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.

Whitson’s v Chartwells.

When students went back to school in September their meals were provided by a new company.  The School Department accepted Whitson’s as the new food service provider to replace Chartwells – who had provided the service for the past eight years.  The decision was not without controversy.  School foodservice employees claimed they were not adequately consulted about the possibility of change.  Chartwells gave an impassioned presentation at the School Committee meeting where the decision was voted upon regarding the gigantic mistake the Haverhill Public School Department was making by not renewing their contract.

Now that the decision has been made and the new program has been implemented I have to say the change has been good for the students.  Certainly the changeover has had its hiccups but overall there is good quality food being served daily.  Changes are also underway to bring electronic billing to parents so they can pay online and to bring a Point of Sale system into all the schools so students only need to swipe their ID card to pay for their lunches.

Apparently Chartwells wasn’t content to make speeches regarding its loss of the contract.  Chartwells filed litigation which has forced Haverhill to start the bidding process all over again. While I understand their disappointment at losing this contract I wonder if Chartwells is suing every school system in the area who elected to change from using them as their food service provider this year?

The administration maintains that they did not make the food service change because of any dissatisfaction with Chartwells.  I’m not sure if their official position on this subject is to ward off more litigation from Chartwells or because of a very short memory.  This time last year the School Committee was faced with a $200,000 shortfall in the food services budget. The equivalent of four classroom teachers needed to be paid to Chartwells to cover this shortfall.  The blame was cast on failure to raise lunch prices in a timely enough manner to stem the gap caused by rising prices in both food and utilities and the loss of Federally subsidized foods to Chartwells.  Certainly the School Committee did not respond adequately to the requests to raise lunch prices but I’m also not convinced Chartwells worked as proactively as it could have to bring these shortfalls to proper attention and to minimize the shortfalls in the first place.  In addition the Point of Sale system Whitson’s is working to implement, is a system Chartwells promised and never fulfilled during their years of service.

Over the holiday break the School Committee met and reaffirmed its decision to accept Whitson’s as the foodservice provider for Haverhill Public Schools.  I’m hoping this will end the controversy but only time will tell.  There is murmuring as to the quality of foods served and quantity available at different schools.    I hope our schools are not suffering from the issues I saw while working for Shaw’s Supermarkets.  The company carefully provided training, recipes and ingredients for consistent foods across all of their stores only to be undermined by their employees taking it upon themselves to do it “better” in such a way that the chain was forced to eliminate all in-store baking!