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!

Just a couple of weeks ago, Dr O’Brien, our Superintendent of Curriculum announced he would be leaving his position in Haverhill.

This past week, Dr Buchanan, our Superintendent, announced he was a finalist for the position of Superintendent in Wenham.  Many of the people I’ve spoken to are surprised and disappointed.  I merely wonder why its taken him this long to ponder moving!

The School Committee is considering whether or not to offer him a contract extension to entice him to stay.  Unfortunately I doubt they can write a contract giving Dr Buchanan the things that would truly make the difference.

Our public meetings are shameful – If this is how grownups act on camera then I cannot imagine the day to day interaction of these people with our Superintendent.

The budget is a mess.  This isn’t any one person’s fault and is totally beyond the purview of anyone in the City of Haverhill but that doesn’t mean the stresses placed on the city and its people aren’t real.  The state needs to change the way schools are funded – or the federal government needs to make sweeping education reform that is productive and helpful before this issue improves.  That being said – I’ve sat through many budget meetings and I know we could handle things better!

Our MCAS results have essentially topped out.  With the severity of the cuts we’re facing there’s no way we’re going to improve much beyond where we are now.  The state has come in for their evaluation – since we’re a level 3 school in a sea of higher performing schools for our geographic area – and asked what, besides money, can the district benefit from.  What else is there besides money?  Sure we can use textbooks but that costs money!  We’d love to give our teachers the professional development they deserve but that costs money.  Many of the schools need repairs but there’s that money issue again.  Class sizes are higher than we’d like but teachers cost money.  It would be fantastic to expand the offerings at HHS, give foreign language classes at the middle schools and have a full marching band but these items cost money.

I have a list of 101 things that Dr Buchanan would provide for our schools if only he could.  None of the items are particularly extravagant.  None of the items are remotely in our grasp either.  Sadly, until society places the value on education that we need to and stop treating the school day as glorified free babysitting we will never have the means to attain those 101 goals.

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.

As you may recall, National Honor Society member and Haverhill High school student Aaron Pinet has created a program to bring foreign language lessons to Haverhill’s middle school students.

Apparently the program is a giant success. At the most recent School Committee meeting Sue Danehy updated the committee regarding his program and gave everyone the URL to visit him online.  Aaron has recruited fellow Haverhill High School students to be language tutors and currently his team is giving our middle school students exposure to French, German, Italian, Spanish and Latin on Monday afternoons from 2:35 to 3:30.

Aaron has also submitted his Language Learning project to “Do Something.”  The “Do Something” organization is committed to helping today’s young people become active participants in society by “Using the power of online to get teens to do good stuff offline…”

Thanks again to Aaron Pinet for taking the initiative to do something about the lack of language learning happening in Haverhill’s middle schools!

I would like to take a minute to applaud the efforts of the students in this story.

I listened to Aaron Pinet speak about his program to the School Committee at their last meeting.  I admired his enthusiasm and entrepreneurial spirit.  Aaron and his fellow language tutors exemplify the good that is happening in our schools.

The overwhelmingly positive response to his program and the number of students wishing to enroll show the need to find a way to return the foreign language program to the middle schools.  We expect our children to have accomplished much before they graduate from High School and yet we continue to take away the tools they need.  Here, our students are creating their own toolboxes with which to repair our troubled system.

Thank you!