for estimation purposes lets assume 60,000 of them are eligible voters. Knowing only 44,000 are registered that’s approximately 73% of adults are registered voters. Now taking those 3,750 homes and being generous enough to assume they all have two parents – that’s 7,500 parents. If parents register at the same rate as the general population that’s 5,475 registered parent voters. Only 12% of the voting population would be parents at this rate!
Turnout is never the full registered voting population but with representation like this no wonder the School Committee knows it doesn’t really need to cater to the parents when deciding issues. That’s certainly not politically prudent for them – is it?
The one thing parents have on their side is voter apathy. Even in a Mayoral race as heated as the last one was, Haverhill only had 11,000 of their 44,000 voters show up at the polls. That’s 25% of the voting population! If all of the parents came out and voted they would be half of this number and more able to effect the polls.
You might say that parents don’t vote… but I don’t think they are any less active than the general population – there just aren’t enough of them! So they need to be more vocal and more active than the general population to effect meaningful change on child related issues. Those who aren’t parents may want to consider child related issues as important as well – these are your tax dollars at work whether you want to pay for education or not; shouldn’t those dollars be well spent? And considering the ramifications of a quality education system on the overall health of a town everyone benefits when the schools are running well.
I believe in health care reform. I believe everyone should have access to medical care – especially the sick people. I believe preventative medicine is an important part of overall good health. I don’t believe in the bill currently headed to President Obama’s desk.
First, the bill lacks reform. So lets be accurate in our naming please. This is health care legislature voted in to make President Obama look like he succeeded where President Clinton left off. This vote is the political version of two little boys on the playground fighting over whose father is the toughest. Nothing about this bill will bring meaningful improvement to anyone’s health care.
Second, I love how they are paying for the legislation:
Third, I don’t know a single person who wants this legislature passed. Voters spoke in MA and supposedly this landmark vote was a warning shot Washington did not heed. When you have the Senate Seat of the most outspoken and fervently Pro Health Care Reform Democrat – Ted Kennedy – up for replacement and the State of Massachusetts votes in a young Republican; the pendulum is shifting!
So we come to what the vote was really about. Can Obama finally get something done? He hasn’t fixed NCLB – I think he might actually have made it worse and I wasn’t sure that was even possible. He certainly hasn’t brought any troops home – I think we have more of them overseas than before; he’s just beefed up forces in Afghanistan instead of Iraq while leaving all the other troops where they were. The Stimulus Packages have done nothing but put us further in debt in this one year span than all of the other presidents combined over the history of the United States. All that stimulates is frustration and desperation. Unemployment is still double digit. This leaves health care. In an attempt to rally support for his Presidency and not make the Democratic Party look ineffective this bill is being rammed through Congress before the November election backlash brings a Republican majority with it. The hope is that all of the good feelings from “getting something done” will erase in the voting public’s minds the betrayal at being ignored in their wishes to not have this bill pass.
If the politicians thought the vote for Obama was historic – wait for November! There’s never been a better time to dust off that voter registration card and submit it and take back our democratic process from the poorly named Democrats!
Two email missives have landed in my inbox this week that I think bear publicizing. In the end they both come down to the same thing – tell our state government we’re done with budget cuts that paralyze the cities and towns we live in.
The first one I received was from a parent at Golden Hill Elementary. There is a rally at the Statehouse in Boston on March 23rd from 9am – noon. Whether or not you have children the education provided in your city affects you. It affects property values and the attitudes of surrounding towns regarding doing business in or with your city and it affects the willingness of businesses to locate themselves in your city.
The second is from our Mayor, James Fiorentini. He is urging everyone to contact your representatives and urge them not to cut local aid further. I will not post the entirety of his message but the contact information he provided for Haverhill’s representatives is this:
House of Representatives
State Senate
You might think there is nothing the state can possibly do. The budget has to be cut and you cannot get blood from a stone. I thought that too until I learned that the budget accounts for only 55% of the money spent by Massachusetts. In 2009 Massachusetts spent approximately one billion dollars a week. We desperately need to have knowledge and accountability of that other 45% and decide whether that money can be used for local aid instead of this “off budget spending.”
Thank you Kamal Jain for the education and my copy of the CAFR. (Warning extremely large pdf behind that second link.)
In a front page article in Friday’s Eagle Tribune the headline reads “Governor Patrick Promises Full School Funding.” In reading the article you soon discover that is wishful thinking.
What the Governor has said is that Chapter 70 Funding will be left uncut, this round, at the $4 billion dollar mark. Sounds great right? He hasn’t promised anything and the house and senate could still make cuts. Too bad they couldn’t tap into some of that un-budgeted cash the State spends every year. Thank you Kamal Jain for giving me new directions to look in to follow the money trails.
If only Chapter 70 funding were the only funding stream for education. The cuts to Circuit Breaker funding are anticipated to be deep and painful and will leave many School Systems struggling even with level funding of Chapter 70 monies.
Level funding is a joke anyway because level funding does not mean you will have level services from year to year. If you fund the teachers at say $10 million in 2009 – their contractual raises and the ever increasing costs in health care and pensions will guarantee that same $10 million in 2010 will not buy as many teachers. So the Governor gets to look good by saying he’s level funding a system when in fact that system still needs to make cuts because those same dollars don’t buy as much. If I just level funded my grocery budget from week to week since 2005 for example – well we would only be able to feed our family for a fraction of the days each week here in 2010.
The paper sums up some of my issues with level funding in this article about the impact of the Governor’s “Promises” and there’s a notation about how the cuts in circuit breaker funding have hurt North Andover. If these cuts are hurting an affluent town like North Andover – imagine how they are decimating an urban district like Haverhill.
Then there is the Stimulus Money that really wasn’t. For Haverhill, once you factored in the cuts made to education funding from all sources, the net stimulus gain for the town was about 10% of the dollars the State meted out. This stimulus funding is a short term burst of cash meant to boost local economies and instead the state used the money to replace funding streams – hardly a stimulus! The stimulus money also came with strings attached as to how it needed to be spent. If those strings kept the towns from spending the money to cover needs created when the cuts happened… no one at the state level cared. They could report that dollars went to your district and that’s where their concern ended.
So thank you Mr Patrick for telling us we’re still not going to get the funding needed to run our towns and schools but hide those facts behind terms like “Level Funding” and “Full Funding” and “Stimulus Money” when in reality its politics as usual. I can only hope Massachusetts’ voting proclivities include ousting our current Governor in November!
Regardless of which of the three candidates you support in this election it is your right and duty to head to the polls today and cast your vote. Do not let the rest of the state speak for you without your input.
Even a small wait is not a huge inconvenience. Employers know today is an election day and cannot prevent you from voting. Polling places open early and stay open late to accommodate a variety of schedules. I’m sure the polling places have cleared the snow. And I know there won’t be protesters preventing you from voting although there may be people with signs, at designated distances from the polls, looking to rally some last minute support for their candidate.
I want to see record turnout in the post election reporting! We can make this happen!
