In an attempt to streamline procedure and make the School Committee more effective it seems Mr Magliocchetti’s focus on policy has backfired.  Lately we seem to spend inordinate amounts of time at each meeting discussing policy, the confusion surrounding it and lack of adherence to it.

I went home after the meeting and picked up the two policy books sent home with my children at the beginning of the year.  Both include the questioned policy on electronic devices.  Both include the policy on harassment and bullying placed on the meeting’s agenda.  Both even include the bus policy with a special section regarding kindergarten students which was the subject of much discussion a few weeks ago.

I know Mr Magliocchetti has children in the system so he, at the very least, should have received one of these books.  I believe Ms Danehy and Mr Toohey also have children in the system.  My daughter’s school required both she and I to read and sign the book so while I’m not able to quote policy directly I am aware of where the information is and generally aware of the items discussed therein.  Even if the overly large binder is not up to date – these little books are!  These books go home with every student from Kindergarten upwards so when members of the School Committee wonder whether or not information has been sent home with the children I can only conclude they do not have access to the policy books sent home or that they have chosen not to read the materials.  I will assume the latter because I know much goes unread and unnoticed by these elected officials.

At one point Ms Danehy suggested all the policy be available online.  While much of it is indeed online -  none of it is exceptionally helpful.  Many of the policy links are broken and others have policy not updated since the 1990′s.  I am endlessly disappointed in our technical savvy as a city because both the School Department and the City of Haverhill have websites which are mediocre at best.  I also wish the School Department technical staff would attempt to view their pages in a browser other than IE.  The pretty movies that work well on IE fail to load using Mozilla.  The formatting is also skewed in Firefox.  I realize that the majority of people use IE but a not insignificant portion of the browsing population does use other browsers!

Perhaps once the policies are all neatly updated and tucked happily into binders they can also be placed on the School Department website for everyone to have immediate and convenient access from home or work or the library or perhaps even their phone so that policy questions can be answered quickly and easily and the School Committee can actually discuss meaningful education related topics for a change?

We shall see at tonight’s meeting – agenda here.

Tonight (Wednesday February 24th) is another Parent Academy.

Please join us at the Consentino School for February’s discussion topic:  Safety and Security.

Registration begins at 5:45.  The presentation is from 6pm – 8pm.  Snacks are provided for the adults as well as a printed packet of information from the presentation.  There is a door prize raffle.  Children are welcome to0 – the District Parent Council provides pizza and activities for the children in the school’s gymnasium.

Tomorrow (Thursday February 25th) is a meeting of the School Committee.

The meeting begins at 7pm and if you can’t be there please watch the meeting on the local Education Channel – channel 9.

A pdf of the agenda for Thursday’s meeting can be found here.

I can only wonder, after the last meeting’s insanity, what further chaos the agenda item “Policy regarding School Transportation Policies” will bring.  Despite all of the urgency from two weeks ago I still have not received any notice of policy changes through the school or online or on the Education Channel and I do have a Kindergarten student so even if they were only sending this notice to parents of Kindergartners I should have gotten it.

In response to the incident regarding a Kindergarten student from Greenleaf Elementary School the School Committee requested clarification or strengthening of the bus policy.  This is a great idea!  The item should have been given to the policy subcommittee and gone through the two week waiting period before being enacted the week after vacation.  This two week period allows those who make the policy to hear from those affected by the policy and to work through certain problems in the language of the policy.

What actually happened is an oddly worded policy was rushed through with a suspension of the rules so that the policy could be enacted Friday February 12^th 2010.  Although I asked my son’s school and his bus drivers if they had heard of this new transportation policy and none of them had.  Despite the members of the committee calling for urgent action and demanding the information reach parents immediately there is nothing on the Haverhill Public Schools website, no fliers have come home, no Honeywell calls have been made and I haven’t seen anything in the paper or on my local access channels.  There was mention by the Mayor that perhaps the day after vacation ended would be a better day to begin enforcement of this new policy but I am unclear about the result of that suggestion as we segued into a comical but sad moment when Mr Bevilacqua speaks about the box in the school department and the boxes in the schools that could be used to make copies on paper to send home with students.  I had a vision of a child stuck on the bus and unable to hand Daddy the papers with the policy changes on it because they were not the parent who usually gets the child off the bus and so the child is returned to school or taken to the Registration Center at the Burnham School with policy change papers in hand and a confused parent waiting at the bus.

None of this belies the problems in forming such a policy.  The initial writing of the policy – which applies only to kindergartners since the child in the incident was a kindergartner – stated that the same person must take the child off the bus each day.  This writing means I cannot send my husband to get our child off the bus when I am running late.  Our son would have to return to the school instead of being allowed to go home with his father and he would then have to go to the school and pick him up as he is listed on the “green sheet” that contains all of the emergency information.

First I would like to speak to the incident in the article linked above.  This policy change we’re currently undergoing is a knee jerk response to one mother overreacting out of her inability to deal with the situation.  Because she failed to get to the bus in time, and then exacerbated that failure by not making emergency plans to cope with that possibility with both her daughter and the other parents at her stop the School Department is now at fault.  Perhaps if her daughter had her mother’s cell phone number this would have been resolved in 5 minutes and not 45.  While I understand the school should have let the bus driver know the child’s mother would be expecting the child to be returned to the school – I also understand the bus driver made the best decision she could with the information she had.  Children all across our city are met by Aunts and Uncles and older siblings and Grandparents and family friends and neighbors and parents of their friends every day.  To change policy because of one incident that is widely publicized ignores the hundreds of incidents each day where people successfully arrange for the safe return home of their children.

I also take issue with the mention in the article of the sex offenders who live in the area.  While having a stranger kidnap and murder or rape a child is a nightmare it is also a nightmare if someone you know kidnaps and murders or rapes your child.  According to the Department of Health and Human Services the latter is orders of magnitude more likely to happen than the former!  So while I would never allow my children to be with a convicted sex offender – not all the people who are dangerous to my children carry such obvious identification.  Also despite the overwhelming media attention; violent crime in all areas had dropped dramatically in the last 50 years as the mayor mentioned in passing at the meeting.  We’re far safer and yet we feel constantly imperiled because of the scare tactics of our various media sources employed so that we buy their newspapers or watch their shows or sign up for their services or take their “learn to protect yourself” classes.

Now lets return to the meeting and our illustrious School Committee.  When Mr Wood attempted to be the voice of reason and mentioned he had just received the policy change that day Mr Magliocchetti snapped.  “Mr Wood is obviously not a parent.  When you have children this is something that needs to be acted on sooner than later. Okay, this is something that happened over 10 days ago.  If he didn’t know about this he’d have to have his head in a hole.”  Mr Magliocchetti assumed Mr Wood had not heard of the incident in question. Instead, what Mr Wood was trying to say was that he had not had ample opportunity to review the policy and was going to recommend the changes go to the policy subcommittee as per school committee policy.  Of course, while the item was placed on the School Committee’s meeting agenda 48 hours in advance the request for the policy was not made of the Superintendent until the morning of the meeting.

At some point the discussion gets completely surreal.  Apparently we have a pandemic of  kindergartners who forge notes so they can go home with people who aren’t their parents after school.  A well meaning member of the audience points out that Mom could have a restraining order against Dad and he could have Mom tied up at home and Dad is kidnapping the child.  Somehow our transportation people need to be psychic and know that nothing untoward will ever befall the children when they leave the bus.

The suggestion was made to have copies of the “green sheets” on the school bus so the bus drivers could check ID when allowing Kindergartners off the bus when someone who is not the primary person comes to pick up the child.  While I understand the sentiment behind the suggestion I’m wondering how far down this rabbit hole we go.  How much training to spot fake ID’s will our bus drivers need to go through?  Will we have armed escorts on all kindergarten buses to check each home in the event the person taking the child off the bus has snapped during the course of the day and is keeping the primary person under duress in the home?  The amendment was moved that teenagers do not need to present identification when taking children off the bus.  This is ludicrous – somehow by dint of being too young for a license they are somehow more trustworthy?

And why stop at Kindergarten students?  Do we really feel that first graders are so much more mature that they can be allowed off the bus with anyone willing to take them?  At what age is a child considered competent enough to state that the person at the stop to pick them up is unsafe and they need to return to school.  At what age are they competent enough to ferry themselves home?  Is this codified in their policy?

Ultimately, the Mayor and the Superintendent stated there is a “common sense” element to allowing children off the bus.  Taking that into account, I don’t see how any of this would have changed the incident linked in the article above.  The bus driver would have looked at the parents of the other child at the bus stop and deemed them acceptable to care for the child until her mother returned.  The real change needed to be with notification.  When the school gets information that a child won’t be met at the bus and no other arrangements had been made previously by the pick up person then the school needs to contact the bus driver to make sure that child is not left with friends but returned to the school or taken to the Burnham School depending on time.