It seems that nearly every week, Dr. Wardynski does something else to consolidate his power over our school system. This week, every principal in Huntsville City Schools awoke on Sunday to read, “All Huntsville Principals’ Jobs on the Table, says Superintendent.”

This type of headline tends to put a bit of a damper on your week, don’t you think? Not exactly making that Monday morning commute to school an enjoyable one did it?

I’m certain that if you asked them individually, they would tell you, with no prevarication, that it didn’t effect them in the slightest. Our principals are professional educators. And every single one with whom I’ve worked or met absolutely loves their job. Without exception, they would clearly tell you that they have the greatest job on the planet as they get to help educate our children.

So, since that would be their public response, I want you to step into their shoes for a moment. Imagine how you would feel if you woke up Sunday morning to see your direct supervisor telling the city that your job is on the table? (I fully realize that this isn’t a difficult thing to imagine for many of you. The tragic cuts to NASA have made this a recurring reality for many in this city.)

Answer honestly: Would seeing that in the paper have an effect on your morale? Would it affect your desire to go to work on Monday?

For myself (and I’m one of those people who do have the best job on the planet), the answer is a resounding yes.

This is why I decided to speak at the board meeting on Thursday night. Again. Yes, I know that the board and superintendent are sick of me and wish I would just go away. I know that many in the community who attend the meetings or watch them online feel likewise.

It may come as a surprise, but I feel that way, too.

I hate spending every other Thursday night away from my family. I hate sitting and watching the board members (not all, but the overwhelming majority) fall all over themselves praising Wardynski (pretty much as they did in the article above). I would much rather spend my evenings at home helping with homework and playing with the kids.

I go for one reason: I believe it is the right thing to do. I believe standing up for our kids, our teachers, our principals and schools is my duty as a parent and citizen.

And so I go: if only to remind the superintendent and the board that they work for us.

Here are my comments from Thursday night:

I’m here tonight to speak about morale in the district.

Morale and Motivation Matter. It matters how you treat people. It matters what you say to them. Morale matters.

When our teachers go for four years without a raise, when they see their step raises frozen, when they see their starting salaries reduced to the state minimum, all while the board votes to give bonuses, “state-competitive salaries,” and raises to the maximum posted salaries of the senior administration because they wouldn’t come for less, morale matters.

When our superintendent dismisses “traditionally trained” teachers as often ineffective in teaching students in high poverty areas, morale matters.

When our superintendent attempts to “motivate” teachers by posting student performance data on teachers’ doors, morale matters.

When our superintendent says that “all principals’ jobs are on the table,” morale matters. Punitive or not, morale matters.

When our board members claim that our superintendent is doing exactly what he was hired to do in doing these things, morale matters.

A love for education is what motivates teachers like Mrs. Roth to organize a star gazing event, on her own time, for Mt. Gap elementary students.

It’s what motivates Mrs. Bowling to continue to push her students to express themselves even when that expression is difficult to understand.

It’s what motivates Mrs. Dodson to take on extra work of evaluating additional assignments like poetry writing projects to encourage advanced students to continue to grow beyond merely the requirements of the test.

It’s what pushes parents and teachers to work together on projects like this year’s PTA Reflections competition on Diversity allowing for a total of 42 students across the district to go the state competition.

Good morale is not an enemy. We have excellent teachers. We have excellent principals. They love education. Help them, let them do their jobs.

Strangely on Thursday, the board seemed more than willing to respond to citizen comments. Dr. Wardynski, however, held his response to my statements until the very end of the night. This time, at least, he made his remarks in a publicly. You may read a transcript of all of those remarks here.

At a couple of points, Dr. Wardynski seems to be directly responding to myself and a parent who followed me, Ms. Kelli Thomas who spoke passionately about the fear she experiences every time she sends her child to school. I will be responding in great detail to his speech in the coming days, but there’s one issue that I would like to clear up tonight. At one point during his comments, Dr. Wardynski claimed that I was mistaken in my assertion that he was attempting to “motivate” teachers by posting student performance data on their doors. He did, in effect, imply that I was lying about the posting of data. Here’s exactly what Dr. Wardynski said during his comments following Citizens’ Comments:

We know the growth of students in our classrooms. Uh, we do not post it on the doors of our classrooms. We don’t need to. Our teachers can see it on their computers. And we discuss it every week in virtual teleconferences with our principals and our school leaders. And we review school performance at the classroom level in some cases, and at the school level in all cases.

Seemingly in response to my comments (although I know for a fact that many other parents have raised this issue with Dr. Wardynski privately as well) that teachers (at least in the “managed” schools) are required to post their students’ performance on standardized tests such as DIBELS and STAR Enterprise Testing in public areas for the entire school to see. Dr. Wardynski said, “Uh, we do not post it on the doors of our classrooms. We don’t need to. Our teachers can see it on their computers.”

Concerning this, this superintendent is mistaken. It is actually quite common among the managed schools (those who students do not achieve some pre-determined testing goal) for compiled student testing performance data to be posting in public places in these schools. Some schools, such as Morris Elementary, post this information on the wall immediately beside the teachers’ classrooms. Other schools, like Highlands Elementary have posted all of their classes scores on the window looking into the lunchroom as seen in the photos below. I have intentionally blurred these photographs so that no personal information may be seen in them, but the photos still clearly show 22 individual charts displaying the standard STAR Enterprise Test Report. Highlands Elementary’s website shows that they have 20 Grades 1-5 teachers or if you prefer classrooms. Here is a sample of the STAR Enterprise Tests Classroom Report.

What we see in the photo below are complied student performance results for the STAR Enterprise Tests displayed in a public area for everyone to see. These pictures were taken by a concerned parent with a child at Highlands Elementary.

Next we see a shot of the DIBELS testing results as well.

I have furthermore received reports that similar displays may be seen at the following schools:

• Chapman Elementary
• Highlands Elementary
• Monte Sano Elementary
• Morris Elementary

I am fairly certain that these four schools are not anomalies in this. In so far as I am aware (I have not searched the entire school in either case), neither Challenger Elementary nor Mt. Gap Elementary have similar displays. I am convinced that either they have not been asked to do so, or that their principals have simply refused to do so. Either way, I am grateful.

Education is not a zero-sum game. It is not a competition where teachers fight against each other to make sure that their scores are higher. When such competition occurs, the result quite often destroys the educational process.

Posting scores in this manner creates a competitive environment in our schools between our teachers and between our schools. If this continues, our kids will be the ultimate losers.

Thus, it would seem that Dr. Wardynski is correct when he states that “we do not post it on the doors of our classrooms.” So far I haven’t found an actual case where it is posted specifically on the classroom door. However, it would seem that he is mistaken when he suggests that the scores are only displayed on teachers computers.

Either way, I am convinced that there is a systematic effort underway at the district level to demoralize our principals, teachers, and at least the “uppity” parents who question decisions and actions of the superintendent. That was what I was speaking against. It is what I am writing to oppose even today.

No single resource is as valuable to the education of our children as our teachers. Now, I agree with Dr. Wardynski that not every teacher should be a teacher. There are a small handful of teachers in every system who likely should be doing something else. And he is also correct when he says that good teachers “don’t appreciate working with teachers who don’t do their job.”

However, despite his words to the contrary on Thursday night, I know that given the concerns I outlined in my comments that the morale of the teaching and principal corps of our district are currently at dangerously low levels.

Our teachers and principals are the public face of our educational system, and it’s far past time that they were honored for the nearly impossible task they have shouldered. It’s far past time that we parents recognized our excellent teachers and principals publicly.

Look, as a parent first, I am completely aware that any teacher or principal caught on the wrong day can come across as difficult, uncaring, or blindly stubborn. I’ve had a few of “those” meetings where I left shaking my head thinking, “Were we talking about the same child?”

But those times, even in an extraordinarily stress-filled year as 2011-2012, are extremely rare. And when they have happened, in my experience all that has been required to correct the issue is simply another discussion with them to clear the air.

Our teachers and principals are human. They are not machines. They will occasionally make mistakes or seem brisk in their tone. However, these issues pale in comparison to the ever-increasing workload, ever-decreasing financial support, and more importantly, steadily increasing attacks.

Teachers and principals teach because they love our kids and believe in education. It’s far past time that we realize that standing up for our kids means that we must almost always stand up for our teachers because they are usually on the same side.

I do not believe that this superintendent nor this board are regularly standing up for neither our kids nor our teachers. And it is far past time for that, and the kind of attacks I’ve mentioned above to end. Not to challenge Willie Nelson, but my heroes have always been teachers. They are the light-bringers. They are the Truth-tellers. And if we value those qualities in our community, we must stand for them now.

I hope that the superintendent and the board have a better Sunday morning than they gave to our principals last Sunday.

Editor’s Note: Below you will find a transcription of Dr. Wardynski’s nine minute monologue that he delivered after the conclusions of Citizens’ Comments on February 2, 2012. This type of response from Dr. Wardynski is a new approach to communicating with the public after the Citizens’ Comments have concluded. (Yes, this could be considered a response even though Mr. Blair repeatedly tells the public not to expect any response. In short, the board was chatty with citizens Thursday night.)

This monologue allowed for no public response as it came at the conclusion of the meeting immediately preceding the adjournment. I am posting it here in its entirety, and I will be posting several extended responses to the comments he made over the next couple of days. As I mentioned, this is a transcription of that statement. Any typographical errors are entirely the editor’s responsibility. Once the video of the meeting is made available, I will also post a link here.

Dr. Wardynski begins:

So, we’ve been implementing a program called Star Enterprise in our district. We’ve got some early results, and I just want to celebrate one or two. We’ve got some outstanding teachers in our schools. And we also have some teachers who are on probation and pending tenure who we are reviewing. Teachers are folks who are key to learning. They’re key to student growth, and there are many who are doing great jobs. And it’s no secret that this superintendent addresses those that we think are not doing great jobs. We continue to do so. But when that becomes the story for our school district, what we miss is the key teachers that are doing great work. They’re the vast majority of the folks in our schools, so for example, Mrs. Murphy.

Mrs. Murphy is a teacher in Rolling Hills Elementary School and in the past nine weeks she has raised student proficiency in her classroom in Math by 17 points. So what was previously about 70% of her students were proficient in reading, er excuse me, in math at the common core standards. So these are standards well above the Alabama Reading and Math Test. She’s raised that from about 70% to about 87% in nine weeks. We have heroic teachers in our classrooms doing great things. Uh, they appreciate working with great teachers. They don’t appreciate working with teachers who don’t do their job. Uh, we don’t have many who don’t do their job, and many of efforts underway are designed to address teachers that aren’t keeping up with the rest of the team. These range from Teach For America to our practice of bringing in teachers at the school district level and selecting them at the school district level because not every school faces the same hiring pool. Some face a fairly thin pool of applicants. And every schools needs to face a very deep pool of talent because every child deserves a great education. So the challenges of some of our schools are not a secret to this board or to this superintendent. But Huntsville City did not get into this position in a day. And we’re not going to get out in a day. We’re working on getting the most excellent teachers we can in the classrooms. That’s going to take some time.

We’re reviewing every probationary teacher this spring. Based on information available to me, that’s a first in this district. Every teacher going for tenure is being review by our committee of excellent teachers and administrators. Many people who think they were going to be tenured will not. Um, we’re building up from a base that was here, that was created over a period of years, and we’re going to reach a new level of excellence. But it is not going to attained in a moment, and it is not going to be retained, attained without great effort. And it will not be attained without measurement. And so we measure everything today.

We know the growth of students in our classrooms. Uh, we do not post it on the doors of our classrooms. We don’t need to. Our teachers can see it on their computers. And we discuss it every week in virtual teleconferences with our principals and our school leaders. And we review school performance at the classroom level in some cases, and at the school level in all cases.

In our next round of evaluations of school and child performance, we’ll be drilling down to standards. Standards that are being met across the district. Standards that are being met within schools and those within classrooms. To identify systemic gaps in our education across the district, gaps within schools, gaps within classrooms. Uh, this is the work that’s going to take some time, but it’s the work that we’re about. And it’s a very systematic effort that involves the use of data that is now going to be adopted, in my understanding, across the county and within other cities in our area. We’re leading the way in this effort.

Uh, those who claim that testing, we teach to the test, that testing is not a valuable resource simply do not know what they are talking about. There is no way to test, to take, to teach to the STAR test. It’s a computive, computer-adaptive test in which every child will face a different question. And the questions aren’t the kind you can teach to. If you don’t know algebra, you can’t teach to answering an algebra question. If you don’t know how to factor an equation, you can’t teach to answering a question like that. If you can’t read, we can’t teach you what the paragraph said, cause you haven’t seen the paragraph. And so we’re after the business of literacy and numeracy. Uh, we’re taking a very strategic approach to raising the proficiency of our children, and our excellent teachers are responding. Mrs. Murphy is but one of many, many across our district, from schools that here to for have been thought of as challenged, to those that are thought of as excellent. Children are seeing a change in their learning environment.

We’re providing them the resources, from computers, to excellent teachers, to excellent leaders. We’re reaching across our country to do so. We’ve reached across our city to bring in new partners to address discipline problems. Last board meeting we signed on with Pinnacle Schools. We’ve had the opportunity to visit our students at Pinnacle Schools over the last week. It’s a different place. The children over there are working diligently. They’re not visiting with each other. Uh, they’re focused on instruction whether they’re special education students or whether they’re general education students. Those who do not comport themselves according to the regulations and rules of Pinnacle Schools will find themselves living in a teepee. And they won’t be coming back until they can behave. And if they can’t behave, they won’t be coming back to our schools.

So while some of our high schools have seen disturbance, some of them have seen student who don’t know how to behave, some that want to bring street violence into our schools, uh, we are taking steps, we have taken steps. And those steps are now in place and underway. Uh, we have 125 seats waiting for children at Pinnacle Schools. And we have plenty of space in teepees. So misbehave in our schools, and you will see a new regime of discipline. Seldon Center will close at the end of this semester.

Uh, in partnership with bringing on excellent teachers, we’re creating an environment in which teachers can teach and children can learn. Uh, you saw it tonight in our discussion of Westlawn’s proposed school. Uh, identifying a way to structure a building so that sixth graders can enter a more, um, a learning environment for which their more responsible for their learning and others are less responsible. The transition from fifth to sixth grade. Uh, we’re looking to smooth that ramp for them. They’ll be in a space that will be somewhat separate from seventh and eighth. We’ve had previous discussions about ninth grade. Smoothing the transition from middle, which has, um, some structure to high school which has less structure with regard to governing the movement  and the activities of students, needs a ramp as well. So ninth grade academies are a part of that.

We’re well aware of the challenges our students face, and we’re not happy that they face these challenges. Uh, we’re taking steps with the resources we have to provide a safe learning environment. Uh, we delayed the opening of our newest high school to ensure it was safe. We’re installing ZoneR on our buses to ensure we have safe transport of our children from home, to school, to home. Um, not all this can take place in a moment. I know that’s not a comfort to moms or dads who would like for it to. It’s not a comfort to me. Um, we’re moving with purpose. We’re moving with speed and increasing our efforts daily. Uh, I believe our city will see the payoff of this, and I believe it already is seeing the payoff. Uh, when you step into our classrooms, the data is there.You can see the children’s progress. And in the coming months, we’ll report it on our website so that parents can see the progress of classrooms. They can see the teacher’s ability to generate growth among the students in that classroom. Um, Huntsville City Schools is becoming a place that is known in our state and across the nation for rapid innovation, rapid change, but these things still take time. We’re moving with every effort we can muster, and we’re moving as quickly as we can. I’m not happy when a parent comes here and has to be unhappy about a school. Uh, you can be certain of that. So, I know our administrators are working, and I know our teachers and our principals are. And we will continue to do so. So I thank everybody for their attention.

In a move that is somewhat out of character, Dr. Wardynski offered an interview to the editor of Rocket City Mom yesterday in the third article of a series concerning the reasons for and role that Teach for America will play in Huntsville City Schools beginning later this year. If you haven’t already read the article, please take a few moments to go read the entire series.

The discussion began with a posting by Dr. Jason O’Brien on January 17th entitled, “Teach For America Explained.” Dr. O’Brien is a teacher and the father of five kids in Huntsville City Schools. He makes an effective argument that TFA is based upon a fallacious argument that “anyone can teach.”

Such a suggestion is as wrong as it is offensive. Just as some individuals are particularly gifted writers, artists, designers, doctors, lawyers, military leaders and ministers, some individuals are particularly gifted teachers.

The central issue facing student achievement is not that they don’t have the right technology, home life, or even clothes (as much as my daughter would disagree), the central issue facing achievement is student motivation.

Good students are motivated students. Weak students aren’t.

And time and again, we have learned that the single best way to improve student motivation is through direct, personal interaction with a teacher who is committed to connecting to a child and pulling them, kicking and screaming if necessary, into a world that stimulates and captures their interest. In short, a child who wants to learn will do so regardless of the obstacles that stand in that child’s way. A child who doesn’t can rarely be taught anything regardless of how excellent their technology or building is. (An excellent technology blogger, Bob Cringely, is writing about this very point in connection to technology right now. Go take a look at his argument.)

And so finding, keeping and rewarding teachers who have the experience to understand that finding a way to motivate a child to learn is the first and most difficult step of education is central to improving student achievement.

But as any parent, and in particular a SPED parent can tell you, motivating students to learn is often the single most difficult job on the planet. The fact that anyone manages to consistently find ways to motivate and encourage curiosity is clearly miraculous, and it should be celebrated as such. Finding, developing and implementing motivational techniques requires time and experience.

Dr. Wardynski ignores this truth in his support of hiring TFA in the article entitled, “TFA: Dr. Wardynski Responds.”

Since he was kind enough to offer his responses to the Editor’s questions, I would also like to offer a rebuttal to some of his more egregious claims.

Dr. Wardynski wrote:

We will be using Teach for America to address the problem of persistent low performance in several schools with high rates of poverty. Within the Huntsville system we have such schools that have been in school improvement for up to seven years. Traditional approaches to raising achievement in these schools have not worked and other approaches are required. In addition to low performance, these schools are characterized by high teacher turnover.

It certainly appears to be true that there is an “achievement gap” in Huntsville City Schools and that gap absolutely must be addressed, but once again, Dr. Wardynski is laying out ideas, hinting at reports and statistics without offering any direct evidence. Were he a student in my English 101 class, I would send his argument back to him with the suggestion that he offer specific evidence. Show us, Dr. Wardynski, exactly how bad the “persistent low performance” is and has been. Perhaps he was referring to a 2010 report in the Huntsville Timesthat stated that thirteen Huntsville schools were “persistently low-achieving.”

But who knows.

He offers no evidence supporting his claim that “traditional approaches to raising achievement in these schools have not worked” either. What does he consider a “traditional approach?” When were these approaches tried? How effective were these approaches? If they failed, why did they fail? All of these are questions that should be considered and answered before making a decision to move in a radical new direction, shouldn’t they? Especially if the goal is indeed to address the achievement gap?

It’s hard to make informed decisions when the top educator of the city refuses to take opportunities to teach and support his case. (Refusing to support your claims with data is however a common characteristic of the Broad Foundation’s disciples.)

But setting that aside for a moment, let’s consider his claim that using untrained, uncertified, TFAers (80% of whom will be gone after the third year, I doubt that these “persistent[ly] low performing” have a turnover rate that high), will actually close the achievement gap. Somehow that seems to shout in the face of logic, doesn’t it? What it really means is that Huntsville City Schools will spend at least 1.9 million dollars over the next five years to help an organization whose own tax returns from 2010 show that they have over $309,115,182.00 in NET assets.

Perhaps instead of sending $1.9 million out of city and state, we would be better served using some of these funds to address the “high teacher turnover” rate at these schools?

I’m certain that we will find that the “traditional approaches” he claims have failed do not include offering a financial incentive, or additional costly professional development to the teachers who are already teaching at these “persistent[ly] low performing” schools. Anyone willing to offer me odds on that one?

Last year Teach for America received over 48,000 applications for 5,200 teaching positions. This level of selectivity is without peer and brings unparalleled levels of talent to schools for which we have traditionally seen very few applications.

Once again, our top educator has failed to offer any evidence supporting his claim that the “persistent[ly] low performing” schools do indeed receive “very few applications.”

Where’s the evidence of this? I know that it’s considered to be conventional wisdom that this is true, but we’re dealing with our students’ lives here. Give us something to base these decisions on other than conventional wisdom. Show us the actual numbers. Show us the “traditional approaches” that have failed. Surely this information is sitting in a folder on Dr. Wardynski’s desk. Publish it. Prove it to us.

Furthermore, what exactly is the TFA measure of this “talent?” Is this based on GPA’s? Communication skills? Connectedness of their parents? Since TFA refuses to share their selection criteria with the public(gosh, I wonder where they learned that?learned that), it is impossible to assess or evaluate the actual level of this “unparalleled” talent by any objective standard.

How helpful are good grades in engineering classes when attempting to teach an unmotivated student to read? Last time I checked, the basic skills required to instruct and motivate a student to read were not standard curricula in those classes.

But, now we move on to a BIG claim.

Beyond being highly selective, Teach for America provides initial and ongoing professional development to new teachers focused upon the challenges of teaching in high poverty schools – a focus not found within traditional teacher preparation programs.

You’ll have to forgive Dr. Wardynski for this one. His lack of time in Alabama and lack of experience in education has meant that he likely is unaware that this statement just simply isn’t true. He claims that “traditional teacher preparation programs” don’t train their students for the challenges of teaching in high poverty schools.

The truth is that they certainly can, do and will if they are asked. You see, unlike TFA which charges extra for their “training,” traditional teacher preparation programs at the “teacher colleges” that Wardynski is so quick to dismiss actually provide the following Teacher Warranty:

Teacher warranty. According to regulations mandated by the Alabama State Board of Education, the College of Education ensures that “a candidate’s competency to begin his or her professional role in schools is assessed prior to completion of the program and/or recommendation for certification” and establishes, publishes, and implements “policies to guarantee the success of individuals who complete its approved programs and are employed in their area(s) of specialization.” The College of Education provides “remediation at no cost to such individuals who are recommended . . . and are deemed to be unsatisfactory based on performance evaluations established by the State Board of Education and within two years after program completion.” (University of Alabama 2010-2012 Undergraduate Catalog)

In other words, these “traditional teacher” colleges and universities actually provide a three year warranty for the teachers they produce. If within three years of graduation, a candidate’s competency to serve his or her school’s particular needs is questioned due to a need for additional training, such as how to teach in high poverty schools, the “traditional teacher” colleges and universities here in Alabama will provide that training “at no cost to such individuals who are recommended.”

Traditional teachers come with a warranty, cost less, and have full certification. And yet, Dr. Wardynski is unaware of this. Perhaps this will help him in the future.

He continues to press his point.

Within Alabama there are several routes to teacher certification ranging from traditional teacher preparation programs to the Troops to Teachers program. These alternatives are designed to bring talented individuals into K-12 education to meet the varied needs of students.

Under alternative certification programs, candidates are usually required to successfully complete a 16 week, split placement internship. Under the tutelage of experienced mentor teachers (and university supervisors who teach pedagogy), student teachers learn the “craft” of teaching. When newly hired teachers enter the classroom without this experience, they end up “learning on the job.” For a detailed description of this, please see Dr. Veltri’s book, “Learning On Other People’s Kids: Becoming a Teach For America Teacher” which details the struggles of TFA participants who consistently report feeling “overwhelmed” and “underprepared” for their initial classroom experiences.

As Dr. Veltri concludes:

I wondered, “Who’s America is Teach for America really teaching for? Why is it tolerable for education to be less than for other people’s kids? And, what are we, as a nation, really prepared to do about it?

I have asked Dr. Robinson for a specific detailed listing of which schools the TFAers are going to be placed. The contract calls for their placement to be restricted to schools where at least “70% of attending students are eligible for free or reduced lunch unless mutually agreed upon by School District and Teach for America,” but the discussion that Dr. Wardynski has had with Rocket City Mom implies that the placement of these teachers could be much broader than anticipated. Dr. Robinson, for example, told me November 3rd that all of the TFAers were going to be placed at “secondary schools.”

It seems that I must have misheard her because when I asked why TFA were now going to be placed at elementary schools she responded:

A small number of the TFA teachers will go in elementary schools. The vast majority will go to middle and high schools. That’s always been the plan. (February 2, 2012)

I apologize for my misunderstanding. I suppose that I merely assumed that when Dr. Robinson was critiquing the Heilig and Jez study as having focused on elementary eduction, and that our TFAers were going to be placed at the “secondary” level that she meant that there wouldn’t be any TFAers in the elementary schools.

Unfortunately, Dr. Robinson hasn’t responded yet to my request for a listing of the schools where TFAers will be used. Since these candidates are so excellent, I have to wonder why they aren’t being placed at every school in the system and why Dr. Robinson and Dr. Wardynski aren’t screaming from the rooftops the names of the lucky schools selected to participate.

Wardynski continues:

We will measure the results obtained by Teach for America teachers and teachers from traditional programs. We will make future teacher selections decisions with these results in view. We are not wedded to specific teacher programs or certification pathways.

This is excellent news. Well, except that Dr. Wardynski has demonstrated a stubborn refusal to actually produce one scintilla of actual evidence supporting his claims so far. I’m sure, however, that a Broad Foundation trained superintendent, evaluating a Broad Foundation teacher training program will be completely objective in his evaluation.

For example, many of our high poverty schools already see 200 to 300 percent higher turnover than other schools. By using our Teach for America teachers in teams and by supporting their development in the education profession we anticipate reducing turnover in our high poverty schools.

Higher than average turnover in “persistent[ly] low performing” schools is a problem nationwide. It is still a problem in areas where TFAers have been placed because, as cited above, TFA does nothing but perpetuate the problem of rapid turnover.

Wardynski wraps up:

We seek to hire highly talented staff who can deliver results in the form of raising student achievement. Teach for America has a track record of delivering such teachers.

Actually, as has been demonstrated time after time after time, TFAers do not out perform traditionally trained teachers. They, in particular, cannot compete with experienced teachers in raising student achievement.

In conclusion, this push to replace traditionally trained teachers who are certified, warrantied, and experienced has little to nothing to do with a desire on Dr. Wardynski’s part to “raise student achievement.” It is, instead, a desire to control a school system from top to bottom and to remake it into the Broad Foundation’s image regardless of the studies that show it won’t work, regardless of the cries from teachers and administrators who have been begging for the resources and support to effect change at our struggling schools, and regardless of the parents who are concerned that their children are being used a pawns in a national game.

This is about control, pure and simple. And unfortunately for us, our elected representatives are falling over themselves to let him take over and take our limited funds out of our schools and into the coffers of a multi-million dollar corporation that has a history of ignoring the public’s calls for transparency.

Our city deserves better. Our schools, administrators, and teachers deserve better. And by god our kids absolutely do.

That huge rushing wind sound you’re hearing . . . me heaving a huge sigh of relief.

I believe that I have things back to just about normal around here. It is now officially safe to share links to the site again. (And please do so.)

So, what happened?

The simple answer is that my site was hacked. Someone (or thing–much hacking is automated) gained access to my server and installed a bit of code there that redirected links from other sites to mine to spam sites.

When you clicked on a Facebook, Google, Yahoo, or Bing link to a post of mine, you would be redirected to a site selling Starbucks or fake Antivirus Software.

As I said, I’ve now corrected this problem. The site is safe for viewing and sharing as you wish.

Let me take this moment to apologize to all of you for the problems the site has had over the last week as well as for your having been redirected to sites that you did not wish to view. I hope that this was only an inconvenience for you, and that it did not cause you serious issues. If it did, please contact me via the comments feature at the bottom of the page.

Credibility is a difficult thing to build, yet insanely easy to lose. I pay close attention to the content of my site because of this. (This is why I do not have, and will never place any ads on this site. This isn’t about getting rich or famous. It’s about making our schools better than they are.)

Where I failed was that I did not pay closer attention to the impact that the delivery system could have on my credibility. I know that my credibility was harmed by the spam sites as well as the outages, and I take full responsibility for all of it. I will do a better job of monitoring the site in the future, and should I find that something has caused my readers issues, I will move to address that problem immediately.

Part of the reason this event took so long to address was that I couldn’t believe that I had been hacked. Once it became clear that I had, fixing it really didn’t take very long.

So again, I apologize.

In the future, I will verify links that I post are not redirecting my readers away from the site, and I will do my best to address the issue much quicker than I did this time around. Most of my readers hear about my posts because y’all share them, and I absolutely need that to continue.

Finally, I would like to take just a moment to address a rumor/joke that has circulated around my outage. A few friends have joked that perhaps the outage was caused by Dr. Wardynski or someone connected to Huntsville City Schools. For the record, I have no reason to believe that Dr. Wardynski or anyone else connected with the district had anything to do with this outage.

Frankly, it would be stupid for Dr. Wardynski to attempt to silence me by hacking my site. Doing so would give instant credibility and credence to my questions and posts. Dr. Wardynski is not stupid.

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On one other note, I posted on January 29th that I was hearing rumors that Huntsville City Schools had blocked access to my site through their servers. I was able to confirm yesterday that you can actually access Geek Palaver from the HCS servers. However, as with many things, just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. I would still recommend that readers access the site on their own time.

Remember that you may do so via email or by subscribing to the RSS feed above.

In case you haven’t noticed, things have been hinky around here lately.

On Monday, January 23, 2012 the website went down for no apparent reason. It was displaying simply a white page. No text. No links. No way to access the administration side of things to alter things. After a day of attempting to get information from my host, I found that others had had similar issues through a google search. It seems that the problem was a bad plugin.

Disabling all the plugins on the site got us back up and running, but things haven’t been right since.

This morning it seems that links on Google and Facebook to my site are now sending people to spam sites.

Yes, if you google Geek Palaver, most of the links you find there now send you to other spam related sites.

Stranger still, if you click on a link that’s posted in Facebook, that link will take you not to the Geek Palaver site, but rather to spam sites. Potentially they will lead you to sites that could give you a virus.

No, I don’t have any idea what’s happening here. I am trying to find out, but until things get corrected, please don’t share links to my site particularly via Facebook.

Strangely enough, the links on Twitter are still working fine. I also believe that the email distribution is working just fine.

I am working on this, but honestly this is all brand new to me. In the past, links take you to the place where you were intending to go. Now, not so much.

This is also only happening to the Geek Palaver site. It isn’t happening to my other site which is hosted on the same server.

So, I apologize for the inconvenience. I am working to fix it.

Thanks everyone, for reading my thoughts on the school board. I’ll keep you updated.

On January 19, 2012, Dr. Wardynski recommended to the board, whom subsequently unanimously approved (no surprise there), yet another step towards his plan for total control of Huntsville City Schools.

From that date forward (technically this started with the hiring of the Pre-K teachers in December), Dr. Wardynski will decide which teachers will be hired, promoted, given tenure, and allowed to progress through the tenure process during their first and second years of teaching. You may view this proposal on the school board’s website.

Previously, the hiring of teachers rested primarily with the local schools and their principles. When a prospective teacher applied to work in Huntsville City Schools, they applied to work at a particular Huntsville City School. They were then interviewed by the principal who typically made the final decision of whom to hire.

Not so any longer.

As with most of the Superintendent’s decisions, he has again offered no clear evidence that this change was needed. I suppose since the board is approving somewhere in the neighborhood of 99% of his recommendations unanimously he doesn’t see the need. Whatever he wants, he gets.

Without question.

(Funny, this, combined with the overwhelming praise being heaped upon Dr. Wardynski by the board of education, sounds eerily familiar. Close to the same percentage of unanimous votes as well as perfect evaluations were given to Dr. Ann Roy Moore as late as 2009. She was fired in 2011. In other words, our esteemed board is quite good at repeating patterns.)

It seems that it would be easy to prove that centralized hiring of teachers in the system is a necessity. After all, conventional wisdom holds that schools on the South side regularly have more and perhaps better qualified candidates applying for positions than those on the North side of town. The constant refrain is, “Title I schools have a greater difficultly in hiring teachers than non-Title I schools.”

Again, this should be fairly simple to prove, if it is actually the case. But despite questions from the public concerning issues such as this, Dr. Wardynski sees no need to provide actual data supporting his claims. A simple phone call to his principals asking for statistics from their last round of hirings is evidently too much to ask.

I’m sorry, but wasn’t he sold to us as someone who bases his decisions upon data and not preconceived notions? We haven’t seen evidence of that in this decision, in the Teach for America decision, in the decision to merge six elementary and middle schools into three, nor even in his budgeting decisions.

It’s as if he’s simply following a script that was written for him by, oh I don’t know, The Broad Foundation. If Dr. Wardynski is indeed making “data-driven” decisions, why is he so hesitant to share that data with the public?

So, we have nothing but anecdotal evidence that there is actually a problem hiring for Title I schools in our district. We have no evidence that the hiring practices, tenure review, and non-tenure review procedures were failing to work. We have no evidence provided that any of the these procedures needed to change, and yet now they have been.

And this reorganization is going to cost the system an additional $141,000 in stipends for the 62 members serving on these committees.

Yes, we can pay a stipend to teachers to make Dr. Wardynski look good, but hiring an additional aide or creating a new classroom just simply costs too much.

Since there’s no presented evidence of need for this reorganization, why might Dr. Wardynski wish to centralize hiring of teachers?

Well, I can think of a few reasons.

• It increases his power and influence in the system.
• It decreases the influence of the principal to develop his or her school, and yet the responsibility of school’s performance still rests upon the principal’s shoulders. They now have the responsibility to perform with dramatically reduced ability to effect change in their schools.
• It reduces teachers to the level of pawns that Wardynski is free to move at will. If he likes a teacher, he can place that teacher in a classroom with predominately highly performing students. If he dislikes a teacher, he can place that teacher in a classroom with predominately lower performing students.
• It decreases the morale of our current principals and teachers further encouraging them to retire or seek employment elsewhere.
• It dramatically increases the cost of recruiting teachers to the system. One of the primary arguments that I and others have made against using Teach for America is that those “teachers” cost the system an additional $5,000 per teacher, per year to recruit. One way to try to negate that argument is by raising the cost of recruiting all new teachers. This is a step in that direction.

There are, as always, many unanswered questions about this new program. Here are just a few:

• How will teachers and administrators be chosen to serve on these committees?
• Will the TFAers hired as a result of the Teach for America contract also face these same committees, or will they be exempt from this process?
• If one of the main reasons for hiring TFA is to address the supposed problem of getting good applications for Title I schools, which Dr. Wardynski repeatedly claims, then haven’t we solved that problem now?
• How will the issues of having one’s peers review one’s work be balanced?
• How will this “super committee” effectively evaluate Special Education teachers who have an entirely different set of qualifications and standards that they are required to meet? (Yes, once again, SPED is an afterthought in our system.)

In short, centralizing the hiring of teachers directly benefits Dr. Wardynski and his goal of directly controlling every aspect of Huntsville City Schools. He receives all the praise if student performance increases. He receives none of the blame if they don’t because you officially cannot hold the superintendent or the board responsible as they have shown time and again.

As Lord Acton wrote in 1887, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

There appear to be no checks on Wardynski’s power at the present time.

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As a side note: I’ve received reports that Huntsville City Schools has now officially added Geek Palaver to their restricted list. In other words, if you’re connected to the internet via a HCS network, when you attempt to visit my site, you will not be able to do so. You will receive a warning that is similar to the warning that you would receive when attempting to access sites like Facebook or other “dangerous” sites.

When I first heard this, I really could not stop laughing. My first response was, “I wonder what took so long?” (By the way, HCS is completely within their legal rights to restrict the use of the HCS network in nearly anyway they wish. But it is disturbing when an educational system decides that some knowledge is just too dangerous or subversive to be allowed.)

However the more I thought about it, the more I felt it important to write this short note.

While I have not confirmed this at this time, if it is indeed true, then the software that is used to block sites is also likely logging the MAC Address (a specific and identifiable number for each computer), date, time, and login information used to access the site.

In other words, if you read this site on the HCS network, likely, Dr. Wardynski will receive notification that you have done so. This will likely happen even if you attempt to view the site during a break or planning period.

Yes, Big Brother is watching you.

And as I have laid out above, I am convinced that Dr. Wardynski is capable of developing a Nixonian Enemies List.

For the record, I do not believe that many teachers and HCS employees are reading these posts at work. My site stats that show when people hit the site show that the vast majority of hits come during non-school hours (early mornings before school are particularly busy.) Frankly, they are far too busy in overcrowded and understaffed classrooms to even take a bathroom break many days, they’re not going to take the time to read my posts. But in case someone did occasionally check the site, please know that Wardynski or others in his administration will likely know about it.

I hope for two things. First, that this is simply a rumor. Honestly, doesn’t the superintendent have more important things to do? And second, I hope that any Huntsville City Schools employee who reads this blog will do so away from work. Use your extremely limited time to take a restroom break. My posts aren’t going anywhere. Read them later. Our kids need your experience all the more now that the Superintendent is actively working to get rid of experienced teachers and administrators.

Seriously, is this what we’ve come to in Huntsville City Schools?

On January 19th, the board met and enacted a number of changes, as has become their practice. I’ll have some comments on these changes soon; it’s been a sickness filled weekend around here. I thought before getting into those changes (new, centralized hiring of teachers, The Pinnacle Schools contract) I would share my comments that I made to the board on Thursday night.

It would seem that some comments do elicit a response from members of the central office. And those comments reveal the difference between a teacher’s approach and the approach taken by someone who doesn’t care about education.

Here’s what I said. [Editor's Note: These comments are slightly expanded from the ones I actually read to the board. During my comments, when I got to the list of changes in the boy's classroom, I did not have time to go into detail with those changes. I have placed the unread details in italics for clarity.]

__________

On January 9th, my boy’s report card came home for the second 9 weeks. On most items, he was doing well, but on one of his IEP goals he was not doing well. This item was one of the primary goals for the year. Because autistic children need to model behavior of non-autistic children, and because he has shown us time and again that his language takes off when he is integrated into a typical classroom, we are pushing for him to be around his friends in Mrs. McCord’s classroom.

In the first nine week period, he did extremely well going into Mrs. McCord’s class. His report read, “He is doing much better with going into the general classroom. He protests less, participates more, and seems to like his routine.”

However during the second nine weeks, he began protesting so much that they were not able to get him into the classroom on a regular basis. His report read, “He had some setbacks during the second nine weeks. We had some behaviors that had to be resolved, so he didn’t go into the general classroom as often as the first nine weeks. Regular schedule will resume in the 3rd nine weeks.”

What changed? Why did he regress?

Because of decisions made by this superintendent and approved by this board, my son’s classroom faced radical changes during the second nine weeks. During this nine week period, he has had to endure:

• A Revolving Door of Aides: While the two aides who finished the year with the boy last year were eventually re-hired, only one of them was placed in his classroom on a regular basis. This was his only significant connection with personnel from the previous year. Then after about a month, this aide was reassigned to another location in the building due to the need to shuffle staff around to cover shortages. Currently he has two aides who began the year with him out of about six who have rotated in and out during that period.
• Three and a half Occupational Therapists: Due to an overwhelming workload, Challenger Elementary has had three OTs in four months. One OT worked for basically one week.
• Two Speech Therapists: Again, due to an overwhelming workload and an unwillingness to pay staff outside of the superintendent’s inner circle, Challenger Elementary has had two STs in four months.
• An Entirely New Class: Because the central office attempted to fund special education on a minimal basis, there was a need after two months to take an Autism teacher from another school in the system, and move her to Challenger. Once there the boy’s existing class that had 11 students in it was split in half. While my boy’s actual room stayed the same, there were at least four classes in the system that were dramatically disrupted because the Superintendent wouldn’t fund the hiring of one additional teacher.

It seems plain to me why my boy would have a difficult time adjusting. In short, your decisions are hurting the very students you’re supposed to be administrating and supervising.

But it isn’t just special education students who are being hurt by your decisions.

When presenting the P-8 concept on September 15th, Dr. Wardynski said, and I quote:

We’re going to go down and have a discussion with the community, the PTAs and the principals and make sure that that concept fits with what the community would like to see. And then once we’ve got that, John’s already working on some concept drawings, come back to the board with a discussion about how that would unfold for board approval.

To date, this meeting still has not occurred with Mt. Gap parents. Yet on November 3rd, the board voted unanimously to approve this decision without having a discussion with the Mt. Gap community to “make sure that this concept fits with what the community would like to see.”

Because of this and the uncertainty surrounding this decision to combine schools, on January 5th, Mrs. Murphee, our excellent principal who has served our community for 15 years announced her retirement.

This hurts our kids.

Your refusal to allow parents to have even a voice in the decision making process is hurting all of our kids. These same type of stories are happening all over our community.

It’s time that our children came first.

Thank you.

__________

I’m please to say that since I asked no questions, spoke continuously, and kept my eyes down that my comments were not deemed a threat to anyone. At least as far as I am aware as I write this.

Unsurprisingly, my comments elicited no public response, but I did receive not one, but two responses once the meeting was concluded. Neither wished to respond to any of the issues that I raised concerning the boy’s classroom experience during the second nine weeks of the school year. No one ever wants to deal with issues surrounding their actions toward Special Education staffing this year.

First up was a brief conversation with Dr. Cathy Vasile, the Director the “Empowered” Elementary programs, which means that she provides direction to Mt. Gap Elementary. She approached me to say that they had scheduled a meeting with the executive committees of the PTAs of Mt. Gap Elementary and Middle. I asked if they had met with parents or the community yet, she said that the PTA boards were responsible for that.

I pointed out to her that this meant that my comment that the decision to turn Mt. Gap into a P8 school had still been made without making “sure that this concept fits with what the community would like to see,” but she disagreed with me about that.

Perhaps she believes that meeting with the executive boards of the PTAs is meeting with the community. As I wrote here, I disagree. The executive boards of the PTA are nominated to help direct the planning and organization of the PTA during the year that they serve. They are not elected as representatives of the community.

In short, as I stated in my comments, Dr. Wardynski did not meet with parents before the decision was made on November 3rd. He has still not met with Mt. Gap parents about this decision, and he most assuredly has not meet with the Mt. Gap community.

So Dr. Vasile and I will, as they say, have to agree to disagree on this point. Disagreements like this sometimes occur between educators and parents. But understanding usually follows.

As she walked away, she further shared with me that the reason that Mrs. Murphree was retiring was because she was about to have a grandchild.

It is not surprising for people to have multiple reasons for retiring. Nor is it surprising for different people to be made aware of different reasons. While I am no where near a retirement point, I have had the experience of leaving several positions in my life. As such, I’m fully confidant when I say that I have never told my boss every reason why I was choosing to leave a position. As I have long been advised, “Never burn bridges.”

Thus, I stand behind what I said in my comments on Thursday night.

I am thankful to Dr. Vasile for actually taking the time to stop and engage me in a conversation about my comments. It shows a professionalism and a commitment to serving the public that I’m sure that she learned during her many years in the classroom and serving as principal at Blossomwood Elementary. I appreciate her service to our community, and I appreciate her taking the time after a long day to discuss our differences with me.

Her dedication to working with parents and the public was thrown into sharp relief a few moments later with Dr. Wardynski walked by displaying none of the commitment to working with the public that Dr. Vasile showed me.

Rather than approaching me to discuss our differences, he chose to just address them as he continued walking without breaking stride. As I was speaking with some friends after the meeting, Dr. Wardynski walked past us and said, “Mr. Winn. The reason that Mrs. Murphree is retiring is because of her grandchild. As she informed us back in October.”

When he finished his statement he was back inside the boardroom while I was standing outside in the hallway allowing for no response, no discussion, no debate, and no understanding.

And his approach to me, more than nearly anything else he says or does, shows the character of his leadership. It also shows the fundamental difference between an educator and someone who has little to no interest in education. An educator stops to discuss differences; an educator doesn’t shout his opinion across a room.

Oh, and had he attempted to discuss our differences with me, I would have pointed out to him that Mrs. Murphree’s sharing her decision to retire in October is still at least two weeks after Dr. Wardynski announced his decision to merge the two Mt. Gap schools. But he is simply not interested in discussing things.

A teacher interacts, discusses, considers, debates, and listens. He or she may not agree with others, but there is still listening. A teacher doesn’t shout orders to parents across a boardroom. That isn’t the teaching way.

I wish we had a teacher leading our schools.

Public education is under attack nationally and locally here in Huntsville under the guise of “private organizations can do our jobs better.” Or as Dr. Wardynski puts it, “they provide services that we can’t.”

This isn’t true.

If a service can be provided, it can be provided by the public. The public may choose not to provide it, but it can be provided.

So it comes down to cost. Even though Wardynski likes to down play this as a part of his decision making, it usually is the primary reason why services are offered or withheld.

This is certainly the case with our soon to be approved contract with The Pinnacle Schools, which is designed to outsource our services to “problem” students.

So it would seem that the superintendent who in September announced that he didn’t believe in closing schools, is planning to close yet another one. (Providence Middle, Huntsville Center for Technology, Whitesburg Elementary/Middle, Chapman Elementary/Middle, Mt. Gap Elementary/Middle, New Century all make the list.)  The Seldon Center, a program designed to be a stopgap for students facing expulsion, will be closed in February and privatized by moving the students to The Pinnacle Schools.

In doing so he offered two justifications: The Pinnacle Schools offers services that Huntsville City Schools “can’t,” and that privatizing the services will save money.

Let’s look at the first claim first: The Pinnacle Schools offers “diagnostic, assessment, education and intervention services for troubled teens, ages 12-18, and their families. Our programs are based on a medical model with 24-hour medical/nursing care.”

First, there appears to be nothing troubling about this organization. It seems that Ms. Karen Lee found herself in a situation where the school system wasn’t meeting the needs of her child, so she started an organization that would. Such action is indeed praiseworthy, and although I know quite little about it, I believe that The Pinnacle Schools is a fine organization.

However, there is nothing, absolutely nothing in that list that couldn’t also be provided by the school system, or the school system working together with other public organizations.

The school system is simply choosing not to do this. (And in many situations, we are offering services that Dr. Wardynski claims we aren’t offering. I assume that this is merely a lack of experience on his part rather than a deception, but on the 5th he claimed that Huntsville City doesn’t have “access to licensed therapists.” While he wasn’t clear about which types of therapists he was referring to, the system does indeed have access to and currently employs licensed therapists. Again, if the system wished to make this a priority, it could indeed have access to licensed therapists.)

But it will save money, right? On Thursday, January 5th, Dr. Wardynski claimed that Pinnacle could offer more services at a savings of about $7,000 per student. He claimed that Huntsville City spends $18,000 per Seldon student and that Pinnacle would offer more services for approximately $11,000 per student. (As you can see in the contract, this amount is somewhat questionable.)

And yet, this $11,000 per student does not include many cost centers that the system will still be required to pay under the contract. (You may download a copy of the contract here.)

The system will still pay for the following:

• A1. Referral and Placement: HCS will designate a referral official to provide documentation supporting the referral. Furthermore, not every student referred to TPS will necessarily be accepted. (2)
• A2. Assessment: HCS will provide extensive communication with TPS. (2)
• A8. State Testing: “HCS will be responsible for any state testing that referred students may be required to take each year. HSC Accountability and Research will provide certified staff to administer all mandated Alabama State Department of Education Assessments” (3).
• B5.b. IEP Implementation: “HCS may assign a certified special education instructor employed by HCS to visit the identified students at the program and consult with program teaching staff regarding adjustments related to academic or behavioral services for the identified students” (5).
• B5.c. IEP Implementation: “Additional IEP services that fall outside the general scope of instructional strategies such as but not limited to speech therapy and other accommodations, will be administered by HCS outside the hours in which the identified students attend the program or adjustments can be made in the daily schedule to accommodate any HCS personnel that need to meet with the identified students to administer the additional IEP services” (5).
• B6. Food Service: “HCS will be responsible for preparing and delivering required meals for RAISE Program students each weekday” (5).
• B9. Program Evaluation: “The RAISE Program’s effectiveness will be evaluated based on criteria determined by both HCS and TPS. HCS will provide all necessary demographic and achievement data for students enrolling in the RAISE program” (5).

I wonder if those costs were included in the evaluation “proving” that TPS will be cheaper to operate than Seldon? Somehow, I doubt they were.

Additionally, while Ms. Lee stated that Pinnacle would be able to meet the requirements of the IEP, the very first paragraph under B5. IEP Implementation says, “a. HCS, the parent and the student must acknowledge that the identified student will be held to the same standards of conduct, academic progress expectations and attendance requirements as any other RAISE Program students” (5).

As a parent with a child who has an IEP, it’s clear to me that Ms. Lee has no understanding of what an IEP is. The basic premise of an Individualized Educational Program is that the individual student is held to individual standards of conduct, academic progress expectations and attendance requirements. That’s the main point of having an IEP.

But I don’t blame Ms. Lee for this. She is, by her own admission, new at working with students having an IEP. The problem doesn’t lie with her or The Pinnacle Schools, but rather with Huntsville City Schools’ leadership not understanding the purpose of an IEP.

If Dr. Wardynski had any experience at all, or perhaps if he were willing to listen to those who do, he would know not to sign this contract with that statement.

But he doesn’t. Or he doesn’t care.

And that’s why he wants to privatize education in the city of Huntsville. He’s not actually committed to public education. He doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t believe in the value it offers a community.

He’s privatized the hiring and training of principals. He’s privatized the hiring of unqualified “teachers.” Now he’s privatizing the services we’re offering to some of our most vulnerable students.

He was placed into his position by corporate interests. This $1,596,000 for the RAISE program (for up to 125 students at a rate of $12,768 per student) and $433,438 for five beds at the Elk River Treatment Program (at a rate of $86,687.60 per student) for the next year is just the beginning of his paying them back.

The Board will likely approve this $2,029,440 contract on Thursday.

Standing silently, making eye contact, and making people feel uncomfortable are now considered threats at Huntsville City Schools Board of Education meetings.

Honestly, I really don’t know why any of you believe what I post here about the school board. Most of the time, if I didn’t see it for myself, I wouldn’t believe it either.

You’d think by that point, I’d be over my ability to be shocked by the board and the superintendent, but the six of them just kept pushing the limits of credulity. They claimed that they knew they were meeting IEPs because they weren’t being sued. They thought paying $1.9 million dollars to recruit unqualified “teachers” to teach when they could instead hire qualified teachers for $1.9 million less was a great idea. They suggested filing a grievance would be the best way to get a response, and then moments later decided that the grievance policy didn’t apply to them.

If I were writing a novel, no one would ever publish it. It’s too ridiculous.

And Thursday night, the ridiculousness continued.

This all started on December 15th. That night, I read my statement, and with about 90 seconds remaining, I stood, silently waiting for an answer from the board for approximately 80 of those seconds. I did not move my hands nor my feet. I stood still, making eye contact with each of the board members as well as the superintendent. When my time clock approached 15 seconds remaining, I said, “Thank you,” and I took my seat.

It seems that standing and waiting about 80 seconds for an answer to a question that I’ve been asking for three months is considered threatening, or so I was informed by Mr. Alfred Lankford, the head of Board Security, in a private discussion Thursday night before the board meeting. Mr. Lankford tapped me on the shoulder as I was sitting waiting for the board meeting to begin, and asked me if he could speak with me in private. As he and I have spoken to each other often at meetings before, I quickly agreed. While looking for a private room to have our conversation, he asked for Mr. Jeff Broadway the other board security officer to join us. Mr. Broadway did not speak during our discussion.

I want to make one thing clear. I like Mr. Lankford and Mr. Broadway. They are both nice guys, and I am fully aware that they have a difficult job. It is not my intention to make their job harder.

Thursday night I was informed by Mr. Lankford that if I wish to speak during the Citizen’s Comments section of the board meeting, I would not be allowed to stand silently waiting for an answer. I would have to speak and then sit down. The consequences of pulling this “stunt” again would mean that I would be banned from all future board meetings.

Mr. Lankford went on to inform me that I had made “everyone” feel uncomfortable and that he considered my actions as a threat. He certainly hoped that I didn’t intend to threaten others.

I asked him if this new rule was being applied to everyone or just to me, and he said everyone. He followed this up by saying, “This was my call as security, so don’t blame Dr. Wardynski.”

I had a difficult time not laughing when he said this to me.

He then told me that if I had questions for the board, I should ask them via email or in a private meeting. I suppose that Mr. Lankford was too busy watching for threats to actually listen to the content of my comments. Sometimes silence speaks much louder than words.

We concluded our meeting with him asking me if I understood the consequences of what would happen if I tried my “stunt” again. I assured him that I did, offered him my hand and left to take my seat to wait for Mr. Blair to read his Citizen’s Comments preamble at the end of the meeting.

Before allowing citizens to speak at the board meetings, Mr. Blair reads the following text:

The Citizen Comments section of the board agenda provides an opportunity for public comment on any item concerning public education and provides for any resident up to three minutes to fully present his or her position on a particular issue. Speakers are required to include their name and address before speaking. A speaker cannot delegate his or her time to another person. Speakers will not be limited unless they become repetitive and no new information is provided. The time clock is displayed in the front board station. We request that no one make any disparaging remarks, comments or statements pertaining to the good name and character of any individual. Finally, please do not expect any board action or response on a request or a comment made under this section. This will allow the board the opportunity to responsibly study, research all expressed concerns, issues or requests.

There were no changes to the preamble from the previous meetings I have attended.

After the meeting, I approached Mr. Lankford for some clarification.

Seeing me, he smiled and jokingly asked why I didn’t speak tonight. I informed him that it had never been my intention to speak tonight, but that I did have something that I needed him to clarify for me.

RW: So, let me make sure that I understand your position.

AL: Okay.

RW: You, and others, believe that a person standing silently is making a threat?

AL: Well, there was a lot of staring as well.

RW: You’re right. The board members were staring at me. I was making eye-contact. But again, you believe that is making a threat?

AL: You made a lot of people in the audience uncomfortable. You can’t do that. I’m not sure that the board even noticed. It’s my job to make sure that people aren’t uncomfortable in the board meetings.

RW: Listen, I want you to know that it was not my intention to threaten anyone. Nor did I intend to make your job more difficult. If I did, I’m sorry.

To those people sitting in the audience on Thursday, December 15th, I would like to offer you my apology as well. It was not my intention to make any of you feel threatened nor to make you uncomfortable. If I have caused your Christmas holidays to be less than a joyous occasion, please let me know so that I may apologize to you personally. My questions, on the other hand, were specifically intended to make the board uncomfortable. It seems that it worked.

Waiting quietly for answers, making eye contact, and generally making people feel uncomfortable are all off limits now. At least for me. I would therefore suggest to Mr. Blair the following changes to his “Preamble” to Citizen’s Comments.

The Citizen Comments section of the board agenda provides an opportunity for public comment on any item concerning public education and provides for any resident up to three minutes to fully present his or her position on a particular issue. It also provides us an opportunity to appear to care about the little people as we pack up to go home. Speakers are required to include their name and address before speaking. A speaker must show the expected reverence due to the board of education when approaching the board. A speaker cannot delegate his or her time to another person. A speaker should approach the board slowly and quietly as the board members are easily threatened. We suggest that speakers keep their heads down at all times as eye contact with your superiors is inappropriate. Speakers will not be limited unless they become repetitive and no new information is provided or unless we’re just sick of hearing from you. The time clock is displayed in the front board station. God help you if you make any disparaging remarks, comments or statements pertaining to the good name and character of any individual. Finally, please do not expect any board action or response on a request or a comment made under this section unless you have sued us. This will allow the board the opportunity to pretend to responsibly study, research all expressed concerns, issues or requests and quietly dismiss them without embarrassment to us or harming our reelection campaigns.

No, old man, you have not hurt these people if they are of good conscience. But you must understand, sir, that a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time–we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world. Now, by God’s grace, the shining sun is up, and them that fear not light will surely praise it.

–The Crucible, Arthur Miller

In a press release yesterday referred to in the Huntsville Times, Dr. Wardynski announced that the “internal review” of the business practices the district conducted eight years ago has resulted in sending a report to the Alabama Department of Education and the Alabama Ethics Commission about one unnamed individual who might have directed some of the district purchases towards a family member’s local business. The story has since been updated under the following headline: “Huntsville City Schools tightening business ethic.”

This is an excellent practice by the superintendent. If there are those who are abusing their positions of trust, they should be held responsible.

But let’s take a closer look at this for a moment. As you know, I think that questions are the crucial component to helping us understand our world. As such, it’s important to raise questions about “events” such as this.

Why did Dr. Wardynski think it was important to issue a press release concerning this single “finding” from eight years ago? Why was it necessary to go public with this information that would typically be handled in private (particularly since “he’d rather not identify the employee”). What does Wardynski gain from this?

We’re told that one employee may have “purchased ‘parts’ for the district from a business owned by a family member.” What does Dr. Wardynski tell us in this press release? He tells us that he and Mr. Spinelli are watching out of how the system spent its money eight years ago. He tells us that he can be trusted with our “two most precious resources: [our] children and [our] tax dollars.” He tells us that those who abuse that trust will likely be fired. He tells us that he will in the coming weeks, “redesign the district’s purchasing and property accountability policies.”

What aren’t we being told here? The list is fairly long:

• The employee is not named.
• The family member’s company is not named.
• The value of the “parts” is not listed.
• The number of other “findings” is not revealed (but the implication is that there are numerous findings that directly resulted in the system going “bankrupt” last year).
• The reasons why the board commissioned but subsequently ignored a report from the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama (PARCA) are not discussed. (By the way, if you’re interested, you may read the PARCA report entitled, “Analysis of Non-Instructional Expenditures, Staffing, and Operating Practices in Huntsville City School System” by clicking on the link.)

So again, what does Dr. Wardynski gain from revealing that 8 years ago there may have been an employee of the system who purchased some parts from the company of a family member?

First, he gets good press. A week ago the Times asked “How has Huntsville’s new superintendent fared in his first six months?” The responses to this question were decidedly mixed on Al.com, and rather negative on the Time’s Facebook page. Immediately after that, the Times also ran a story showing that a “Third Huntsville school employee regains job after layoff appeal.” Having a new story that clearly shows that he’s “tightening business ethic” is a dramatic improvement in just a week’s time, don’t you think?

Second, he gets the opportunity to silence employees. He’s already shown that he’s willing to go after principals, coaches and teachers (not to mention his propensity to get rid of aides and therapists), but now he’s showing the entire system that if you’ve done something that could be considered questionable even in the previous decade, you will likely find yourself answering questions before the Ethics committee.

A frightened workforce is a pliable one.

Now, you may be thinking, as with the Deputy Governor Danforth from The Crucible that, “them that fear not the light will surely praise it,” but I ask you, if you have a boss who is willing to spend the time and resources of the third highest paid employee of the system reviewing decisions from the past decade, would you be willing to question him? He’s already shown himself unwilling to be held accountable by the public and parents; he certainly isn’t going to be held accountable by those who report to him.

Finally, (well for now anyway. I’m sure that there’s much more for Wardynski to gain from redirecting attention away from his decisions and back to those decisions made before he arrived in town.) he gets to draw the press’s and the public’s attention away from the hundreds of thousands he’s paying to his friends as he expands the central office’s payroll. He also get’s to draw their attention away from the millions that he’s funneling toward Broad Foundation interests.

Here’s a chart comparing the upper echelons of the district’s leadership from January 2011 to January 2012.

We are spending just shy of twice as much on the leadership of the central office as we were just a year ago.

One final question comes to mind as I consider Dr. Wardynski’s press release. If we are indeed entering a new era where were are doing our best to protect tax dollars, if we are indeed in need of a redesigned purchasing and property accountability policies, if we are indeed tightening our business ethic, will this new ethic include the no-bid contracts with PROACT Search, SUPES Academy, and Teach for America, (which together total $2,310,000 in contracts over the next five years) that the Superintendent recommended and the board approved? Will those types of purchasing of services also be placed under Wardynski’s newly found interest in making the system accountable? They seem to be far more concerned about “parts” from eight years ago and far less concerned about the whole that’s being spent right now. Will these contracts also be reviewed by the Alabama Board of Education and the Alabama Ethics Commission?

Somehow I doubt it.

A witch hunt is always useful and profitable for the hunter.

__________

I will be in attendance. As always, the meeting will be broadcast on ETV (Comcast 17, Knology 99), and at the Huntsville City Schools website. I will also be live-tweeting the meeting @russwinn. You can follow on Twitter or on the Geek Palaver Facebook Page.

A simple tick of the clock that humans assign such importance. Would that life actually cared about things like a new second; we would surely be more attentive to each moment, each action, each decision that we make that makes life harder for those around us.

But we’re not. Life isn’t like that. Life doesn’t care that the new year is coming. It doesn’t care if our neighbor is hungry or thirsty. Life is selfish. It’s concerned only for its continuation. The only ticks of the clocks that actually matter to life are the first and the last.

But being human means that our lives are more than mere existence. Being human means that we develop our essence over those ticks of the clock. We develop whom we are. We hope for whom we will become.

And so we assign importance to ticks of the clock: birthdays, holidays, and the beginning of a new year.

There is hope that we will be more than we were before. Here are a few of mine.

I hope that I will love more than I have been loved. There’s little doubt in my mind that I am loved. Every smile from my boy, every hug from my girl, every kiss from my wife proves this to me every day. What I’m not so certain about is that I’ve loved others more. Without being too Schindler, I’m certain that I could have done more. I could have done more to speak for the voiceless. I could have; I will do so.

I hope that the areas where our community comes together, like in our schools, that we will find a way to work together to help all of our kids. All kids are our kids. They are all our responsibility, our duty. And we must fight for them all. We must say to those who are behaving in such a way that some children matter less than others that they are wrong. We could do more; we will do so.

I hope that our teachers, aides, principals, therapists, and volunteers will know how much we value and appreciate the work, the damn near impossible mission that they have taken upon themselves. We must fight for them as they fight for all of our kids. We must value them as they value all of our kids. We must support them as they support all of our kids. We must respect them. We must make certain that they know that they are indeed the most important people in our system. We could do more; we will do so.

I hope that those who have entered our community only seeking what they can take from our community, and particularly from our children, will accept our invitation to leave. Your selfishness is not welcome here. I could do more to make this clear; I will do so.

Finally, I hope that my children will learn to value questions, to ask them boldly, to speak for themselves and others, to scream against injustice, to love selflessly — especially those whom others ignore, abuse, hate and dismiss. I could do more to show them this in my life; I will do so.

These are my hopes for the new year. I will work to make them come true.

May your new year hopes also come true with the tick of the clock.

__________

(Oh, and PS. I hope that Alabama rolls over LSU on the 9th. Just sayin . . . Roll Tide.)

Wow, it really is nice not to have to think about Huntsville City Schools on an hourly basis. It’s been a nice vacation.

But on Tuesday, the Huntsville Times reported that Thomas R. Skulina, and independent arbitrator who served as the hearing officer at Clark Sharp’s employment hearing, said that Dr. Wardynski’s hiring decisions since July directly impacted his decision in favor of Mr. Sharp retaining his position as a mechanic with Huntsville City Schools.

This is the third of nine hearings so far that the system has lost and that RIFed employees have won. Of the nine hearing that have occurred, three of the employees who lost, represented themselves. Of the six who had representation, the system has lost half.

There are 27 decisions still pending.

According to the Huntsville Times, Skulina criticized Dr. Wardynski hiring practices and expenditures on “employee recruitment.”

It would seem that others are taking notice of the strange approach to hiring that Dr. Wardynski has implemented immediately following one of the deepest reduction in force in the past ten years.

Skulina wrote:

These invoice charges [of $670,000] were cited (in Sharp’s appeal) to underscore the point that enough adjustment in the work force had been made and did not necessitate the termination of this [Sharp] employee, who conceivable (sic) saves money for necessary services.

By my count, Skulina significantly underestimated the Wardynski spending spree.

Some of the invoices that Skulina referenced included the Teach for America Contract (which was cited incorrectly as being up to $550,000. The actual total for the contract over the next five years is $1.9 million), Dr. Cooper’s salary which was $7,054.74 above the maximum posted salary, hiring Aaron King for the newly created position of “Director of Transition” at a salary of $59,211 a year.

Skulina also reference Wardynski’s bonus salary, and the purchase of new computers for students. (He didn’t mention the purchase of new computers for the central office.)

In other words, despite the superintendent’s constant claim that he’s not spending money on the central office, even independent arbitrators are noticing that he’s spending more on himself than on staff or students.

Hopefully other arbitrators for the other 27 pending hearing will see the same thing.

Wardynski’s approach has been to spend money without regard of the long term impact. He seems completely unconcerned about cuts in services, larger class sizes, closing schools, hiring his friends, or repaying the Broad Foundation for his “training.”

Sadly the board of education is enabling all of these decisions as well.

We’ve already, in five months, matched the legal spending the system paid in the previous nine months before hiring Wardynski. With only nine of 27 cases decided, the legal expenditures for this system will easily clear $1 million this year.

So, we can spend money on lawyers. We can spend money on central office staff. We can spend money on computers. But spending on teachers, instructional assistants, and therapists isn’t allowed.

The Huntsville Times has asked recently for people to share their opinions about the new superintendent’s performance after six months on the job. I assume that if you’re a lawyer, in favor of closing schools, nepotism, or the head of a multi-million dollar foundation then you would have to say that Wardynski is the best thing that has ever happened to Huntsville City Schools.

If, on the other hand, you’re a parent struggling to get an appropriate education for your child, I’d have to say that the assessment of his first six months is quite dire.

Dr. Wardynski and the board are destroying Huntsville City Schools for a generation of students. Thankfully others are starting to notice.

You are all Children of God

–Galatians 3:26

And so it is Christmas Eve, a time when everyone is waiting. Waiting for Santa. Waiting for presents. Waiting to see the looks on the kids’ faces to make sure they’re happy with the toys they get. We’re waiting, always waiting

But that’s the problem with Christmas Eve and Advent; they suggest that we should be waiting for something, some miracle from above, some thing to happen to us.

But there just isn’t time.

There isn’t time to wait when children are being abused.

There isn’t time to wait when women are being dismissed as second-class (or even third-class if they’re pregnant) citizens.

There isn’t time to wait while hatred because of skin color grows.

There isn’t time to wait while whole nationalities are being kicked around for not being rich enough to buy their way into the country.

There isn’t time to wait while our city becomes convinced that only those who can count do count.

There isn’t time to wait while homosexual teens are being beaten, mocked and spat upon for being born different. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re all born different.

We’re all freaks and weirdos. We’re all illegals, second, third and last-class citizens.

We’re all the 99%. And we’re the 1% too–when we open our eyes enough to see the suffering that our getting is causing.

We’re all special-needs. We’re all black, white, women, men and children.

We’re all Children of God.

The miracle of Christmas eve isn’t that God came once. The miracle isn’t something we have to wait fro from the heavens. The miracle is that faith calls us all God’s sons and daughters. The miracle has already happened. So what exactly are we waiting for?

As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

–Galatians 3:27-28

Advent and Christmas Eve aren’t about waiting for miracles. They’re about creating them. Our friends, our enemies, our sisters, our brothers, our parents, our neighbors, our strangers, and especially our Children, bless them every one, our Children can’t wait any longer.

It’s time for us to be the miracle that our would needs. Just in time for Christmas.

Stephen King wrote once that God punishes us for what we can’t imagine. There is truth there. Yet the opposite is also, always a possibility. This is why life is so interesting.

God also amazes us with what we can’t imagine.

At 5:43pm eight years ago today, this happened to me when into my life came the girl.

Birthdays are hard on me. Not mine. I couldn’t care less about those. But the kids’ birthdays always kick me in the heart. There, as Croce sang, never seems to be enough time.

Life is a constant sprint. Running to the kitchen making sure that the strange smell coming out of the toaster isn’t dangerous. Racing to school. Speeding past the cop to get to ballet. Screaming down the hallway as I hear water splashing on the floor next to the tub. Our lives together are together. I think I’m getting at least that much right, but our lives are fast. And that breaks my heart.

I’m terrified, especially on birthdays, that I’m losing her a little more every day.

She’s flying past me as I try to grab hold of a moment. A moment where I can make the world better with just a raspberry on a belly. Just one moment where I can stop and hold my baby girl in my arms. Just a few more moments where she’s playing dress-up rather than actually getting dressed up.

[to go out and away]

But again, my imagination fails and God steps in to amaze. For every moment I spend wishing for her to remain my baby, I’m amazed by the beautiful, loving, funny girl that she has become. I’m stunned by her intelligence, shocked by her wisdom, surprised by her beauty.

I’m amazed, constantly amazed, that I get to spend my life watching her grow, helping her grow, pushing her to grow even though I don’t want her to, into such a caring young woman who is starting to seek out her own path in this world.

And for that, there might just be world enough, and time.

Happy Birthday, my sweet little girl. I love you.

Thanks to a regular reader (and proofreader as well), I thought it would be interesting to see just exactly how much Dr. Casey “Then su . . . then you have recourse” Wardynski had spent on legal fees in the five months he’s been here and how that number compared to the previous nine months before he arrived. (I went back 14 months because that’s all that is currently available on the HCS website. If anyone has a copy of the September 2010 check register, it would be interesting to know those numbers as well.)

As always with our system, the actual numbers are much worse than I had assumed.

In five months, Dr. Wardynski has spent $351,488.92 on “Legal Fees.” In the nine months preceding his tenure, the system had spent $338,096.57. In fourteen months, Huntsville City Schools has paid $689,585.49 in legal fees.

In other words, Dr. Wardynski has more than doubled the fees paid to lawyers since he’s been here.

In the previous nine months, the system’s monthly average for legal fees was $37,566.29. Since Wardynski has arrived that monthly average has jumped to $70,297.78.

If he keeps up that average for the next seven months, Dr. Wardynski will spend $843,573.41 not on teachers, aides, therapists, supplies or even facilities. He will have spent $843,573.41 on lawyers.

What could we buy with that funding if Wardynski weren’t so quick to suggest legal action to parents who ask questions? Here are a few ideas:

• 23 First Year Teachers at $36,000 per year.
• 93 Instructional Assistants at $9,000 per year.
• 23 Therapists at $36,000 per year.

In short, for the amount of funding that our superintendent pays to lawyers, we could nearly double the number of instructional assistants or therapists working with our students. We could increase the number of classrooms by 14%.

But instead of meeting the needs of students, Dr. “Sue Me” Wardynski would prefer paying $522,812.41to Mr. Brooks’ firm, Lanier, Ford, Shaver, and Payne.

Many readers have long since suggested to me that I should pursue legal action against the system. As I am loath to be the cause of our local educational funding going to something other than our students, I have done every thing possible to avoid legal action. Dr. Wardynski, because he refuses to discuss his reasons for cutting special education funding more than any other area, has made this impossible.

I have therefore filed a grievance with the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education as a start. Perhaps he will be willing to answer their questions.

At the board meeting on Thursday (December 15th), I stood, again, to ask for an explanation of why the special education funding has been cut by seven million dollars. Here are my comments:

I am here tonight to ask the same questions that I’ve been asking since September.

Why have you cut 7 million dollars from Special Education funding from FY2011 to FY2012?

Why is Special Education responsible for 61% of the 11.6 million of projected savings from 2011 to 2012?

I have contacted each of you privately to ask this, and the only answer was “we’ll talk about it in November.”

I have asked you publicly at three consecutive meetings, and you’ve offered no response.

I’ve jumped through the hoops of filing a formal grievance per your recommendations at the December 1st meeting. And yet because your interpretation of the policy is that there is no grievance policy when a parent has an issue with a decision of the superintendent and the board, you have again refused to offer any answer.

Your decisions are hurting my son’s education. I am not going away and neither are these questions:

Why have you cut the special education budget by 7 million dollars?

Why is 11% of the student population responsible for 61% of your projected cuts?

Why are you refusing to answer questions from the public? I have about a minute and a half of my time left. You’ve had three months to formulate a response. I would appreciate hearing what you have to say now.

And so I waited, silently, for a public answer that didn’t come. Some on the board smiled and motioned for me to sit down. Some glared. Some rolled their eyes. Security even made a point of checking the time that I had remaining to “encourage” me to take my seat. But I stood silently waiting for an answer.

Once again, no one on the board, nor our esteemed superintendent, chose to answer any of these questions publicly.

They believe that they are above responding to questions from the public.

Once the meeting was completed, I approached Mrs. McCaulley to ask her if she had any further suggestions for me on how I might receive an answer, but before I could reach her, Dr. Wardynski looked at me and addressed me for the first time since August 18th. I was, needlessly to say, surprised. While I didn’t record the conversation, here is my recollection of what Dr. Wardynski had to say to me after the meeting was over:

Wardynski: The short and sweet answer is free, appropriate education in the least restrictive environment as I’ve explained to you before. We are not required to meet any specific funding level. We are only required to meet the requirements of the IEPs.

Winn: But you’re not meeting the IEPs.

Wardynski: “Then su . . . then you have recourse.”

The only response that I’ve received from either the superintendent, the central office, or the board is, in my interpretation, “sue us.”

Mrs. Sledge offered that as a solution when she refused to discuss the consolidation plan in detail with parents back in April. Dr. Robinson suggested that this was how she knew that IEPs were being met back on September 29th. And now, rather than offer any justification for his actions or decisions, Dr. Wardynski started to tell me that I should sue him and the district. He did at least have enough wisdom to realize that wasn’t a smart thing to say.

So he backed off and instead said, “Then you have recourse.”

Since the superintendent, central office (following the direction of the superintendent), and the board of education also following his lead have repeatedly and consistently refused to offer any explanation for their decisions and actions, the only recourse that I have remaining to me is a legal one.

Yes, the most sued system in the state has a superintendent who encourages the public to sue rather than simply answer questions that parents raise.

The corporate superintendent has no issue spending money on lawyers but refuses to spend money on SPED kids or to answer questions from those pesky parents.

Oh and for the record, he’s partly right. All that the system is required to do is meet the requirements of the IEPs. The problem with being partly right though is that you’re also partly wrong. In addition to failing to meet IEPs, the cuts have not been made according to state code section 16-39-3 that requires funding cuts to be made on a “per capita basis between exceptional (SPED) and nonexceptional children.” The system’s own numbers show that this did not happen. 61% of the cuts have been made to 11% of the student population. If I was wrong about this, they would have said so rather than encourage me to sue.

So rather than offer an explanation of his actions, Dr. Wardynski prefers that parents simply sue when he violates Federal IDEA law and Alabama State Code.

He prefers that parents sue rather than having to respond to questions. He prefers dealing with lawyers rather than simply talking to parents. Dr. Wardynski on Thursday, December 15, 2011 suggested to me that I should sue the district.

We’re going to follow his suggestion.

I have been asking the same question since September 24th: Why have you cut Special Education by seven million dollars? My question is being ignored.

Let’s recap: I started by asking Dr. Robinson about it privately via email. On September 29th, I was told by Dr. Robinson that Dr. Wardynski and Mr. Spinelli would be making a “formal presentation on special ed costs at the November work session.”

Neither Dr. Wardynski nor Mr. Spinelli contributed publicly to the special education presentation that happened on November 17th. They allowed Mr. King, whom to my knowledge has no experience in special education, but seems to be the one making many of the special education decisions, to make the presentation. It was a rehash of the presentation they offered on August 4th.

Despite the assurances I received Dr. Robinson that I should “have my answers in November,” I was the only person at the board meeting to bring up the cuts that represent 61% of the total cuts made in the system from FY2011 to FY2012.

I suppose that Dr. Robinson’s response to me after the board meeting on September 29th, that she knew that IEPs were being met since we weren’t being sued is all the actual justification she requires and all I should expect.

As I wasn’t satisfied, I continued to asking the same questions again during the public comments on December 1st. That evening I was told by Mrs. McCaulley and Dr. Robinson that I should file a grievance, “that way you’ll be sure to get a response within seven working days.”

So, as I have documented, I went home that night, found and verified that I had the correct form with Dr. Robinson, and submitted a formal grievance over the superintendent’s recommendation, and the board’s decision to cut special education funding. I asked for three things:

• A formal and public review of the special education numbers,
• A written justification for why these cuts were applied inordinately to Special Education,
• Action from the board to alter the budget and correct this discrepancy.

Again, as I have documented, even though this request was properly formatted, Mrs. McCaulley told me that the board ”does not have a policy for when the citizen concern is really against the board.”

I followed up on December 2nd via email with Dr. Wardynski to request a response from him even though he was not formally required to respond by their interpretation of board policy. This request was again sent to Dr. Wardynski and the entire board. It read:

Dr. Wardynski,

I have received a phone call from Mrs. McCaulley informing me that the board does not actually have a grievance policy at the present time for grievances against the board or the superintendent.

While I am grateful for her call, I respectfully ask you to honor the spirit of the request that I have filed with you. In other words, I would like to receive a response from you concerning the cuts to the special education budget.

At a minimum, I would appreciate receiving a written response from you formally stating that the board does not have a grievance policy when the grievance is with the board or superintendent as mine was. I would also appreciate the board’s diligence in developing a policy that will allow the public to receive a response to issues that they have with the superintendent’s recommendations and the board’s decisions.

Thank you for you attention to this matter.

The seven day response time came and went on Monday, December 12th. I’m sure it will not come as a surprise that I have not received any response from Dr. Wardynski nor any of the board members.

Our superintendent and the board members who are elected to “administer and supervise” the educational process of the system are actively and deliberately ignoring the public that they serve. They are refusing to answer questions asked in private. They are refusing to answer questions asked in public. They are refusing to answer questions filed according to their own grievance policies.

They are actively and deliberately turning their backs on eleven percent of the student population they were hired to serve.

I will attempt, again, to obtain a response from either Dr. Wardynski or the board at tonight’s board meeting. You would think that they would be completely aware of this by now, but just in case they aren’t let me plainly state that ignoring issues does not make them go away. Turning your back on the public for whom you work will not make them go away.

I ask that you join me in making the board respond to the public by showing up at the board meeting tonight at 5:30pm in the Merts building on 200 White Street. If you cannot attend the meeting, you may watch it on ETV (Comcast 17, Knology 99), and at the Huntsville City Schools website. I will also be live-tweeting the meeting @russwinn. You can follow on Twitter or on the Geek Palaver Facebook Page.

Please stand with me on this issue. As I have stated, special education funding isn’t just about meeting the needs of others. It’s also about taking care of your own child’s education. And it’s the right thing to do.

Yesterday I argued that Dr. Wardynski was hoping to divide the city of Huntsville over the issue of Special Education funding. He seems to be hoping that he could silence me and others of his critics by showing that special education costs more than regular education.

As I have seen with the special education community, I am hopeful that the general community will not succumb to his appeal to fear of the unknown, uncertainty about the true nature of the disabled, and doubt that something like autism is an actual illness warranting additional expenditures. But fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) are powerful weapons in the hands of a politician skilled in handling them.

And Dr. Wardynski is skillful indeed.

He’s benefited from the FUD that Dr. Richardson created when he endorsed a laughably pathetic demographer’s report that recommended the closing of nine schools in the system. Now many of those schools are afraid to ask questions about future plans of the superintendent for fear that “the state will close us down.”

He’s benefited from the FUD that he created when he immediately moved to fire teachers and principals, move principals around, or simply close schools on his own.

He’s used FUD as cover to hide his true plans as when he removed the letters from Lee High School the day before the board meeting in which the board voted to spend at least $1.7 million dollars to hire teachers who aren’t qualified to teach.

And he’s used it to attempt to divide the community over the issue of special education funding.

So let’s handle the disclaimers right up front. Yes, my son is one of the 2,445 students in Huntsville City Schools with an IEP. Yes, these cuts directly impact the quality of the education my son is receiving, and so I have a vested interest in this issue. I benefit from your interest in this issue. It’s true.

But it’s also true that your child is hurt by the cuts to Special Education as well.

Here are a few reasons why you should care about Special Education funding:

All kids have special needs. No kid is truly non-exceptional. There are areas where some children excel and where other children lag. A good educational system makes every effort to meet the kids where they are and help them get to where they need to be. Wouldn’t it be a better system if Dr. Wardynski looked for ways to meet the needs of the children rather than for ways to divide the community? Wouldn’t your child benefit from a system that sought to meet his or her needs? If it becomes acceptable to refuse to meet the needs of exceptional kids, it will become acceptable to refuse to meet the needs of all kids.

If Wardynski can cut SPED funding by $7 million with all the protections afforded to SPED by federal law, no program is actually safe. What makes you think that he won’t cut funding that directly impacts your child next? Music, art, and laboratories all cost money that could quickly and far more easily be cut than SPED funding. If you believe having a friendly relationship with the man will help, if you think that having a PTA president who meets with him regularly makes a difference, you should reconsider. If the superintendent isn’t concerned about violating state code and federal law, there’s no reason to think that having a friendly relationship will matter to him.

It could happen to you. The third point is a harsh one. You should know that in so far as my wife and I are aware, we did nothing to cause the boy’s autism. The national autism rates are 1 in 110 children. Last year in Huntsville the rate was 1 in 60 and those are just the numbers in Huntsville City Schools. They don’t count the hundreds of SPED parents who have long since given up on the school system actually doing their job of educating all of our children. We have good to great insurance, but autism is not covered in the state of Alabama. For the first two years after the boy’s diagnosis, we spent, on average $23,000 a year on private therapies.

As amazing as the gift of life is, it is also amazingly fragile. All it takes for any one of us to require extensive support and additional services is a single slip, a wrong turn, or standing up too quickly. I hope and pray none of you have to experience something like that, but I am certain that many will. In fact, I find it hard to believe that most of you don’t already know someone with a special needs child. When this happens to you or someone you know, how will you cope? Will having an underfunded special education program make much sense to you then?

Special Education is the last best hope for correcting the pattern of teaching to the test. Many of you may believe that it’s pointless to try and educate a special needs child. You may believe that they cannot be educated. Frankly, I know this isn’t true because I’ve seen the vast leaps my boy has made. But I am convinced that this is what Dr. Wardynski believes. He believes that we are wasting money on educating special needs kids. This is why he submitted a budget that cut $7 million dollars from SPED in a single year.

This is what hiring someone with no educational experience buys you: a leader unconcerned with teaching anyone who needs a little extra help to learn.

Do you think your child might occasionally need a little extra help to learn? In the system that we’re rapidly becoming, you won’t receive that help from Wardynski’s schools. His focus is entirely on testing. It’s on testing because people who don’t understand education assume that passing the test is all that matters. Special Education is the last bastion of education where the process is designed to meet the needs of the child rather than to meet the needs of the test. You should care about this because if Wardynski has his way, our system will be reduced to doing nothing in a classroom that can’t be done by a test proctor. This is his goal.

But finally, if these reasons aren’t persuasive enough, you should care about the cuts to special education funding because it’s the right thing to do. Plain and simple, it’s the right thing to do.

I hope you’ll join me in asking about the special education cuts. I hope you’ll join me is holding the superintendent and the board accountable for the education of all our kids.

Life is an amazing gift. Being up before the sun, looking at the night as it fades away helps to put this into perspective (although, honestly, I’m not a morning person.) The beginning of each new day is like Christmas morn: it’s hard to contain the excitement and potentiality that the day will bring.

Sorry for a rambling start. It was another wakeful night with the boy, but it ended with us walking together into school this morning, bouncing together, and saying bye. Nothing special there. Except the miracle of my boy actually telling me bye and adding three simple, beautiful words to the end.

“I Looove ooo.”

Life is an amazing gift: precious, wonderful and miraculous.

And it arises from treating each other the way we wish to be treated.

This is one simple idea that we spend a lifetime learning to follow. It’s crucial. Without it life loses excitement and potentiality. It becomes the gift that we put in the back of the closet and forget about.

Come Together

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit of late when I think about our schools. I wrote once that when resources tighten, it is natural to want to look after the needs of those dearest to you first. Even if doing so means that others suffer.

There was a time when I thought that we as a city would overcome this maxim. When it was announced back in June that nine schools were going to be closed, there was the beginning of a coming together that I hadn’t often experienced in this town except when the power was out. It seemed that having a state mandated superintendent sent in with orders to close schools on the basis of a flawed demographic report was doing quite a bit to get all of the schools (or at least those who were on the list) working together. There was no division between us. At least for a moment.

Too often our community is pitted against each other. We’re divided along racial lines. Those in the south are often callously unconcerned about the quality of the schools in the north. There are seemingly ancient divisions between Butler, Lee, and Johnson as well as between Grissom and Huntsville. (Or often times between Huntsville and the entire rest of the system.)

We are divided along financial lines. Wealthier schools often seem to receive preferential attention and support from the Superintendent than those schools in other parts of the community despite his claim to be primarily concerned about “closing the achievement gap.” It would be quite interesting to see if all of the schools PTA presidents, just as a single point of reference, received the same level of access to the superintendent. Somehow, I’m betting that there are those who are more equal than others.

Divide and Conquer

Now the Superintendent is attempting to divide the city along the lines of ability and the cost of services. In other words, Wardynski has offered a response to my questions about the seven million dollars in cuts. He believes that all students should receive exactly the same amount of funding, and since exceptional (the state’s legal terminology) students cost more than non-exceptional students, he is convinced that cutting funding from exceptional students is completely justifiable. He’s simply aware that it’s both politically dangerous and illegal for him to say so. So he keeps his mouth shut when I ask questions. Or he finds technical loopholes that he can wiggle through to avoid answering questions.

I suppose he’s never read Harrison Bergeron on the horror of a life where everyone was finally equal.

He wants to be the U. S. Handicapper General. He said as much in a discussion with Mr. Spinelli back during the budget hearings on September 8th. You can watch it here: http://www.ihigh.com/huntsvillecityschools/broadcast_176461.html?silverlight=1 but the volume is bad. The discussion starts at about the 3:50 mark.

Spinelli: 4.9 million is for ah special education. Approximately we spend $20 million to date on ah. Or we budgeted $20 million in Special Education for the fiscal year 2012.

Wardynski: So we’re um about 5 million in federal funding, the rest will come mostly from local funding.

S: Yes.

W: Total expenditures are pretty close to $20 million dollars. So that about $15 million will be coming from local funding. So of our local funding, which is about $95 million, about 18-19 percent of that will go to special education. And when we lay that down across the children, we’re still completing the analysis, there’s about 2300 children that we track in sets. We’re still waiting for iNow to surface some more for budget purposes. An of those 2300, they represent just about 10% of our students. We’re spending about half of our special education funds on about 400 of those students. So about 50% of our special education funding is going to about 400 of those 2300 students. And that sorta lays down in a way that’s sorta exponential in nature that um the local funding is in some cases is up to $30,000, $40,000 per student. So we’re keeping an eye on that one. We’re implementing the IEPs. By making sure as we’re looking at IEPs and resource allocation, that we’re doing it in a way where with the real sources we have we can meet all of the students’ needs.

S: Right. There’s some students that um we’re spending much more than the $30 or $40 thousand on.

W: Right. There’s a few outliers.

S: Yes.

W: We’re taking a good look at how services are rendered to make sure we’re being efficient.

S: Right

W: And yet meeting the needs of the children.

S: And the other 90% of your students, we’re spending about $8,000 or $9,000 a student for the education. [He is talking about non-exceptional kids here.]

So what is he attempting to accomplish here? First, he is attempting to divide the special education community. By arguing that “half of our special education funds” are being spent on about “400 of those students,” he’s attempting to say to the special education community that there are some special education students who are receiving far more services than the vast majority of the entire community.

Dividing Special Education

He’s attempting to defend his actions of cutting $7 million in special education funding by saying first to the special education (SPED) community that there are those who are getting more than your child.

I’m grateful to the SPED community for a world of things, but I think the main thing I appreciate them for is this: communication. We talk to each other, we listen to each other, and for the most part, we do our level best to treat each other the way we want to be treated.

You see, we’re used to getting those looks from strangers who don’t understand why our son is flapping his arms. We understand how it feels. And so rather than staring, we smile, or maybe we walk up and talk. In short, we would appreciate the gift of understanding from others, so when we are able, we offer it.

Dr. Wardynski’s blatantly political attempts to divide the SPED community failed because we talk with each other, and we understand that our child might soon require additional assistance.

Divide Special Education From Everyone Else

Whether or not this same blatantly political attempt to isolate the exceptional students from the non-exceptional students will work, frankly, remains to be seen.

When funding is tight, there is a sense of urgency to get what we can for ourselves and our families and let others worry about themselves. Wardynski is clearly hoping that he can make that case that spending more on a few students will be deemed unfair to the other 89% of the community who are non-exceptional. He’s clearly hoping that Huntsville gives into our baser selves rather than rising to our better angels.

The question is, is he right? Will he succeed in splitting the community into factions? A system is much easier to control when the people refuse to work together, when we only look out for ourselves and our own. A community that stands together cannot be abused.

Wardynski was sold to us as a numbers guy. That’s all well and good, but to be an effective leader you must care about more than just the bottom line. Doing the right thing for the right reason at the right time is also required. The rule of gold shouldn’t outweigh the golden rule.

Sadly, Wardynski, Spinelli, and King seem to have forgotten this. If we stand together, we can remind them.

Tomorrow, there will be a follow up with a list of reasons why you should care about the funding for special education programs. Please check back for that one.

One of the first things that a parent with an autistic child learns to do is minimize change in the daily routine. Your child on the spectrum teaches you this immediately. For example, just as other families do, when the boy, the girl and I load up to go to school each morning, we always run through a quick checklist to make sure that we haven’t left any homework, library books or lunch boxes. There’s nothing unusual about that. What is unusual is what happens when something slips our list and we have to pull back into the garage after we’ve left. When this happens, all hell breaks loose.

Parents often speak of a meltdown when things don’t go as planned. If your child is expecting to go to see The Muppets, has been planning on it for months thanks to Disney, has her own Kermit doll all ready to take in to the movies, and something comes up, meltdowns follow. Sometimes these can go on for as much as an hour.

Parents of autism speak of meltdowns also. The difference is that with autism the meltdown comes when you have to pull back down the driveway when you forgot a library book that has to be returned. Sometimes these meltdowns ruin the rest of the day.

Change is difficult for those on the spectrum. It may have something to do with a heightened ability to perceive change, but for whatever reason, slight changes often disrupt an entire day. So to function, many families adopt several strategies to help their children adjust. We work hard to lessen the impact of unnecessary changes in his life.

This should be a similar goal for our school system, but those children who cannot speak for themselves are often ignored, warehoused, shuffled, and segregated by those in power for the convenience of the system rather than the benefit of the students.

Two Educational Experiences

Let’s take a look at just two of those kids who have spent an equal amount of time in the Huntsville City School system. It just so happens that they are both my own.

The girl does not have autism. This is entirely typical of those on the spectrum as boys are found on the spectrum about four times as often as girls. She’s in second grade in HCS and has been attending HCS for two and a half years having been in Kindergarten, First and now Second grades.

The boy, as I’ve written often, does have autism. He too has attended HCS for basically two and half years as he began attending schools in pre-school. He’s currently in Kindergarten for the second year as we elected, with his IEP team’s input, to allow him to repeat Kindergarten this year.

The Schools

Perhaps it would be instructive to see just how many changes have been forced on my boy as compared to my girl during basically the same time period.

• Number of schools attended by the girl in 2.5 years: 1.
• Number of schools attended by the boy in 2.5 years: 2.

The girl has attended just one school for her entire time in public schools (Mt. Gap Elementary–We selected our home based on the school district.). The boy, however has attended two schools, neither of which are Mt. Gap. For preschool he was placed at Farley Elementary. We weren’t happy about this because it meant getting two kids to two schools at the same time in the morning, but after meeting the principal, staff and in particular the boy’s teacher we were convinced that it would be a good environment for him. We were also explicitly told that he would be staying at Farley in order to minimize the disruptions he would face. With this in mind, we decided to take him out of private therapy and place him into the hands of Huntsville City Schools.

It was a good decision on our part. His experiences there brought our withdrawn child out of his shell. For the first time in his life, he would look at us and seek us out. There were no significant changes to his classroom during this year. The teacher he started with, he finished with. The aides he started with he finished with. They developed a close relationship that made his education possible. In this regard, the boy’s pre-k experience was quite similar to the girl’s kindergarten experience: Stable. You know the kind of environment that makes education of any child possible.

At the end of that year, we were actively planning to help him transfer into Kindergarten at Farley. We were working with his Kindergarten teacher, and she participated and assisted regularly in developing the boy’s IEP. What’s more, the boy recognized and liked her. It was going to be a smooth transition. Then at the end of the year, at basically the last possible moment, we were informed that his pre-k teacher had been non-renewed (This is a tragedy as she was a superb teacher. Many have forgotten, but the cuts to Special Education and to all of our teachers in general began in 2010, not just in 2011) and that the boy was being moved to Challenger Elementary as he started Kindergarten.

We were offered no explanation or justification for this transfer. We were also offered no option. There was no mention of the assurance that we were offered. There was no direct communication between those making the decision to move our son and us. We received notice of this second and third hand.

New School

• Number of teachers the girl has had in 2.5 years: 3
• Number of teachers the boy has had in 2.5 years even though he was retained in the same kindergarten class for his third year: 4

The beginning of his Kindergarten year in the fall of 2010 was difficult. Being in a completely new environment with completely new students took a toll on his educational progress during the first half of his Kindergarten experience at Challenger. All of his friends were gone; they stayed behind at Farley. He was in a brand new building. His daily routine was completely different, and he didn’t know any of the teachers he was working with. Simply put, the first half of the year was spent in adjustment to the new setting.

Then his teacher had to leave on an extended maternity leave. Of course this wasn’t anyone’s fault, but basically just as the boy was getting settled into his new environment, his teacher had to leave to be replaced by a permanent substitute. Again we were blessed to have an excellent sub, and thankfully the aides and therapists remained constant. In other words, the boy had to only adjust to the loss of his teacher.

But Christmas break 2010 marked the end of stability in the boy’s educational experience.

Entering 2011 and the Reduction in Force

• Number of significant changes in staffing the girl has faced in the past 12 months: 0
• Number of significant changes in staffing the boy has faced in the past 12 months: 15

The girl has known the principal, secretary, librarian, PE teachers, lunchroom staff and even many of the janitors at her school since she started there in 2009. She’s known most of the children in her grades since 2009 even though they were not all in the same class. The people working with her to help her excel haven’t significantly changed since she started Kindergarten. The girl is a straight A student.

When the boy returned from Christmas to begin 2011, we were faced with a new teacher. In February with the first RIF, the boy’s aides were cut basically in half with a teacher who was just getting to know the kids. This combined with the new environment set him back. All of the teachers he had known, except two, were gone. By the end of the school year, his classroom basically had one sub and two aides. And none of those personnel, at the end of the year were expecting to return to the boy’s classroom the following year even though he was.

The difficulties faced this year were countless.

• Two “New” Teachers: The boy has had what amounts to two new teachers this year. His first teacher returned from maternity leave (thankfully), and he was finally entering into his inclusion classroom on a regular basis.
• A Revolving Door of Aides: While the two aides who finished the year with the boy last year were eventually re-hired, only one of them was placed in his classroom on a regular basis. This was his only significant connection with personnel from the previous year. Then after about a month, this aide was reassigned to another location in the building due to the need to shuffle staff around to cover shortages. Currently he has two aides who began the year with him out of about six who have rotated in and out during that period.
• Three and a half Occupational Therapists: Due to an overwhelming workload, Challenger Elementary has had three OTs in four months. One OT worked for basically one week.
• Two Speech Therapists: Again, due to an overwhelming workload and an unwillingness to pay staff outside of the superintendent’s inner circle, Challenger Elementary has had two STs in four months.
• An Entirely New Class: Because the central office attempted to fund special education on a minimal basis, there was a need after two months to take an Autism teacher from another school in the system, and move her to Challenger. Once there the boy’s existing class that had 11 students in it was split in half. While my boy’s actual room stayed the same, there were at least four classes in the system that were dramatically disrupted because the Superintendent wouldn’t fund the hiring of one additional teacher.

So in summary, the girl has had a stable educational environment for the first three years of her education; although with the planned but undiscussed changes to Mt. Gap in its conversion to a P-8 next year, this is likely to change soon. She is excelling as a result.

The boy’s experience has been anything but stable. In fact, I find it difficult to imagine his last two and a half years (and particularly his last 4 months) being more disconnected, disrupted and disturbed.

This is what comes of cutting the special education budget by seven million dollars. It is this disruption that tells me, without a doubt, that despite the heroic efforts of his teachers and aides, that the boy’s educational program is not being met. There’s no way that it could be with the insane amount of adjustments that he’s been required to make.

All of this so that we can pay Wardynski a salary that’s $55,000 above the minimum that he should be paid based upon his experience. All of this so that we can offer him a $10,000 bonus at the end of a year when teachers’ salaries are set at the state minimum and are frozen at their current level. All of this so that we can offer Spinelli and Cooper competitive salaries that are even above the posted maximum salaries posted. All of this so that Wardynski can have two secretaries, and an aide-de-camp.

Special Education is funding the expansion of the central office, and our children, my boy, is suffering because of it.

I wonder, I truly do, how the trinity at the top and the board who enable all of these changes can sleep at night.

And they continue to refuse to discuss it with parents.

Please feel free to file this under the “you-couldn’t-make-this-stuff-up-if-you-tried” category.

Before writing my last post about Filing a Grievance with Huntsville City Schools, I verified that the form that I had found and linked to, was the correct form to use when submitting a grievance against the board and superintendent. I was concerned about it because, as Redeye pointed out, this was the same form that is used when a parent wishes to file a grievance against a teacher, or other staff member at a school.

I wondered about that when I asked Mrs. McCaulley about the form after the board meeting and she suggested that I pick one up at the schools, but both she and Dr. Robinson had left me with the impression that there was a form to use when a parent had an issue with a board decision.

In fact, I received an email from Dr. Robinson this morning confirming for me that I was indeed using the correct form and that I should submit this form to Dr. Wardynski.

Except now it’s not. (Really. I told you, I couldn’t make this up.)

Moments after posting my last blog, I received a call from Mrs. McCaulley. She informed me that I had indeed filled the form out correctly, but that she had just realized that the board “does not have a policy for when the citizen concern is really against the board.”

She kindly and generously informed me that the 102-7 Policy is really designed for concerns with a teacher, principal, staff member or assistant superintendent, but that when the concern is with the superintendent or the board that the board does not currently have a policy designed to handle those types of grievances.

She assured me that she would look into developing a procedure to handle grievances against the board and superintendent. I believe that she is genuine in her desire to create this, but I have no faith that it will actually happen.

I have asked Dr. Wardynski to respond to the spirit of the request I have made even though there is no policy at the present time that requires him to do so. Shall I hold my breath?

So, once again, the hoop that I was asked to jump through has been pulled away. Do you ever feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick a football that Lucy is holding? Cause I do.

[Update: After you read this, make sure that you read the next blog that I have posted as well. It's called, "No Grievance Policy Against the Board or Superintendent." No, I'm not making this stuff up.]

During the board meeting last night, Mrs. McCaulley and Dr. Robinson announced for the first time in my hearing that there was yet another hoop to jump through if you expect to receive a response from the central office or the board concerning a question, issue or grievance that you have.

Interesting isn’t it? I’ve been bringing questions, issues and grievances to the board both privately via phone calls and emails, and publicly via the citizen comments section of the board meetings since April. This is the first time that I’ve been informed of the formal grievance policy and procedure during that time.

I suppose that it didn’t occur to Dr. Robinson to mention this process to me before.

So, despite having regularly and consistently contacted my board member in private, despite having raised the issue of the $7 million dollars in Special Education funding cuts from FY2011 – FY2012 repeatedly in private and public, last night I discover that there was yet another hoop that a parent or a concerned citizen must jump through in order to get an answer from the board or the superintendent.

When I asked Mrs. McCaulley for a copy of the required form to file a grievance, she directed me to pick one up from my local school. While I appreciated that Mrs. McCaulley shared this new method of receiving an answer from the board with me and the public last night, I really wanted to find the form online so that I could begin the process last night

Fortunately, I was able to find the form on my own.

The Grievance Policy, Procedure and Form may be downloaded from the Huntsville City website at the following links: 102-7: Parental/Citizen Concerns Policy, 102-7: Parental/Citizen Concerns Procedure, and 102-7: Parental/Citizen Concerns Appendix A (The Form).

Once you have downloaded and completed the form, the procedure for submitting the form is vague. Here’s the approach I have take concerning my grievance over the cuts to Special Education Funding.

First, I completed the form as follows:

• School Name: Here I listed the Huntsville City Schools Board of Education since my grievance concerns the superintendent’s recommended budget that the board has approved.
• Complaint/Concern Regarding: Here I used the “Other” field and listed Dr. Wardynski and the Board.
• Check One List: I marked Superintendent – 5th Stage as my issue is with Dr. Wardynski and the Board.
• Complainant: I offered my contact information.
• Issue: I stated the issue that I have with the board cutting special education funding more than any other department or student population in violation of Alabama State Code 16-39-3.
• Action Requested By Parent/Citizen: Here I requested a formal and public review of these numbers, and a written justification for why these cuts have been applied in such an unbalanced and unfair fashion. I also requested that the school board correct this budgeting error.
• Resolution: I left this part of the form blank assuming that it is the Superintendent and the Board’s responsibility to respond.

I also attached a copy of the report that Mr. Spinelli sent me showing the $7 million in cuts from FY2011-FY2012 as evidence.

I have emailed signed copies of these documents to Dr. Wardynski and the Board, and I have dropped off copies of the same at the Merts Building.

According to the 102-7 Procedure Dr. Wardynski and the board now have seven (7) working days to respond to my grievance in writing. As such I am expecting a written response from them on or before Monday, December 12, 2011.

I have no issue with jumping through hoops to protect my son’s education. I only wish that my board member had bothered to inform me of the existence of these hoops earlier in this process. I hope that this information is helpful to others who are also facing road blocks to receiving answers from our elected officials.

On Thursday, November 17th,  Mr. Aaron King offered an updated report on Special Education to the report that he and Dr. Wardynski presented back in August. While you may not have a child who is discussed in this report,  HCS students who have an IEP represent about 11% of the Huntsville City Schools population, what happens to the special education students should matter to you. The system seems to have a pattern of testing its implementation of procedures on the special needs kids before applying them to other segments of the population.

Closing services offered at schools, moving students, cutting teachers, aides and therapists, all of these methods of “saving money” were all trial tested on the Special Education population before they began doing the same thing to other groups.

The central office’s pattern of making decisions without involving parents or the public in any way is also a process that has been used with Special Education long before it was used with other groups. Thus, it pays to notice what they are doing with special education kids even if you don’t have one yourself.

Continuing this pattern on the 17th, Mr. King, who as far as I have been made aware has absolutely no previous experience working with or evaluating special education programs (he was a high school chemistry teacher in Madison Co., Mississippi before coming here as Dr. Wardynski’s aide) has been placed in charge of evaluating and assessing the special education services, IEPs and teachers in Huntsville City. Again, this is following a pattern with our school system. Experience is seen as a detriment or as an obstacle to be overcome. So rather than taking advantage of the extensive years of experience that our system has in working with IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act), Dr. Wardynski has handed this over to his Director of Transition.

Repeating Patterns

This is a similar pattern to the way that Dr. Wardynski is handling the re-naming of Lee High School. It’s the way that he’s handling the consolidations of Mt. Gap, Whitesburg, and Chapman elementary and middle schools into P-8s. The pattern of replacing experienced personnel with unexperienced personnel is the primary issue that I have with the Teach for America decision.

But this is Dr. Wardynski’s pattern. Experience doesn’t matter to him simply because he doesn’t have any.

The pattern is to avoid parental involvement or input in the decision making process. While I certainly understand where Dr. Wardynski learned this pattern, in the military people follow orders or they die, a public school system is not the military. If the system excludes parental input, as they have done repeatedly, the school system will die.

As such, it’s crucial to involve parents in the decision making process. Dr. Wardynski claims on a regular basis that he wants this, but his actions and decision making process exclude parents. And ultimately, it is our actions that speak the loudest.

So what exactly have been the superintendent’s actions that we can learn from.

A Statement of Priorities

The superintendent has cut special education funding from FY2011 to FY2012 by $7,173,863.74. This is not an estimate. This is not a guess. These numbers are Dr. Wardynski’s and Mr. Spinelli’s numbers that they grudgingly provided when I asked for a report from them two and a half months ago. (I say grudgingly because Mr. Spinelli delayed providing these numbers to me by 15 days. When they finally sent me the numbers, they sent me the raw data in an Adobe Acrobat file without any totals. I suppose it’s a good thing I know how to import information into a usable format. Education is a wonderful gift, isn’t it?)

After I uncovered the seven million dollar in cuts that represent 61 percent of the total systemwide cuts from FY2011 to FY2012, I contacted Dr. Jennie Robinson seeking her assistance as my board representative in eliciting an explanation from Dr. Wardynski and Mr. Spinelli. This is the approach that the board prefers in handling these types of issues. If you have an issue, they ask that you contact them in private, and so I did. Dr. Robinson responded to my request for the board to discuss this at a board meeting on September 29th. I wrote about this back in October. In an email, she stated:

I followed up on this with Dr. W and Mr. Spinelli after the meeting today. They said that they are going to do a formal presentation on special ed costs at the November work session. They will not have all budget actuals back from the state until then. They also said that the discrepancy is not totally in the coding errors (although that does contribute a little bit) but in the difference between budgeted numbers and  actual expenses.

So you should have your answers in November.

The Special Education Report

This brings us to the November 17th meeting. The presentation that Mr. King offered was an updated version of the presentation that Dr. Wardynski offered on August 4th. For some reason, Dr. Wardynski did not want to follow up his presentation from that night. He chose to pass it off to his aide. The primary changes in the report include changes in the numbers of Instructional Assistants, and the addition of 1.5 Occupational Therapists.

In addition the report includes information on Dr. Wardynski’s moving 23.5 Special Education workers out of the Merts Office and into the schools. The claim was that this move:

1. Eliminates the drive time from the Merts Center and therefore reduces the milage expenses incurred by the individuals and the district.
2. Establishes more time for interaction with students and educators.
3. Provides more personnel in the schools to help manage and mitigate problems.

These all seem like reasonable benefits until you realize that there are 18 schools with autism units and 2 autism specialist who are placed at AAA and Challenger. In other words, there are 16 autism units that these two autism specialist will still have to cover and assist. Will they be driving from Merts? No, but they are still driving from AAA and Challenger to the other 16 schools.

Travel costs haven’t been eliminated, they’ve just been moved out of the Merts cost center and onto the individual schools. Interestingly enough, shortly after the Special Education update report, Mr. Spinelli offered a financial report that showed that the administrative expenditures were 3.4% of the budget, which they claimed were well below the state average of either 4.0% or 4.5% (they used both numbers). Is it possible that the transfer of personnel out of Merts an into the schools was simply to make it appear that the administrative costs were lower than they actually are?

Somehow, I think that might be the case.

Also, can anyone explain why you would place an Elementary Collaborative Coordinator at Huntsville High School? Or what about placing another one at Grissom High? Wouldn’t it make much more sense for the Elementary Collaborative Coordinator to be at an elementary school? At least they were successful at placing the middle school coordinators at middle schools.

Perhaps Mr. King, who appears to be in charge of the special education services at this point was confused? Nah, surely he had a good reason for doing this. Right?

District Plans for Equity

So what does Mr. King recommend that we do with the data he presented to the board? For that, we’ll need to examine the following slide:

I wonder: How exactly is someone with Mr. King’s limited experience going to “ensure that services are allocated and provided based on legitimate needs as determined by the IEP team?” Is he planning to examine the work of the IEP team and determine that some needs just simply are not “legitimate?” What exactly is he planning to base his evaluation of legitimacy on? Has he worked with Special Needs students for years? Does he have any formal training in identifying legitimate needs for special services? If so, I would love to hear about them, but I suspect that this is similar to all those excellent TFA studies that Dr. Wardynski keeps mentioning in defense of the excellent quality of TFA’ers when compared with teachers who are actually trained. Isn’t it funny how he never calls these studies by name? I suppose we should just trust him and Mr. King.

So, who is going to be establishing “the proper protocols to ensure that the IEP process is equitable across the district?”

Since it would seem that Mr. King is unaware, the “I” in IEP stands for an Individualized. This means that equitability across the district is not to be taken into consideration. If you’re focused on “equitability,” the “individualized” part is tossed out the window. Again, experience matters.

Where’s the Discussion of the Seven Million?

So what’s missing from this presentation? You guessed it: neither Mr. King, Mr. Spinelli, Dr. Wardynski, nor anyone on the board raised any discussion of the seven million dollars that was cut from Special Education from FY2011 to FY2012. The only discussion of funding decisions was Dr. Robinson expressing astonishment that Mr. Spinelli and Dr. Wardynski were able to show during the presentation of the 2011 Financial Statements that the general fund now has an operational surplus of $3.4 million dollars. She actually asked, “How were you able to do this?” I suppose that she had forgotten about the two reductions in force that she voted for in February and April.

I suppose she had forgotten about the report that I had shared with her two months earlier that showed that the special education budget had been cut by seven million.

The only mention of this reduction in funding came when I asked about it during the public comments.

No one offered any response.

So, per the boards request, I wrote Dr. Robinson privately again on Friday of last week asking her again as my board member to request a specific response to my concerns about the seven million dollar reduction in special education funding.

She has not responded to my email. I suppose that she didn’t receive it.

So, tomorrow night at the board meeting, I will stand to ask again why the Special Education funding has been cut by seven million dollars. It will probably be a fruitless exercise as the board seems happy to balance their books on the backs of our neediest children, but I’ll ask anyway.

I’ll ask because our teachers deserve my support. I’ll ask because our aides, therapists, and principals do too. I’ll ask because if they can make one group bear the burden of their financial mis-management, they can make any group do so.

I’ll ask because my son cannot ask for himself.

In an effort to appear ethical, the Alabama legislature passed a new ethics law has made giving a teacher a gift card illegal just in time for the holidays.

Let’s make sure we understand this.

• We’re not going to pay our teachers a competitive salary to draw great ones away from other fields.
• We’re going to freeze their salaries.
• We’re going to actually cut their salaries by requiring a 2.5% increase in the employee contribution to the retirement plan.
• We’re going to dramatically increase their workload by requiring them to teach more students.
• We’re going to strip away their job security, and
• We’re going to insult their by telling you point blank that anyone, anyone at all, can do their job.

But that’s simply not enough.

In addition to all of this, we’re now going to make it a Class B Felony for them to accept any item that has value or may be resold from that 5 year old kindergartener in their class. The Advisory Opinion written by Mr. Matthew C. McDonald was release on October 5, 2011. You may download it from here.

This opinion says on page 9 that a public employee may not receive:

Any gift, benefit, favor, service, gratuity, tickets or passes to an entertainment, social or sporting event, unsecured loan, other than those loans and forbearances made in the ordinary course of business, reward, promise of future employment, or honoraria or other item of monetary value.

Thus, according to the opinion a public employee may receive:

Public officials/public employees may receive promotional items, items created for presentation, or other items of de minimus value.

However the legislature did not choose to place any limit on the meaning of “de minimus value” and the Advisory Opinion refused to do so as well.

An apple might still be acceptable just as long as it’s not one of those expensive, Honeycrisp apples

Now, perhaps you might not think this was specifically directed toward teachers. It does say, for example, say that a “public employee” may not receive these things. It doesn’t say, “teachers” may not them. And yet the law specifically claims that lobbyists may spend $25 on a meal and that principals (a person or business retaining a lobbyist) may spend $50 on a meal.

So they decided to offer themselves clear guidelines, but for teachers, any gift that my be determined as having any value, well, that’s off limits.

Somehow, I’d bet that the Iron Bowl stands will still be filled with our legislators who purchased tickets at face value this Saturday. (In case you didn’t know, face value of Alabama tickets range from $55 – $85 dollars. You can’t purchase Iron Bowl Tickets without buying Season Tickets which sell for $385, if you can actually get them. Right now, Iron Bowl tickets are selling for as much as $250 apiece on craigslist.)

So our ethical legislators can buy face value tickets for the Iron Bowl at a savings of almost $200 a ticket, but they’re worried about a $5.00 gift certificate to Target that would likely be used to purchase supplies for their classroom that the state refuses to purchase.

All the animals are equal, but some, especially the pigs, are more equal than others, aren’t they?

Let me be clear here. I’ve never had a teacher request a gift of any kind. I’ve never received any impression from a teacher that she (or he) expected anything but a “thank you” from a family. Teachers more so than most, and especially more so than our esteemed representatives, understand the importance of ethics when it comes to evaluating students in a fair and honest manner.

In short, this is an attempt by our representatives to give the appearance of ethical behavior while getting to, once again, punish their favorite whipping dog: those dedicated individuals who have committed their lives to educating our kids.

People in power fear education, for an uneducated populace is far easier to control than an educated one.

So, what can you do about this?

First, call or write your representative and let him (or her) know that gifts to teachers should be exempted from this law to at least $25 dollars. If a lobbyist can spend $25 dollars on a meal for a representative, shouldn’t a child’s family be able to show their thanks to a teacher at a similar level if they are able and willing?

Second, there’s a small loop-hole in the law that allows teachers to receive gifts from friends and family (nice of them to leave that in there, wasn’t it?) This clause may be found on page 17 of the Advisory Opinion. It reads:

One major inclusion in the revised Ethics Law is the exception for anything given through a friendly relationship. It must be an actual relationship and may not be a sham.Set out in the statute as one relevant factor is, did the friendship pre-exist the recipient’s status as a public employee or official. (17)

While I am not a lawyer, this says to me that so long as your friendship with the teacher “pre-exist[ed] the recipient’s status as a public employee or official” then it’s completely legal for you to purchase that person a gift.

So, until this law is changed, I would suggest that you consider giving your friends, who just happen to be teachers, a small gift in appreciation for being your friend.

So far at least, it’s still legal to give friends and family members gifts even if they are corrupting our youth by teaching them to ask questions.

This stupid regulation needs to be changed. Until it is, please make a point of telling your kids’ teachers, aides, principals and staff thank you for their unselfish commitment to educating your kids. Our teachers need our support.

When the pediatrician, at the boy’s two-year check-up, said to us, you’ll probably need to have him checked for autism, I wasn’t thankful.

Since this is a family blog, I’ll refrain from being frank with my language. Suffice it to say there was a rageful fear that stole over me in those moments. Followed rapidly by a little over two-million, one-hundred and two-thousand, four hundred other moments that were, to a varying degree, just like those first.

Fear of the future.

Rage for the disconnected now.

Fear of the hobbled hopes.

Rage at the ceaseless struggle to understand.

Fear at the thought that I never would.

rageful fear

There was little time for other as we rushed to find a way to help him. Knowing that every day he waits for a breakthrough is like three for another kid, we were rushing, raging against the fog of autism.

But there are clearings and breakthroughs. There is connection. There are times when the boy looks me in the eye and says, “I love you.” And the rageful fear fades.

For that and for so much else, I’m thankful.

I’m thankful that I’m learning to listen, really truly listen. My ears seek out the smallest syllable, the quietest question whispered in the middle of the night. And when it comes, I’m screaming for joy in my heart waiting for the next.

I’m thankful that I’m learning to live in the moment. To play when we’re playing. To climb when we’re climbing. To laugh when we’re laughing, and we laugh–he and I–often and loudly. To cry when we’re crying because we can’t connect. To lock eyes before we lock hands as we run to play.

I’m thankful for the community we’ve found and the friends, old and new, who just get it. There was a time when my off the scale introversion didn’t worry about losing a friend; I was foolish in my youth. As the boy’s friends have taught me, true friendship opens whole new worlds to explore and to love.

But mostly I’m thankful for this beautiful boy who bounces without reservation, who shouts with joy without concern, and who loves without shame. Despite the fog and the rage and the fear, I’m thankful for who my boy is.

I’m a blessed dad.

Dr. Wardynski has been superintendent of Huntsville City Schools since July 5, 2011, or a just shy of five months. It’s been a busy five months for him.

Here’s a quick summary of the changes Dr. Wardynski has brought about in that time.

1. Classroom Sizes have increased along with a higher student to teacher ratio.
2. The Central Office staff, in particular the upper level of the central office, has increased.
3. The Special Education budget has been cut by $7 million dollars to pay for significant increases in the recruitment, selection and professional development of Teach for America teachers and various other of the superintendent’s personal goals.
4. Senior Administrative positions are slated to receive bonuses and have already received raises while teachers salaries are frozen and new teachers salaries are set at the state minimum.
5. Eli Broad Foundation’s Return on Investment is up to $2,310,000.
6. The Superintendent who doesn’t want to close schools has now either closed, slated to close, relocated or merged nine schools without parental input, which is exactly the same amount of schools recommended for closure by the demographer’s report in June.
7. All job descriptions have been suspended allowing for personnel to be moved at will.

Funny, it would seem that he’s following the Broad Foundation’s game plan to the letter. In, “How to tell if your School District is Infected by the Broad Virus,” SueP of Seattleducation2011 suggests looking at a few of the following clues:

1. Schools in your district are suddenly closed.
2. Even top-performing schools, alternative and schools for the gifted, are inexplicably and suddenly targeted for closures or mergers.
3. Repetition of the phrases “the achievement gap” and “closing the achievement gap” in district documents and public statements.
4. Repeated use of the terms “excellence” and “best-practices” and “data-driven decisions.” (Coupled with a noted absence of any of the above.)
5. Power is centralized.
6. Decision-making is top down.
7. Local autonomy of schools is taken away.
8. Principals are treated like pawns by the superintendent, relocated, rewarded and punished at will.
9. Culture of fear of reprisal develops in which teachers, principals, staff, even parents feel afraid to speak up against the policies of the district or the superintendent.
10. Ballooning of the central office at the same time superintendent makes painful cuts to schools and classrooms.
11. Sudden increase in the number of paid outside consultants.
12. Superintendent attempts to sidestep labor laws and union contracts.
13. Teachers are no longer referred to as people, educators, colleagues, staff or even “human resources,” but as “human capital.”
14. The district leadership declares that the single most significant problem in the district is suddenly: teachers!
15. Superintendent lays off teachers for questionable reasons.
16. Teach for America, Inc., novices are suddenly brought into the district, despite no shortage of fully qualified teachers.
17. The district hires a number of “Broad Residents” at about $90,000 apiece, also trained by the Broad Foundation, who are placed in strategically important positions like overseeing the test that is used to evaluate teachers or school report cards. They in turn provide — or fabricate — data that support the superintendent’s ed reform agenda (factual accuracy not required).
18. Superintendent behaves as if s/he is beyond reproach.
19. The superintendent receives the highest salary ever paid to a superintendent in your town’s history (plus benefits and car allowance) – possibly more than your mayor or governor — and the community is told “that is the national, competitive rate for a city of this size.”
20. Your school board starts to show signs of Stockholm Syndrome. They vote in lockstep with the superintendent. Apparently lobotomized by periodic “school board retreat/Broad training” sessions headed by someone from Broad, your school board stops listening to parents and starts to treat them as the enemy. (If you still have a school board, that is — Broad ideally prefers no pesky democratically elected representatives to get in the way of their superintendents and agendas.)

There’s more, but I think this is sufficient to communicate the point. If you’d like to read the entire list, you may do so at http://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/how-to-tell-if-your-school-district-is-infected-by-the-broad-virus/

As I said, Dr. Wardynski has been busy in the past five months. Kinda makes you wonder exactly what’s in store in the future. If this is the type of “future leaders” that Broad Foundation supported programs like Teach for America produces, I would much prefer that they go on about their chosen careers and leave education to those who have committed their lives to it.

Last night during the Huntsville School Board meeting, Dr. Philip Kovacs, a concerned parent, asked Dr. Wardynski and the board a few specific and direct questions concerning the Teach For America four-year contract that the board approved at the beginning of the month.

He, of course, received no answers.

The only response offered was Dr. Wardynski on WAFF last night mocking “teacher colleges” and claiming, again without offering any evidence, that TFA’ers are far superior to traditionally trained teachers.

Perhaps someone should have mentioned to the new superintendent that this is a research based town. We don’t just follow orders that have no basis in reality. Asking questions and seeking answers is the crucial component to education. It’s a shame that wasn’t covered in his weekend training course.

It was, evidently, covered in Dr. Kovacs’ training, for his questions struck at the heart of the matter with a clarity that Dr. Wardynski’s unsupported claims of a “proven track record” cannot hope to match.

How about sharing evidence of this “track record,” Dr. Wardynski? Then, perhaps your mocking, dismissive tone towards people who have committed their entire lives to the calling of education will have some validity.

Again, I suppose 16 total months of educational experience didn’t prepare you for doing anything other than giving orders.

Shame.

Dr. Kovacs is committed to seeking the truth. His use of the Socratic method of asking questions is evidence of this, and I for one greatly appreciate his willingness to question those in power.

His questions deserve an answer. If you agree, please copy them down and ask them yourself. The more people we have asking, the more difficult it will be for our system’s administration to insult our teachers with their unfounded belief that anyone can teach and lead an educational system.

Dr. Wardynski’s irritation at being asked questions is evidence that he is not an educator. Experience, sir, actually does make a difference.

Let’s continue to irritate him by asking questions like these.

1. You’ve claimed there is “overwhelmingly positive research” in support of Teach for America. This is demonstrably false. Why are you making this claim when there are only two, non-peer reviewed reports on TFA, both of which have been discredited by scholars?

Furthermore, given that TFA has been around for over 21 years, if they were so successful, shouldn’t there be dozens of peer-reviewed studies showing that success?

As there is no peer reviewed research on the program, this is in fact an experiment, as such, will you give notice to parents whose children will take place in your experiment, as is required by law?

If your answer is “no,” are you in fact demanding that all families participate in your experiment, or will parents be allowed to place their children in classrooms with professional teachers?

2. Will you guarantee that TFA members will be equitably distributed across the district and not only placed in Title I schools, which would be in direct violation of the ongoing federal desegregation order re: Hereford v. Huntsville?

Furthermore, will you provide the media with the percentage of black teachers laid off and the percentage of white “new faces” replacing them, or will the media need to use the Freedom of Information Act to determine those figures?

3. I am aware of several alternative programs that have better retention rates than TFA. Did you solicit competing bids from these other organizations? If so, where are those bids, if not, why not?

4. Dr. Robinson claims the $5,000 per year is for professional development, but TFA claims the money must be used towards paying off college loans. Who is incorrect on this point? Are my tax dollars going to professional development, or am I paying off other people’s debt because quite frankly, I have plenty of my own.

5. If, in two years, your 1.9 million dollar experiment on Huntsville’s children has not produced “overwhelmingly positive results,” will you hold yourselves accountable and resign?

For the record, what is your metric for determining “overwhelmingly positive results?”

6. Will you provide members of the media with the exact amount of money you have given to the Broad Foundation since Dr. Wardynski was hired, or will you make them use the Freedom of Information Act to determine to that figure?

7. Will you agree to stop outsourcing public education and to immediately end outside-of-district spending until the media has had time to determine, exactly, how much of our tax dollars you have given away?

Thank you, Dr. Kovacs, for your commitment to education. We stand with you in asking these questions.

Just shy of two months ago, I posted my findings concerning the reductions in the Huntsville City Schools budget for Special Education. Using numbers provided to me by Mr. Frank Spinelli, CSFO, and Mr. Rob Terry, I found that the Special Education budget for FY2011 was $27,588,027.27. This budget for FY2012 has been reduced to $20,414,163.53, or a difference of $7,173,863.74.

For nearly the past three months I have been asking for a justification of this reduction in funding for our neediest kids. Perhaps tonight Mr. Aaron King will finally provide that justification.

When I asked Dr. Robinson about this reduction at the September 29th board meeting, she offered a couple of justifications:

• The seven million dollar reduction represents the “difference between budgeted numbers and actual expenses.” As I pointed out on October 2nd, even if she is correct, the difference between what was actually spent and a planned budget is still $7 million dollars, which is 61 percent of the total cuts made system wide.
• She also made her claim that she knows that the system is meeting IEPs because the system is not being sued.

Hopefully, Mr. King will come up with something a little better than that tonight. (By the way, why is it that Mr. King is making this presentation? Why isn’t this presentation being made by Mr. Spinelli as CSFO, or Dr. Cooper as Deputy Superintendent for Instruction since she is directly responsible for Special Education, or perhaps even Dr. Wardynski himself? I suspect this is because they want to communicate to the board that there’s little to no need to ask questions about his presentation.

I also doubt that he will be willing to offer any justification for why Special Education is being asked to carry more of the cuts than any other group in the system despite state code section 16-39-3 requiring that the cuts made to special education be prorated “on a per capita basis between exceptional and nonexceptional children.” Perhaps Mr. Brooks will be willing to offer an interpretation of this code that justifies placing 61 percent of the cuts on special education.

Despite Dr. Robinson’s claims to the contrary, the school system is not meeting the requirements of the IEPs. At Challenger Elementary alone, the entire school went for two months without a single Occupational Therapy session when the previous OT resigned after about a month of school. The OT that was hired to replace the first one resigned after just a single day. Additionally, the entire school has been without a Speech Therapist for the past two weeks when our superb ST resigned because she was being overworked and underpaid.

When I asked where the extra $1.9 million dollars was coming from to pay for the recruitment, selection and professional development of the TFA’ers, honestly, I think I already know. It came out of the $7 million that was cut from the Special Education budget from FY2011 to FY2012.

It will be interesting to see how Mr. King justifies this.

A quick follow up to my post from last Saturday, November 5th, Teach For America Costs Twice the Reported Amount: It would seem that I was correct that the cost of TFA was at least twice as much as had been reported. The Huntsville Times reported Sunday that the actual cost of the contract will be “at least twice as much as initially indicated.”

Bonvillian reports, “That brings the estimated price tag for the contract up to $1.7 million over the next several years.”

But now it seems that this number is increasing again. During the Bama game Saturday night, Dr. Robinson forwarded an email to me from Dr. Wardynski. It seems that Dr. Robinson was asking Dr. Wardynski about the total costs of the TFA contract. Dr. Wardynski wrote her back to say that the contract would cost $1.9 million rather than $1.7 million as we had reported.

In other words, the total number of TFA’ers Huntsville City Schools is planning to hire has increased again. During the initial presentation on October 11th, Mr. Carpenter, Alabama TFA Executive Director, claimed that the contract would call for the hiring of the following numbers:

• 2012-2013: 30 TFA’ers
• 2013-2014: 30 TFA’ers
• 2014-2015: 50 TFA’ers

This contract would require $5,000 per teacher, per year. These TFA’ers would be hired by the district under alternative certification. So, when presented to the board, this contract would cost $1.1 million dollars for a total of 110 teachers over three years.

When the contract was published it had changed dramatically and then called for the following hiring pattern:

• 2012-2013: 30 or more
• 2013-2014: 40 or more
• 2014-2015: 50 or more
• 2015-2016: 50 or more

Following this pattern we will hire 170 total TFA’ers at a cost of $1.7 million for four years. You may find this information in the contract under Appendix A on page 16. It seems that the “or more” part of the contract has now been figured out.

On Saturday, Dr. Robinson shared with me that Dr. Wardynski had told her that the actual numbers will be as follows:

• 2012-2013: 40
• 2013-2014: 50
• 2014-2015: 50
• 2015-2016: 50

As you can see, we have now nearly doubled from the initial presentation the total contract as we’re now planning to hire 190 TFA’ers over the next four years. (Dr. Wardynski’s email actually had two different totals. The total expense was listed at $1.9 million, and his breakdown of the amount was as described above, but when he totaled the numbers he totaled them as 180. I have asked Dr. Robinson to clarify this discrepancy, but she has not responded.)

190 TFA’ers at a rate of $5,000 per teacher, per year for two years is $1,900,000 for the duration of the contract.

This deal is getting worse all the time.

The board will be meeting tomorrow night at 5:30pm at the Merts building, 200 White Street. I will be in attendance. As always, the meeting will be broadcast on ETV (Comcast 17, Knology 99), and at the Huntsville City Schools’ website. I will also be live-tweeting the meeting @russwinn. You can follow on Twitter or on the Geek Palaver Facebook Page.

Also Welcome to all my new readers! If you’d like to stay connected, please sign up for the email distribution list on the upper right hand side of the screen in the field next to the Subscribe button. Again, welcome and thanks for reading. We can make a difference.

At the last board meeting on Thursday, November 3rd, Dr. Robinson defended her support of the superintendent’s recommendation to sign what was at the time a $1.7 million dollar contract with Teach for America by claiming that she had spent the week reviewing studies on TFA and the effectiveness of the teachers placed in a system by TFA.

She claimed that there were both “good” and “poor” studies concerning the effectiveness of the teachers that TFA hires. In short, she was convinced that TFA’ers were more effective than traditionally certified teachers. In an email from Dr. Wardynski that Dr. Robinson shared with me, he claimed, “We are making this investment because evidence has shown that the achievement gains provided by TFA exceed the gains afforded by a similar investment in alternative strategies” (November 9, 2011).

Thus, the extra $10,000 spent training a TFA’er will be money well spent because TFA’ers will provide a “very large gain in school culture and student achievement” (November 9, 2011).

He offers no explanation of how the gains in “school culture” are to be evaluated, but the “student achievement” standard is fairly clear.

To evaluate that, we’ll need to look at the studies available to us.

“Good” and “Poor” Studies

Assuming that the Heilig and Jez study that I shared with her on November 1, 2011, was one of the “poor” studies, I approached Dr. Robinson after the meeting to ask for her thoughts about this study.

In summary, while she didn’t call Heilig and Jez’s study “poor,” she did claim that this study did not take into account significant changes that TFA made to their training program in 2009. As the study was published in June of 2010, she is correct that it does not take into consideration data after 2009. She did not offer an explanation of why TFA needed to make significant changes to their training program in 2009, nor did she offer any details concerning what changes were made to their training program in 2009.

She also claimed that the Heilig and Jez study was “supported” by NEA. On this “criticism” she is correct. The National Education Association is a supporter of the National Educational Policy Center. They are also funded by private donations to the University of Colorado Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

While it is important to know that the NEA has provided some funding for the NEPC, that does not mean that the NEA influenced the Heilig and Jez study to produce a negative report on TFA any more than The Ford Foundation influenced them to produce a positive one. (The Ford Foundation has made countless donations to Teach For America.)

Finally she claimed that the TFAers hired under this contract would be placed at secondary schools rather than at elementary schools. As such, she claimed that what we really needed to consider were TFAs performance at the secondary level.

When I asked for copies of the “good” studies that proved that TFA was putting teachers into schools who were just as effective as traditionally trained and certified teachers, she offered me two studies. In her defense, Dr. Robinson, unlike Dr. Wardynski, did proffer the links to the studies that she considered to be “good.”

Dr. Wardynski merely claims that there is “evidence [that] has shown” TFA’s achievement. For this, I thank Dr. Robinson.

“The Effect of Teach for American on Students: Findings from a National Evaluation”

The first was a 2004 study sponsored by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. entitled, “The Effect of Teach for America on Students: Findings from a National Evaluation” by Decker, Mayer, and Glazerman. This study offered an evaluation of TFA for teachers teaching at the elementary level.

Dr. Robinson did not offer a reason why this study evaluating elementary schools in 2004 was a “good” study while the Heilig and Jez study of elementary schools in 2010 was not.

The Decker, Mayer, and Glazerman study claims that TFA’ers “produce higher student test scores than the other teachers in their schools” (16). Figure 2 (xiv) supports this claim concerning Math scores, but it does not support this claim concerning Reading scores.

In short, while TFA’ers out performed the control teachers by “10 percent of a grade equivalent” (xiv) in Math, the effect on the reading scores was negligible. In other words, the math students were almost one month ahead of their peers with control teachers.

But who exactly were these control teachers with whom the TFA’ers were competing in this “good” study? They are described as including, “traditionally certified, alternatively certified, and uncertified teachers” (xii).

So, Dr. Robinson’s first “good” study proving that TFA’ers are better teachers than traditionally certified teachers compares TFA’ers to both “alternatively certified” and even “uncertified teachers.”

So some of the best evidence available showing that TFA’ers are better show only that they are marginally better (in math) than uncertified teachers.

As Hibpshman’s State Board review of the Decker, Mayer, and Glazerman report states, “it is conceivable that the effect size [TFA's superior performance] would altogether disappear or be reversed if they were compared to better teachers” (5).

In February and April of 2011, the Huntsville City School board of education’s reduction in force plan laid off 154 certified teachers. When Mrs. Morrison asked Mrs. Belinda Williams, HR Director, for evidence that these 154 teachers were being re-hired, Mrs. Williams replied during the November 3rd meeting that she did not have data to support that claim at that time.

“Making a Difference?: The Effects of Teach for America in High School”

The second “good” study that Dr. Robinson shared with me was by Xu, Hannaway and Taylor of the CALDER Urban Institute entitled, “Making a Difference?: The Effects of Teach for America in High School.”

This “Working Paper” from April of 2007 argues that, “The findings show that TFA teachers are more effective, as measured by student exam performance, than traditional teachers” (3). This is referred to as a “working paper” by CALDER because it has not been peer-reviewed unlike the “poor” Heilig and Jez study that I had shared with her on November 1st. CALDER themselves state that “CALDER Working Papers have not gone through final formal review and should be cited as working papers. They are intended to encourage discussion and suggestions for revision before final publication.”

While discussion is a hallmark of the educational process, it’s troubling when nearly $2 million dollar decisions, when decisions that will effect at least a third of a child’s primary and secondary education are being based on studies that have not even been reviewed.

In addition, one of the report’s primary authors, Jane Hannaway, discloses on the title page of the report that her “daughter is employed by Teach for America” (1). She does not report in what capacity her daughter is employed. Also, she does not reveal that she is “engaged in a major conceptual effort for the Gates Foundation on the design of human resource management strategies in education.”

The Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation have extensive ties dating back for at least a decade. Both foundations actively support Teach for America.

Despite the lack of peer review, I was able to find one independent assessment of this study by the Department of Education who provide CALDER with their primary funding. The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) offer the following assessment of this study:

What did the study authors report? TFA improved student performance on standardized end-of-course tests in math and science–by about one-tenth of a standard deviation. This is equivalent to moving a student from the 50th to the 54th percentile. (1)

So again we find that the best evidence supporting spending an additional $5,000 per teacher, per year is that it increases student performance in math and science (but not in the humanities subjects) by one-tenth of a standard deviation. The best that can be said is that math students are about a month ahead of their peers.

IES went on to offer the following assessment of the “Making a Difference?” report:

Students may be placed in a course taught by a TFA teacher because of their ability in that subject – and not solely because of their general math and science ability. If so, differences in performance in TFA and non-TFA classes may be influenced by differences in student ability in specific subjects. As a result, the study may not accurately measure the effect of having a TFA teacher. In addition, the data did not link students directly to the teacher who taught their course. Instead,  the study matches students to teachers based on test proctor and classroom demographics. This method is  somewhat imprecise, and matching errors could lead to misleading results. (1)

So again, the best studies that those who support hiring TFA’ers at, at least, a $1.7 million dollar premium can offer are studies that “may not accurately measure the effect of having a TFA teacher.”

This is what passes for evidence with the school board. But, in their defense, this is more evidence than they usually require before they rubber stamp the superintendent’s recommendations.

Dr. Wardynski often claims that our children only get one shot at their education. If he really believes this, why is he so willing to take a $1.7 million dollar chance on unqualified teachers? At best, TFA represents a huge investment for minimal gains in math. At worst, it represents a huge investment for significant losses in student achievement.

It represents a corporate experiment where TFA’ers learn to teach on other people’s kids.

We should cancel this contract immediately.