Well, tonight was interesting. It seems that the superintendent was concerned that there might be a video mob of some sort at the board meeting tonight. I wonder why he would be concerned about that?

There were no less that six district security personnel at the board meeting tonight. And even more disconcerting than that, there were at least five marked Huntsville Police Department cars and one unmarked police car present at the meeting tonight.

During the citizen comments, which I think were nearly cancelled tonight as they were left off the agenda, there were approximately 10 security personnel in the board room.

And that was after all the general public entered the building through a metal detector again.

The only time this level of security was present was during the removal of the Lee High name from the new high school. Then I think there may have been three district personnel and perhaps two or three armed police officers.

Oh, and there was no metal detector that night.

I have heard through the grapevine that security was concerned that there might be a video flash mob of sorts tonight

And of course that would have been just terrible. It’s absolutely terrible when the public pays attention to what elected and appointed officials say and do.

There was at least one person there tonight who did record at least part of the meeting in an open way. This person, and no it wasn’t me, was recording the meeting in the full view of district security and Huntsville Police, and yet she/he was not asked to leave or stop recording.

I chose not to attempt to record the meeting tonight as it was fully broadcast on ETV, and frankly, because I wasn’t interested in spending the night in jail.

However, every time I turned around, there was yet another security personnel walking up toward me.

This despite my standing in the hallway the entire night watching the meeting on the TV monitors in the hallway. (I gave up my chair a few times to various people, and so ended up in the hallway.) It was kinda crowded tonight.

I wonder why the board and superintendent would be so worried about people paying attention to them that they would feel the need to have HPD present for additional security?

I wonder why there were so many of them actually in the board room while I was speaking?

It seems that perhaps I was being singled out tonight despite Mrs. McCaulley’s claims on Sunday night via email that I wasn’t being singled out.

I wonder how she feels now?

I was allowed to speak tonight. I believe that the superintendent and the board were genuinely surprised when I didn’t make the entire three minutes about me. If you’re interested, here’s what I had to say:

In honor of the Rave Cinemas support of the autism community at the beginning of the month with their “Avenge Autism” walk, I considered wearing my Hulk Smash gloves tonight, but then I was concerned that Mr. Blair might be the only person here to get the joke.

So I left them at home.

After all, I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was intimidating, disruptive or threatening as I have been called.

For the record, it has never been my intention to intimidate or threaten any one, and I’ve gone to great lengths to avoid disrupting the board meetings in any way. I haven’t even allowed my comments to run over the three-minute limit.

I’m not here to threaten anyone. I’m not here to intimidate anyone, and I appreciate having heard from Mrs. Morrison, Mr. Birney, Mrs. McCaulley, and Mr. Blair that they as individuals have not felt threatened by me. It would be nice if the board could publicly state that, but I’ll take what I can get.

I do not, however, apologize for asking questions and expecting answers.

Education without the free ability to question isn’t education. It’s indoctrination. And I’m sure that we can all agree that is not our goal here.

In that light, here are a few questions:

How is it helpful to students to tell their teachers that they’re being moved to another school while the students wait in the hallway? Teaching while holding back tears doesn’t seem helpful to me.

Why are we still discussing Dr. Wardynski’s bonus while teachers’ step raises are still frozen and starting salaries are still set to the state minimum?

Why are we on a pace to spend 7 million dollars less than the published budget on Special Education, which is exactly the same projected surplus that Mr. Spinelli is predicting for the end of the year? In other words, why are you balancing the budget on the backs of special education students?

Questions aren’t intimidating to people who believe they are doing the right thing.

Thank You.

Not one board member spoke to me tonight, and the superintendent chose not to respond to anything I had to say.

I did get a nod from Mr. Lankford at one point, but no direct communication.

There was a significant amount of intimidation, disruption to normal events, and fairly overt threats tonight (and this week). But it didn’t come from me. It was instead the superintendent through his security team who was attempting to intimidate the public into silence.

So there’s another board meeting tomorrow night at 5:30pm at the Merts Center, 200 White Street. I’ll be there, and supposing that there aren’t any technical issues that halt the broadcast as there was two weeks ago, you can watch it at home on ETV (Comcast 17, Knology 99), and at the Huntsville City Schools website. I’ll be whining away on Twitter @russwinn during the meeting. You can also catch my posts on the Geek Palaver Facebook Page. All of this supposes of course that I will be allowed to attend the meeting.

The agenda for tomorrow has been published, and they’re going to talk (again?!?) about evaluating the superintendent, the new school calendar,  and just how wonderful hiring countless numbers of consultants has been for the district.

So, again, while teachers salaries are still set at the state minimum, while teachers STEP raises are still frozen, on a night when they are going to discuss “Principals’ Terminations,” the superintendent will likely walk home with a $10,000 bonus in his pocket for successfully passing the test that the board specifically designed for him to be able to pass.

(One of the standards of evaluation that was placed upon Dr. Wardynski was to raise AP participation rates. As he himself indicated even before they voted to approve that as one of his goals, he had already accomplished that. It’s nice when your standard for success includes items that you’ve already completed.)

Yes, they will be discussing this bonus even before they discuss the new state assembly mandated school calendar.

Concerning the calendar: it seems that Dr. Wardynski and the board should actually thank the assembly for providing political cover for his decision to remove fall break from the calendar. Remember tomorrow night when Dr. Robinson calls for citizens to complain about their loss of a fall break to their representatives in Montgomery that she, along with every member of the board except Mr. Blair, had already approved a school calendar that removed fall break.

Here’s a listing of the significant dates including closed dates:

• August 20, 2012: First Day of School
• September 3, 2012: Labor Day
• No Fall Break (This was already gone in Dr. Wardynski’s original calendar for 2012-2013)
• November 12, 2012: Veterans Day
• November 21-23, 2012: Thanksgiving Break
• December 24-January 2: Christmas Break
• January 21, 2013: MLK Day
• March 25-29, 2013: Spring Break
• May 23, 2013: Last Day of School

There are no built-in weather days, but it is unclear at this time how weather days will be handled. It is at least possible by one interpretation of the “Beach Bill” that those days might be allowed to occur after May 23, 2013. Another interpretation would mean that the school day would be required to be extended until the hours are made up. I would be quite surprised if even our esteemed representatives know for sure.

It’s always nice when education suffers as a direct result of industry lobbying. I love the Alabama Gulf Coast, but this is an evil decision they have forced upon the state. It’s remarkably similar to Dr. Wardynski’s decisions to privatize so many of the district’s functions. Again, if it weren’t for the district taking his control, Dr. Wardynski would, I’m sure, love the sentiment behind the decision: namely that public education should be run by private organizations, industries, and businesses.

There will, after all, be at least four new contracts approved tomorrow night with private organizations.

After this discussion they will move on to an encomium of all the amazing, wonderful, fantastic, astonishing contractors who don’t cost us anything, they save us money. I’m sure it will sound nothing like a (warning: stereotype ahead) woman coming home from the store with three-hundred dollars on the credit card talking about all the money she “saved.” Verifiable evidence will be in short supply.

Oh, and there’s an ominously titled item called “Principals’ Terminations” under new business.

And finally, despite my best efforts to clear all of this mess up before tomorrow’s meeting, I still don’t know if the board or Dr. Wardynski will allow the public to video record the meeting tomorrow night.

Here’s the question I asked of Mrs. McCaulley as School Board President:

Will I be allowed to record future public board meetings in accordance with Alabama State Code 36-35A-6? [This section states: "A meeting of a governmental body, except while in executive session, may be openly recorded by any person in attendance by means of a tape recorder or any other means of sonic, photographic or video reproduction provided the recording does not disrupt the conduct of the meeting. The governmental body may adopt reasonable rules for the implementation of this section."].

To this question, Mrs. McCaulley responded on Sunday, May 13, 2012 at 9:28pm:

Response: As president of the board you have my permission to operate within the perimeters of the law. After I read the Alabama State Code Section 36-35A-6, you cited above, I noticed it used the term “may be openly recorded”   therefore one could interpret openly recording is not a mandate or requirement but optional.

You’ll note that she has not stated if I may actually record the meeting tomorrow night without being asked to leave the meeting again, and without being told I was “intimidating the board” as Mr. Lankford said, or called “intimidating and threatening” as Mrs. Anderson stated in an email to the Huntsville Times last Tuesday.

I followed up this non-response from the board President by asking:

“If on Thursday, May 17th, I attempt to record the board meeting in exactly the same manner as I did on Thursday, May 3rd, should I expect to be asked to leave the meeting?”

I have received no response to this question.

So, if I should attempt to record the meeting tomorrow night, I have no idea how the Superintendent will direct his staff to react.

Please note, it is not my intention to “intimidate,” “disrupt,” or “threaten” anyone or anything.

I am grateful to Mrs. McCaulley for saying that I have not intimidated her. I also appreciate the communications I received from Mrs. Morrison and Mr. Birney saying the same thing. Mr. Blair chose to state in the press that he had always found me “pleasant and cordial.”

So I’ve got that going for me.

I have not, however, heard anything at all from my board member Dr. Jennie Robinson. Neither have I heard anything from Dr. Wardynski.

I suppose that when Mr. Lankford said I was “intimidating the board” by recording them, and when Mrs. Anderson stated that I “had been described as intimidating and threatening” (that, by the way, was the first time that I’ve been informed that I was “threatening”) for doing so, that they were talking about how Dr. Robinson and Dr. Wardynski felt. They are, after all the only ones left.

I have asked for any specific documented evidence that I have intimidated, disrupted, or threatened anyone at the district level.

The only response I’ve received from Mrs. McCaulley is:

Again to your inquiry about any written incidents reports concerning you, to my knowledge there are none.

Thus there is, at least to Mrs. McCaulley’s knowledge, no documented evidence that I have done any of the things I’ve been accused of doing.

I have also, not received anything approaching an apology for the district staff’s response to me, but that’s okay. I’m not really sure that it would mean much at this point anyway.

And frankly, I’m certain that they were only following orders.

You see, I don’t actually care what they say about me. And truthfully, I don’t care if they allow me to record the meeting or not.

None of that is important to me.

What is important is that my children receive an appropriate education. I am convinced that cutting Special Education by seven million dollars (or the exact amount of surplus the district is anticipating at the end of the fiscal year) has kept my boy from having an appropriate education. I am convinced that merging my girl’s school without discussing it with parents first will keep my girl from having an appropriate education.

I am convinced that having a demoralized faculty and staff in our schools keeps my children from having an appropriate education.

I am convinced that having people who don’t want to be teachers, teach keeps my children from having an appropriate education.

I am convinced that having a CSFO who can spend $28,790 without documentation keeps my children from having an appropriate education.

I am convinced that having district leadership that attempts to intimidate parents and teachers for asking questions keeps my children from having an appropriate education. When people aren’t allowed to ask questions, education has been replaced by indoctrination.

This is what I’m concerned about. These are a few of the issues that really matter.

You remember when you were a child going to a store, and you saw a toy you wanted? Perhaps there are just two on the shelf. Maybe two Lukes from Star Wars. They look exactly the same to you, except for two small differences. One of them, for some reason, cost thirty cents more than the other.

In those days, thirty cents made a world of difference. After all, you could get the latest Detective Comics to go along with the Luke for that. So, what kid in his right mind would buy the more expensive Luke?

Well, no one.

But we’re forgetting about the other difference between the two Lukes. And that, as Frost says, makes all the difference.

The more expensive Luke had a sticker on the package that said, “New” or “Improved,” or god help us, “New and Improved.”

And suddenly that copy of Detective Comics would just have to wait because coming home with a “New and Improved” Luke would make me the envy of all the boys on the block.

I’d just have to make sure I kept the packaging to prove to everyone that my Luke was actually newer and improved-er than their Luke.

It’s funny how little things change as we grow up.

As I was walking through the grocery today, I noticed a can of Planters peanuts that had a flag on it’s side reading “NEW.”

Honestly, new peanuts? Somehow I don’t think the peanut has changed much, do you? But I’d bet that Planters marketing department will have 10 studies showing that putting the “New” label on the can increases sales or profits or both.

And that’s what this is all about. Sales and Profits.

Today, the Birmingham News ran just such a promotional, or puff, piece on Teach for America called, “Birmingham City schools praise Teach for America” by Marie Leech.

She tells the story of history teacher Wyatt Smith who “came in one day and said he had a special guest for us, and came back in dressed as Abe Lincoln and did a rap song before the exit exam with everything we’d learned. He doesn’t care about making a fool out of himself to make you learn.”

Leech calls Smith’s style, “unquestionably non traditional, but filled with energy.”

You know, she’s right, having a teacher who dresses up as a character is a great way of teaching students about that character. I think the first time I saw it put into practice was in Vacation Bible School about forty years ago. The pastor dressed up as Jesus and walked in carrying a cross.

I’m pretty sure I saw it again in nearly every elementary classroom, middle, and even a few high school classrooms (although by that point most of the students in my classes would have thought it silly). I even had a seminary professor who regularly came to class wearing a red ascot impersonating the Devil.

I’m sorry Ms. Leech, but there’s nothing, absolutely nothing “non-traditional” about dressing up as a character to get student’s interested in a topic. Teachers have been doing this for nearly as long as there have been people wishing to teach others. You might want to take a look at Plato’s writings about Socrates on occasion to see what I’m talking about. Socrates is constantly depicted as adopting roles in his efforts to educate the youth of Athens.

Leech also talks about Audrianna Archibald, one of the few (in 2009 about 3%) TFAers who also has an education degree. Ms. Archibald says, “In the college of education, they taught us lesson plans, but there was no sense of urgency. Also, tracker are not taught in education. That’s probably the biggest thing taught in TFA, is tracking each student’s progress and letting parents know how their child is progressing.”

Honestly, she says that a college of education doesn’t teach tracking a student’s progress.

Seriously?

She goes on to say, “I go to their birthday parties; I go to church with them. If you want them to be completely engulfed in what you’re teaching, then you have to build those relationships or it’s hard to get them focused on what you want them to do.”

Again, there is nothing, absolutely nothing “non-traditional” about building relationships with your students in order to educate them. My children’s teachers have been to their birthday parties:

They’ve been to church with their kids. They encourage their kids to follow their passions and celebrate their successes:

They volunteer their time, money, and sweat to support events like the Autism Walk:

Getting involved in children’s lives is, frankly, standard operating procedure for every teacher than my children have ever had. And anyone who tries to tell you this isn’t the case isn’t paying attention.

Or they’re trying to sell you something.

Leech goes on to praise a French teacher named Heidi Kershner who is using an innovative method of teaching French called “immersion.”

I’ve got to just stop here for a moment. To be honest, I had a terrible time with French, Spanish, and in college, German. My inabilities to learn and speak foreign languages was legendary. My peers regularly used me to encourage others after a test: “Well at least you didn’t do as bad as Russell.”

But come on. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, “innovative” about using “immersion” as a method for teaching foreign languages. This method has been used for as long as anyone has attempted to teach a foreign language to someone. The more immersed the person, the quicker the person adopts the language.

Truthfully, the only person who would believe that any of the examples offered in this article are “innovative” or “non-traditional” would be a person who doesn’t have any idea what education is. If these examples demonstrate anything at all, they are examples that demonstrate the inexperience of the people offering them up as “innovative.”

All this article proves is that TFAers don’t have enough experience to know that their innovative methods have been in practice for, at times, thousands of years.

Every single teacher I know of makes use of all of these methods and many, many more because teachers, particularly teacher with experience, know that how you reach a child differs with every single child.

And so, someone must be selling us something.

The one objectively true statement in this “traditional”-teachers-are-no-damn-good puff piece is this:

The teachers earn the same salary as a first-year teacher in Birmingham city schools, roughly $36,000 plus benefits. The district also pays a $5,000-per-teacher, per-year fee to Teach for America for recruitment, placement and training.

That’s right. A TFAer costs tax-payers $10,000 (TFAers stay for two years–the total is therefore $10,000 per TFAer) more than those boring, so-called “traditional” teachers.

There’s no specific evidence that TFAers out perform traditional teachers. At best, they are about the same–and yet they cost more.

There’s no specific evidence offered in Leech’s article that TFAers approaches to teaching are “unquestionably non traditional” as she claims.

There is evidence that TFAers cost more.

There is evidence that TFA of Alabama is attempting to sell us something. The Alabama Education Trust Fund budget for FY 2012 appropriated $611,100 for Teach for America.

There is evidence that TFA’s assets have increased by 623% over the past ten years to $337,962,466.

There is evidence that the Broad Foundation has 1.6 billion dollars in assets at the end of 2010.

Wouldn’t it be nice if million dollar corporations like TFA and billion dollar foundations like the Eli Broad Foundation would celebrate teachers who do exactly the same work, but don’t cost $10,000 more?

But then those teachers couldn’t be called “new and improved” could they. Those teachers don’t grow TFA’s coffers by 623%, do they?

No. Those traditional teachers just teach.

They give their lives, not just two years, to inspiring students to learn. They give their lives, not just two years, looking for ways to connect with their students. They give their lives, not just two years, looking for ways to immerse their students in their subject matter. They give their students their lives.

“New and Improved” is just another way of separating a fool from his money.

We need not be fooled by repackaged peanuts again.

It would be nice if the Birmingham News could stop giving TFA free advertisements. I hope the Huntsville Times will avoid doing so next year when Dr. Wardynski starts singing the praises of TFAers for doing the same things that teachers have been doing for thousands of years. He certainly won’t tell us if the TFAers are failing. I hope that the Times, unlike the Birmingham News, will.

Two of our high schools, Huntsville High and Grissom High, have received national recognition from the U.S. News and World Report ranking of high schools in the United States, and Dr. Cooper, the Deputy Superintendent of Huntsville City Schools said on Wednesday in an interview with WHNT that this national ranking “shows that our commitment to student achievement is working.”

During the televised interview she went on to say:

We have an extremely passionate staff. Our district is committed. Our community is committed . . . We’ve been very thoughtful about what we’ve done in our high schools . . . We definitely take our test scores very seriously. At the beginning of the year, our principals are sitting down with their staffs reviewing the test scores.

You can watch the entire interview here although the quote concerning this achievement showing “our commitment to student achievement is working” is not a part of the televised interview. That quote is taken from the web site text accompanying the video.

You know, aside from the fact that this ranking is based primarily and solely on test scores, there’s nothing wrong with celebrating the achievements of our local schools. In fact, this is something that Dr. Cooper does quite well. Her primary responsibilities at the board meetings so far this year have in fact been to celebrate student, faculty, administrator and district achievements during the Superintendent’s Celebrations. Dr. Cooper has the unenviable task of reading the proclamations to those in attendance. She handles these responsibilities well, and as my daughter has received one of these celebrations, I am grateful to her for her work in setting these up.

While she has a right to celebrate Huntsville High’s and Grissom High’s achievements, she does not have a right to take credit for those achievements as her quotes indicate she is doing. During the video and in the story accompanying the video, she refers to her role in this achievement about ten separate times.

“Our commitment to student achievement,” “Our district,” “Our community,” “We’ve been thoughtful,” “What we’ve done,” “our test scores,” and “our principals” all indicate to me that Dr. Cooper believes that she and Dr. Wardynski and their “commitment to student achievement” are at least partly responsible for these two schools’ achievements.

And normally I would be inclined to agree with her. Education is a function of an entire community. No individual can be honestly singled out as deserving credit when a student learns. That credit, as you’re likely to hear at graduation ceremonies over then next few weeks, goes to a whole world of people.

Education is all of our jobs, and as such I have no problem with her taking some of the credit for these successes.

Except for just one small little detail.

The rankings that just came out from U.S. News and World Report are based on test scores from the 2009-2010 school year. Please go and take a look at the U.S. News and World Report methodology site on how they conducted their evaluation. Robert Morse tells us:

We analyzed 21,776 public high schools in 49 states and the District of Columbia. This is the total number of public high schools that had 12th-grade enrollment and sufficient data, primarily from the 2009-2010 school year, to analyze.

These 2012 rankings are based on test scores from the 2009-2010 school year.

Dr. Wardynski didn’t start working for Huntsville City Schools until July 5, 2011. Dr. Cooper didn’t start until October 2011.

In other words, it will be at least two more years before the Wardynski administration can take any part of the credit for future U. S. News and World Report High School rankings. In fact, if any superintendent deserves partial credit for these scores, that superintendent would in fact be Dr. Ann Roy Moore and her policies and not Dr. Casey Wardynski and his.

As Arnold H. Glasgow said, “A good leader takes a little more than his shard of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit.”

Perhaps our current district administration will someday grow into their own claims of being “strong leaders.” As we saw in his acceptance of Superintendent of the Year, they’re not there yet.

__________

For the record, the inspiration of this post came from a private communication from a regular reader. I have asked this reader if I could offer public credit for the suggestion, but this person has declined to be named. However, since I am being critical of the Superintendent for taking credit for others’ work, I do not want to be accused of doing the same. This post is entirely based upon my own research, but a reader, who wishes not to be named, suggested the topic to me. I thank that reader for the suggestion.

So, anyone read anything interesting in the paper today?

In case you missed it, here’s a link to Crystal Bonvillian’s article about the events at the board meeting last Thursday, May 3, 2012.

If you’ve missed my account of the evening, you can read about it here and here.

There are just a few follow up points that I would like to make.

__________

First, citizen comments are typically placed at the end of the meeting once all the business is completed. For some reason, I’ve been told it was an accident, the citizen comments portion of the meeting was not broadcasted this past Thursday. The last time citizen comments were broadcast was on April 19, 2012. That evening a teacher, who is well known by the board and Dr. Wardynski, Mrs. Pam Hill, stood to speak. She was frustrated at the way teachers had been treated that night.

This was not a typical comment by Mrs. Hill, but I fully understand her frustration. You see the board, last summer, voted to freeze teachers step raises and reduce teachers starting salaries to the state minimum. And yet at the meeting Dr. Wardynski, who was playing round robin with principals again, claimed that principals, and not teachers, would be rewarded for their teachers’ hard work during the year.

The interesting part was how Dr. Wardynski chose to respond to Mrs. Hill.

Here’s the clip.

Yes, rather than simply ignore her as he typically ignores me, Dr. Wardynski decided to “caution” her. He said:

Ms. Hill, you’re an employee of Huntsville City Schools. You do not represent Hampton Cove Elementary School. So that was a misrepresentation. Uh number two, you stood there the night I read the specifications against Principal McGhee. Uh, Principal McGhee was relieved for a whole host of reasons that where upheld in court. That had to do with poor leadership, ethical questions. And so we will relieve such leaders, we will relieve such teachers, and so I would caution you when talking to your employers to speak to them as your employers. The Board is your employer.

And that was the last time citizen comments were broadcast via eTV.

After I completed my comments on Thursday (which I began by saying thank you to Dr. Wardynski), I received several texts letting me know that the eTV broadcast had been turned off at the beginning of the citizen comments. Since Dr. Wardynski indicated that he wanted to respond to my comments, I decided to record his response so that I wouldn’t miss anything he had to say. (Normally, I record the broadcasts on TiVo, but since it wasn’t being broadcast that wasn’t possible.)

I was able to record approximately one minute and fifty-seconds of the remaining comments before I was asked to turn off the iPad.

The only reason I was attempting to record the rest of the meeting was because it wasn’t being broadcast.

__________

Second, I have written to Mrs. Laurie McCaulley to ask for permission to be allowed to record the board meetings in accord with Alabama State Code which states:

“A meeting of a governmental body, except while in executive session, may be openly recorded by any person in attendance by means of a tape recorder or any other means of sonic, photographic, or video reproduction provided the recording does not disrupt the conduct of the meeting. The governmental body may adopt reasonable rules for the implementation of this section.” Alabama Code Section 36-25A-6.

She has not yet responded to my request.

__________

Third, I have not as of this writing, heard from any of the Huntsville City Schools Board of Education members in response to the events on Thursday other than the brief conversation that I had with Mrs. Morrison following the meeting. As I wrote on Thursday, I offered her my apology if I had indeed intimidated her. Her response was to laugh at the unnecessary apology.

To date no one on the board has confirmed that I have the right to record the public portion of the board meetings.

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It’s been a busy day on the blog. For any new visitors, I’d like to say thanks for stopping by. I appreciate having the opportunity to be heard. If you have questions, or if you disagree with anything I’ve written here, please take a moment to ask them or raise your issues in the comments.

Alternately, you may email me at geeks@geekpalaver.com. Palaver means holding an in-depth conversation, in case you were wondering.

For all my regular readers: Thank you for taking the time to read my wordy posts. Believe it or not, I do actually trim them down!

Finally, if I may be so bold, I would ask that you remember this one thing:

My being asked to leave the board meeting for recording it is nothing, absolutely nothing, in comparison to the stress and pressure that our teachers, instructional assistants, therapists, staff, custodians, lunch staff, principals, administrators and our kids–especially our kids–have had to face this year, all year without relief.

My being asked to leave is nothing compared to the stress and pressure that our Special Education kids have had to deal with in the face of constant changes to their lives.

If you’ve had an employee of Huntsville City Schools behave in a way that was less supportive than you expected, keep in mind the amount of stress they’ve been under and respond by telling them how much you appreciate their service to our children. It is, after all Teacher (and all our other educators) Appreciation Week.

If you feel a need to do something about the events last Thursday, I would ask that you consider the following:

1. Thank a Teacher/Educator for her or his dedicated service to our kids.
2. Call your board member and ask them to make responding to the public a much higher priority than it’s been before.
3. Continue paying attention to the board meetings. Yes, they’re boring, but the decisions that Dr. Wardynski makes and that the board approves will impact your children’s education for a long time to come. At a minimum, you need to know what those decisions are.

On Tuesday April 24th, Dr. Wardynski offered what he called the first annual State of the Schools address. It was an event sponsored and hosted by the Huntsville PTA to allow Dr. Wardynski the opportunity to speak to the public about the state of the schools in Huntsville City. If you’d like to read a good summary of the event, please take a look at Bonvillian’s excellent piece, “Huntsville Superintendent Touts Achievements in First ‘State of the Schools’ Address.” The district has now also posted the video on YouTube. I would suggest that you take an hour out of your day to take a look at it.

If you give it a read (or a watch), please make sure that you read all the way to the end. Bonvillian’s final paragraph contains an accurate assessment of Wardynski’s most touted “achievement” concerning balancing the budget. According to the superintendent, the district is in the black again due to a shifting of funding from the capital fund to the general fund.

Oh and now the district is planning to borrow more money for the capital fund.

It’s pretty easy to “balance” the budget by borrowing more money and shifting it around. It allows a lot of  flexibility to hire consultants to do your job, pay $80,000 just to recruit two principals, and pay an extra $10,000 to hire a TFAer through Teach For America rather than simply hiring them on our own.

I wish my budget had such “flexibility.”

While I certainly do appreciate the Huntsville PTA for sponsoring this event, it clearly took a lot of work to pull this together, I still have to wonder why Dr. Wardynski is so opposed to taking questions at events like this.

Oh wait, now I remember.

So, since there were no questions and since there was no formal response, I thought I would offer a series of responses here on the blog.

As always, I solicit your questions and responses. Questioning makes us all smarter.

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It’s been a while since I’ve written about special education in the system. In many ways, that’s been intentional. It’s good for a writer to be able to step back a bit and examine an issue dispassionately, and frankly, I have a difficult time doing that when it comes to special education.

Here’s why:

It’s hard to be dispassionate when it comes to my boy’s education.

But in honor of Autism Awareness Month, and since Dr. Wardynski mentioned Special Education exactly twice on Tuesday night, I think it’s important to discuss the changes he was bragging about during his State of the Schools address. The first was to say that our first Teach For America “teacher” being hired under the new TFA contract is both a traditionally trained teacher (she/he has a teaching certificate and education degree) and this “teacher” is a Special Education teacher.

Yes, Dr. Wardynski was bragging that the first TFAer would be a Special Education teacher.

The second time that Dr. Wardynski mentioned Special Education in his State of the Schools address was to say that Special Education classrooms would be receiving technology updates over the summer.

Before I offer my own assessment of Special Education in the district, let me respond to these two points.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires that the district provide disabled students a “Free and Appropriate Public Education.”

One key to that requirement is the word “appropriate.” A disabled child’s education must be appropriate for the child. In other words, if a child is blind, it is not appropriate to require the child to respond to visual stimuli. If a child is deaf, it is not appropriate to require the child to respond to sounds.

Children on the spectrum do not adjust well to change. As I’ve written before, even pulling back into the garage to get something you forgot can ruin a day.

Even if, and this is as they say, a BIG IF, this new TFAer is actually qualified, by placing a TFAer into a Special Education resource room, Dr. Wardynski is assuring that those children assigned to that room will face disruption.

You see, unlike a general education classroom, SPED students will typically stay with the same resource teacher for multiple years. This is part of the “appropriate” education. Many SPED students develop more slowly than their non-SPED peers. Having stability in their resource room allows one teacher to track that student’s progress over several years. 50% of TFAers are finished with teaching after two years. 80% are finished after three.

A new study shows that Teacher Turnover Affects All Students’ Achievement. One of the main points that the researchers found was that this affect on achievement was harder on at-risk students such as minorities, and low-achieveing students. While the study did not specifically look at Special Education, it should be clear that Special Education students are among the most at-risk of any demographic.

By hiring temporary teachers for SPED, Dr. Wardynski is ensuring instability in the SPED classrooms.

This combined with hiring instructional assistants from basically temporary agencies at rates and benefits that can’t compete with McDonalds

Let me say that again. By hiring temporary teachers for SPED, Dr. Wardynski is refusing to provide an “appropriate” education to our students. Our Superintendent of the Year is refusing to follow federal law.

Secondly, Dr. Wardynski bragged about updating the technology in SPED classrooms over the summer. As the SPED classrooms and resource rooms are often the absolute last classrooms to receive new technology, this is a welcomed change. (My son’s resource room has been requesting a SmartBoard for years. It is my understanding that his is among the last rooms in the building to receive a SmartBoard.

He’s convinced that technology can supplement personnel.

This is not the case with those SPED children on the Autism Spectrum. While they often have aptitude with technology, the appropriate education isn’t just to funnel children into modes of education that they are already successful in, an appropriate education will challenge students in ways that they are not already comfortable. Children on the spectrum have difficulty with social interaction. As such that is exactly what they need.

They need stable, long-term relationships with people who are trained to work with and connect with them.

Technology can assist students on the spectrum, but it cannot replace personnel.

Finally, as I pointed out, Dr. Wardynski is touting the seven million dollar surplus that he and Mr. Spinelli are predicting to have at the end of the fiscal year in September.

Seven million dollars is a lot of money, and it’s a figure that constantly turns up when discussing special education this year.

Seven million is the difference between the 2011 and 2012 budgets for Special Education. When I asked about it often enough, Mr. Spinelli, upon my request, sent me a Special Ed Expenses October – December 2011 report that miraculously had seven million restored in the 2012 budget for special education.

It seemed that my months of questioning had paid off. That was until I took a look at the actual expenditures for the first quarter and saw that we were spending only about $20 million rather than the budgeted $27 million. (By the way, these numbers held true for the second quarter as well.)

Once again, the totality of the budget surplus appears to be coming from one single group of students.

Special Education.

Cardinal Roger Mahony once said, “Any society, any nation, is judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members; the last, the least, the littlest.”

By the way, Cardinal Mahony was only paraphrasing, you know, Jesus, when he spoke of how we treat “the least of these” in Matthew chapter 25, verses 31-46.

But if the Cardinal is correct about judging a society and a nation, wouldn’t that also hold true for a school district?

Thus, if the state of our special education students in our schools is not good, then by default, the state of our schools as a whole would also have to be judged not good.

This despite Dr. Wardynski’s claims.

This despite the Huntsville Council of PTAs’ belief that Dr. Wardynski was the Superintendent of the Year.

Huntsville City Schools continues to balance its budget on the backs of our weakest members. How can that be anything but a failure?

So there’s been a lot said about security at board meetings lately. Take Saturday’s article by Crystal Bonvillian of the Times, “Huntsville school board meeting audience met with metal detectors.”

Laurie McCaulley was told that Al Lankford, the district’s security chief, was concerned about “body language and demeanor at some of the meetings.” This is quite a curious statement.

You see, as someone who regularly attends board meetings, I am, of course, concerned about security at the meetings. Heck, my daughter was in attendance at the board meeting on March 15th, so of course I am interested in making certain that these bi-weekly meetings are safe. Every sane person shares that concern.

If I didn’t believe the meetings were safe, I wouldn’t go. If I didn’t believe they were safe, I certainly wouldn’t have allowed my daughter to attend.

But I do, and I did. And I’ve been at every board meeting since April 7, 2011 except two. In fact, if we count simply the bi-weekly board meetings for the past year, I’ve probably attended more of them than Al Lankford has attended. (For some reason Mr. Lankford wasn’t present from the January 17th meeting until about a month later. I was pleased to see him return.)

In other words, I’ve seen nothing in the audience’s body language and demeanor that would lead me to the conclusion that someone was behaving in a threatening manner. What I see at board meetings are people laughing, talking, applauding, saluting, and mostly sitting quietly and listening to the meeting.

Now, granted, I’m not there to watch the audience; I’m there to listen to the business being conducted. I’m also not a trained security officer. I know for a fact that a trained police officer is capable of “seeing” more than I.

But I am a writer and a teacher. I take my subject matter from observation of people as a writer, and I know when my students are alert, engaged, interested and learning (and I know when they are not) on the basis of their body language. So, while I do not have the years of training that I am sure Mr. Lankford has in identifying a threat, I do believe I am capable of seeing and noticing when someone is behaving in a threatening manner.

So while this is just my unprofessional assessment, not once have I seen anyone in the audience behave in a way that would cause me to be concerned about my safety.

But then I don’t see the world as Mr. Lankford, (or Dr. Wardynski for that matter) sees it. For example, Mr. Lankford, during our conversations on Thursday night asserted that sitting quietly and holding an iPad recording the Superintendent’s comments was an intimidating action. During that same conversation, he also referenced my sitting quietly at the State of the Schools address and holding an iPhone directed toward Dr. Wardynski and his presentation as an intimidating action.

He even claimed that my standing silently for 80 seconds as I waited for a response to my comments as an “intimidating action.” He stated multiple times that I was “intimidating the board” and that he wasn’t going to allow me to do that. He even implied that my sitting silently with my head down, live tweeting the meeting was questionable.

So it seems to me that he sees a threat where I do not.

It seems to me that Dr. Wardynski also sees threats in things that just don’t seem threatening to me. For example, during his presentation to the board concerning his recommendation to put a fence and a “welcome center” (read: guard shack) around the new Lee High campus, he asked for several photos of the neighborhood surrounding Lee High to be displayed for the board and the public.

Here are just a few of the photos he showed to establish the “aesthetic” of the new Lee High campus “neighborhood.” I’ve photographed these shots off of the eTV Broadcast on Thursday night.

And like any true showman, he saved the best one for last. Here’s what Dr. Wardynski said when he introduced the picture below:

This is in the neighborhood. That fence there is, which fence is that, Glenn? Coca-Cola Plant, and what’s the one on the left? That’s the soldier’s home? So the solder’s home has an ornamental fence as well which adds to the character of the community.

Here’s the picture that accompanied the text that Dr. Wardynski was using to justify the $600,000 fence around Lee High School:

So, what’s the central detail of this photograph? What’s the first thing to catch your eye? What’s the single detail that will convince much of America that additional security around Lee High is necessary?

Don’t see it? Here’s a close up:

Evidently Dr. Wardynski didn’t see it as he didn’t comment on it, but I see a faceless figure, probably male, approximately six feet tall wearing stained jeans, a dark tee-shirt underneath the scariest item of clothing known to at least parts of America: the Hoodie.

Yes, in order to convince the board to support the new fence around Lee High, he showed them a picture of a person in a hoodie. (Truthfully, I think the board had already made up their minds on this matter. I think this was intended to drive the need for a fence home to the general public.)

Now, for the record, I am not opposed to the fence around Lee High. I think it’s overpriced. I think that the price should have been included in the $40 million spent to build the school, but I don’t think it’s a bad idea. Many schools have a clearly defined parameter.

But the superintendent’s methods of getting what he wants are at best questionable here. While I’m sure he would claim to either not noticing the person in the hoodie or not understanding that it might communicate something that he didn’t intend to communicate, it would seem that he is at least inadvertently using fear, uncertainty, and doubt to get what he wants.

One might even say that he is intimidating others into supporting his recommendation.

So there may have been some acts of intimidation taking place on Thursday night, but if there were, those actions weren’t initiated by me. I was sitting quietly in my seat listening, tweeting, and eventually attempting to record the superintendent’s words until I was ordered to stop.

One might argue that security was being used to intimidate members of the public for undertaking state statute protected activities. One might argue that the superintendent was attempting to influence the board and the public by using emotionally charged, racially charged images. One might argue that the superintendent was the one attempting to intimidate others the last time that citizen comments were broadcast in his comments to a teacher who stood up for what she believes in.

(I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the citizen’s comments to the board weren’t broadcast during the board meeting immediately following the superintendent’s “cautioning” of a teacher. You know, the meeting where the citizen’s comments worked against him.)

In the article, Mr. Lankford is quoted as saying, “We’re tired of getting threats;” I’m sure that our teachers, administrators, staff, and parents all agree with him on this.

I’m certain the metal detectors will help with this problem.

For some reason, I was told it was an accident, the broadcast of the board meeting tonight on eTV was cut off just as Citizen Comments were about to start. (And yes, for the record, I believe that it was an accident.)

There was little to no indication of this in the meeting, but I received many texts, tweets and Facebook comments concerning this. After I completed my comments, which I’ll post below, Dr. Wardynski indicated that he wanted to respond to my comments about spending more money on Instructional Assistants. He was asked to wait since there were other comments to follow mine.

Dr. Wardynski decided to wait to respond.

As my typical readers know, I like to make an attempt to capture Dr. Wardynski’s comments exactly as he shares them.

Knowing that the recording had been cut off, I decided to record the superintendent’s response. As my iPhone’s battery was running low, I got out my iPad to record it.

This is allowed under Alabama’s Sunshine Law:

“A meeting of a governmental body, except while in executive session, may be openly recorded by any person in attendance by means of a tape recorder or any other means of sonic, photographic, or video reproduction provided the recording does not disrupt the conduct of the meeting. The governmental body may adopt reasonable rules for the implementation of this section.” Alabama Code Section 36-25A-6.

I was not standing, moving, or blocking anyone’s view with my recording. I do not believe that I was disrupting the conduct of the meeting in anyway. I was not talking, and the video makes no sound. Furthermore, the meeting continued even while Mr. Lankford of security was asking that I turn off the recording and step outside to discuss it.

I complied with his requests.

I was told that I could not record the meeting because it was an intimidating action on my part. And since I had done other intimidating actions before, (referring to the time when I stood silently for about 80 seconds at the end of my comments waiting for an answer), I would not be allowed to record the meeting.

It seems that the board and the superintendent are intimidated by someone attempting to convey their thoughts and ideas to others.

{By the way, yes, those are camera that you see in the background over Dr. Robinson’s right shoulder. I did not attempt to use them.)

__________

I spoke with Mrs. Morrison after the meeting was over. I told her what had happened, and I offered her my apology if my actions intimidated her.

The former principal laughed. Which was nice.

After the meeting I also ran into Mr. Brooks, the board attorney. He offered me his hand and said, “Good job.”

The school board attorney didn’t seem too intimidated by a parent in a purple tee-shirt.

Before the meeting began, and granted, before I recorded any portion of the meeting, Mr. Blair sat down beside me and asked how things were going with my family.

He and I had an extremely pleasant conversation in which I shared with him much of what I planned to say during the public comments. He was compassionate and sympathetic.

He was also friendly and funny.

I greatly appreciated his time and willingness to engage me in a conversation.

He did not seem to be intimidated. (I suspect that as Mrs. Morrison had done, he would have laughed if I had asked him if I was a intimidating him.)

Although I had spoken during the citizen comments, and yes, I did make eye contact with Dr. Wardynski while I was thanking him for coming to the Autism Awareness Month kickoff and the PTA Reflections Award Luncheon in Mobile, I don’t believe that I was threatening in any way in my comments. Feel free to judge for yourself. (Since the board broadcast was turned off, we don’t have a video recording of these comments.)

Dr. Warydnski, I want to thank you for your presence at the Autism Awareness Month kickoff at Hampton Cove Middle School on April 11th. I also want to thank you for your presence at the State PTA Reflections awards this past Saturday in Mobile. Your support of those of us with children on the spectrum and of the arts is greatly appreciated by myself and my family.

I’m here tonight to ask for a little more help.

At the January 19th board meeting, I shared with you and the board just a few of the never-ending changes in my son’s classroom at Challenger. That night I mentioned the revolving door of aides, Occupational Therapists, Speech Therapists, and even an entirely altered classroom.

As we saw with my son this weekend in Mobile, he doesn’t handle change well, and yet change seems to be forced upon him non-stop in his classroom.

Since I reported this to you in January, the rate of change has increased. In February, both of his aides, or two-thirds of the adults in the classroom were take out of his room. So the revolving door of aides continued into the second half of the year.

Then after a little more than a month another of his aides quit to take a better paying job. This isn’t at all surprising since EPSCO aides make approximately nine dollars an hour without benefits.

Honestly, a McDonalds employee has a better deal. McDonalds offers their employees health insurance and retirement.

Is it any wonder that the aides are so quick to leave?

It’s more surprising that so many of them returned from last year when they took about a $2.00 an hour pay cut to keep working with our kids.

We have to do better. Our kids deserve better. Change hurts everyone including those who aren’t on the spectrum.

For example, my daughter came home in tears on Monday because of the radical changes that are being planned for Mt. Gap Elementary. she’s losing “her” library, and that breaks her heart.

Dr. Wardynski, we need for these things to be resolved now. At the March meeting with the Mt. Gap PTA, you told us that you would be announcing who our new principal would be, and I quote, “in the middle of April.”

It’s now May 3rd, and we still don’t know. And our teachers still can’t plan for next year. And our little girls are still coming home in tears.

These words don’t seem intimidating to me, but clearly I’m not a good judge of that.

So, as a public service, I would again like to offer my assurances to Dr. Wardynski, Mrs. McCaulley, Mr. Blair, Mrs. Morrison, Mr. Birney, and Dr. Robinson and anyone else who regularly attends board meetings that it is not my intention to make you feel intimidated.

I’ll fully own up to my intention to pay attention and to question what you do. I’ll also own up to my intention to speaking up for those who cannot speak for themselves. But it is not my intention to intimidate you in any way.

Fear and intimidation are a coward’s approach to getting what he wants. I’m attempting to reason with the district’s leadership. Nothing more.

Well, Saturday was a day for celebrations I suppose. Had I known after the girl’s award ceremony that Dr. Wardynski were about to win Superintendent of the Year from the Alabama PTA, I think we might have stayed in Mobile another night to watch.

But since I didn’t find out until after we were home, I guess we missed the opportunity to shake his hand as he had shook the girl’s after her award.

In other words, it would seem that Dr. Wardynski had many reasons to make the drive to Mobile: To celebrate the Reflections award winners (12 came from Huntsville), to watch Huntsville Council of PTAs and various PTA groups win 17 of the 24 awards that were handed out Saturday night, and to be named Superintendent of the Year by the Alabama Council of PTAs after a mere nine months on the job.

[Okay, I'm going to get a bit snarky now. Before that happens, I want to acknowledge that Dr. Wardynski did not have to be at the Reflections Award banquet at 12:30pm on Saturday. That was still a nice gesture as I wrote about yesterday, and he still has my thanks for that.]

It’s a shame that as a member of not one but two PTAs in Huntsville that I wasn’t aware that the Huntsville Council of PTAs was planning to nominate Dr. Wardynski. I suppose that I should have been paying closer attention to the meetings where this was discussed.

Oh that’s right, I wasn’t, as a member, actually welcomed to participate in the discussions to nominate Dr. Wardynski. Those were private meetings of the Huntsville Council PTA Officers and the PTA Presidents who were able to attend the meeting. The public wasn’t asked for their opinion or input.

As I have said before, I do appreciate the PTA. They regularly and often go out of their way to honor and support all of our kids. I appreciate their support for my daughter’s video this weekend.

However, I do, clearly disagree with their decision to nominate Dr. Wardynski for superintendent of the year. And that’s the problem we’re facing here.

While most of the Huntsville Council of PTA’s decisions aren’t controversial in any way, this one clearly was. There are many PTA members, both parents and teachers, who are not in agreement with the Council’s decision on this matter. And while it’s true that this is just one decision, this is a huge decision.

By making this decision to nominate Dr. Wardynski the Huntsville Council of PTAs is in effect telling the city and the state that the entire Huntsville PTA supports and endorses Dr. Wardynski’s decisions. These decisions include:

• Merging and closing, closing, and closing schools.
• Supporting cutting teacher salaries while expanding his own.
• Refusing to reduce class sizes.
• Insisting on hiring unqualified “teachers” who cost more than qualified ones. (By the way, the Council actually wrote in their October Newsletter that this contract would bring “top teachers from across America into our school system.”
• Privatizing our public schools.
• Depending upon high-stakes testing because it’s easier for unqualified teachers to proctor tests than it is to teach.
• Cutting the Special Education Budget to the tune of $7,000,000–which is, not surprisingly the exact amount that Wardynski is claiming we will be in the black come September 2012–and in doing so made our classrooms unsafe.

By nominating Dr. Wardynski for Superintendent of the Year, these, and many more, are things that the Huntsville Council of PTAs are endorsing.

Maybe it’s just me, but I fail to see how endorsing these positions is supporting and speaking on behalf of children and youth in the schools.

As I have said, I support and believe in the goals of the PTA. I like everyone I know involved in our PTAs. Bringing parents and teachers together, to work together toward the common goal of educating our children is not simply noble, it is necessary for education to actually occur. I am not challenging that.

What I am challenging is why such a small group of people should feel free to speak for such a large group (more than 12,000) without even the benefit of a public meeting.

On these issues, the Huntsville Council of PTAs does not speak for me, but more importantly since my daughter is at a merging school and my son is suffering from cuts to the Special Education budget, they are not speaking on behalf of my children.

I hope that my assessment is wrong. If not, I hope that it will change. And change soon.

Yeah, I know. I’m sure few of my regular readers never expected to see a title like that on this blog.

I’m sure it will come as an even bigger surprise to some working in the central office and those on the board. In fact, at the State of the Schools address recently, one board member jokingly asked if it was safe to sit between me and Dr. Wardynski for fear of being hit by something I might throw. It was a joke, but . . .

But I’m writing this to say thank you to Dr. Wardynski for being present at two events that I care a great deal about.

On Wednesday, April 11, 2012 Dr. Wardynski joined Mayor Battle in speaking at the Autism Awareness Month kick-off event planned by Mrs. Nancy Barnes and Dr. Edwards, the principal of Hampton Cove Middle School.

As is typical of the events that Mrs. Barnes organizes, this kick-off was informative, exciting and moving. One of the more moving parts was a video by a dad, Lou, whose daughter, Bianca, has autism. I hadn’t seen it before, and yes, I was in tears at it’s completion. If you haven’t seen it, watch it below:

While I cannot claim that Dr. Wardynski’s words were as moving as those, he was gracious enough to come and speak at this event. And for his support of Autism Awareness Month, I offered him and Topper Birney (who was also present) my thanks. I thought it important enough to also offer my private thanks in a public way as well.

As I said to them both, just as my parents taught me to fight for what I believe is right, they also taught me to say thank you.

And so I am. Both for his willingness to at least listen when a parent like Lou has something important to say and for his attendance at the State PTA Reflections Award Banquet yesterday afternoon in Mobile.

For those of you who don’t know, Mobile, Alabama is at best a six-hour drive from Huntsville. We drove down on Friday to see the girl win First Place for her video about Diversity. (If you haven’t seen it . . . oh, who am I kidding? Everyone who reads this blog has at least heard of it by now. But anyway, I’m a proud dad.) It was a long way to go for banquet chicken.

Dr. Wardynski, and his wife Sue, were present for the awards luncheon. There were several people from Huntsville being honored yesterday, so this wasn’t just for my girl, but I didn’t notice a significant number of superintendents from other districts who made the drive.

He was kind and gracious to my family. His presence for a celebration of the Arts in schools, just like his presence at the Autism Awareness Month kick-off, was important. It draws attention to the necessary role that the Arts play in education. It draws attention to the crucial role that Diversity plays in our lives. It draws attention to the fact that 1 in 88 children in America have autism. It draws attention to the fact that 1 in 69 children in Huntsville have it too.

His presence meant a lot to me and to my family.

And for those things, I say thank you. Your presence in Mobile was beyond the call of duty to your position as superintendent.

Dr. Wardynski and I disagree about a great many things. That hasn’t changed. But despite an unnamed board member’s fear of being caught in the cross fire, I am not throwing things at him for the sake of throwing things.

I am simply fighting for what I believe in, and I won’t stop. But I will say thank you because that’s something I believe in as well.

Ed. Note: This first appeared on RocketCityMom. If you’re not following them, you should be.

You know that feeling you get when you kid hits a home run, or makes an A on a really hard test, or is simply kind to someone without having to be reminded to be so?

That’s a feeling that I have nearly every day, and yes, I know how lucky I am.

Being the big sister to a special needs little brother isn’t easy. Especially when you’re only 19 months bigger. I’ve lost count of the number of times that my girl has willingly walked out of a movie that she wanted to see, a restaurant where she wanted to eat, or left the library, a park, the pool or a play area before she was ready because her little brother was having a meltdown from sensory overload.

Suffice it to say, it happens at least on a weekly basis. Only rarely does she complain or whine. (She is only eight years old, after all.) But since about the time she was four, she just gets it. She understands.

In fact, it was when she was about four that she first asked, “When is Matthew going to talk to me?”

She knew that she had been talking since before she turned one, and she was ready to just talk to her little brother.

But he wasn’t. And she didn’t understand. And so we had our first conversation about autism with our little girl. She listened for a moment, and said, “So, we’ll just have to teach him how to talk.”

And she has never given up on him.

She remains his most persistent teacher. She celebrates his every utterance, syllable, attempt, word, and sentence as if it were his first one.

Being on the spectrum requires a lot of a family. A willingness to suffer fools with a smile, knowing that someday that ancient smokestack of a woman outside Publix will realize that her “helpful” suggestion of greater discipline for a boy having a meltdown may have been one of the most hate-filled and evil statements she has ever made.

A willingness to just walk away from the hatred that some feel towards those who are different.

A willingness to walk out of the movie because the music stopped playing at just the wrong time.

A willingness to listen and celebrate what others assume are given because we know that *nothing* is actually a given in this life.

Being on the spectrum requires love. Unconditional, undying love, as the love of a sister for her little brother. That’s what my girl’s film captures: her open, willing embrace of diversity, of finding a way to play, of finding hope to continue listening, watching, and celebrating each incremental gain.

And constantly fighting to find another.

This is who my daughter is; not because of anything that I have done, she simply came to us this way. And we cannot believe how lucky we are.

Emma’s PTA Reflections video on Diversity has won First Place in her age division (Primary) for Film Production at the State level.

Thank you to everyone involved in the Reflections program at Mt. Gap Elementary PTA (especially Tammy Klueger and Amy Harbour) for all their encouragement and support.

As such, her video has been submitted at the national level competition as well.

You know that feeling that you get when your kid is kind without being reminded to be so?

Yeah, I know that feeling too. I have it everyday from *both* my kids.

So the superintendent has been on a hiring binge of late for principals. He has also been actively firing and moving current principals out of their positions and into new ones without preamble, preparation, or pause.

To what end?

Well, as with everything the superintendent does, these moves are entirely about control. In order to control the district, he must control the teachers and employees. For that to occur he must control the schools, and the schools are under the control of the principals.

So, first you threaten all of them by saying that all of their jobs are on the table. Those who can retire, probably will.

Then you actively move principals out of the schools they are currently serving and into new, increasingly difficult situations as he has done with Leslie Esneault by calling it a promotion.

And you do the same with a principal who you moved into her current position less than a year ago as with Ava Waters-Maze.

And of course, you fire everyone you can, like Chad Laqua and Kurus Jamison, even if you were singing their praises just eight months ago.

All of this to establish control over a system. To make the system ready to be remade in Eli Broad’s image and idea of what education should be.

As a prelude to all of this, you hire PROACT Search to conduct “six to ten national searches” for suitable principals to replace all those you’re firing or “promoting.” Yes, PROACT Search has direct ties to Eli Broad supported activities. What of it?

So we pay PROACT to conduct a “national search that we couldn’t conduct on our own” $11,000 (with up to $2,000 per search to cover expenses) for every candidate that they find.

To date, we’ve paid PROACT a total of $77,999.99 according to the district’s check registry since September of 2011.

Here are the actual links if you want to check the numbers for yourself:

• February 2012: $13,000.00 (Pg. 4)
• February 2012: $26,000.00 (Pg. 29)
• December 2011: $5,500.00 (Pg. 3)
• November 2011: $14,666.66 (Pg. 31)
• October 2011: $7,500.00 (Pg. 24)
• September 2011: $11,333.33 (Pg. 32)

By those figures according to the original contract, we should have hired about seven new, “nationally competitive” principals.

We have, insofar as I can tell, hired four principals as a result of a search conducted by PROACT Search. Bet you’ll never guess which four were recommended by PROACT?

• Michael Scott Campbell of Fairfax, VA.
• Ray Landers, of Attalla, AL.
• Dan Meier, of Fairfax, VA.
• Paul Bonner, of Charlotte, NC.

So, we’re paying PROACT Search $11,000.00 (plus $2,000.00 expenses) per search to find two new principals from Fairfax, VA., one from Attalla, AL., and one from Charlotte, NC. All four of these new principals were hired with probationary contracts that would establish which school they would be placed at, at a later date. This past Thursday, Wardynski claimed it would be the end of May before these placements would be decided.

One of these contracts, Mr. Meier’s, was rescinded at a specially called board meeting on Thursday, April 12, 2012. Despite Dr. Robinson’s claim that the rescinding of the contract proved that “Dr. Wardynski is doing things in new ways and developing new processes,” the board, on the day they voted to rescind the contract, did not discuss the action at all. They simply voted, as unanimously as they did to approve the contract to rescind it.

Again, there was no public discussion of any of the “new processes” of which Dr. Robinson spoke.

I suppose we’re just supposed to trust her on this. Just as we were supposed to trust her when she praised each and every one of the recommendations Dr. Wardynski has brought to the board.

Note: There is a rumor floating around that Dan Meier wasn’t one of the PROACT Search recommendations. It’s possible that someone saw his name on a PROACT list and said, “we already know about him, so we’re not going to pay for PROACT to recommend him.” Thus, it is possible that it wasn’t PROACT’s responsibility to vet Mr. Meier before he was hired as has been reported. (This despite the fact that both the Board President and Vice-President claimed that PROACT Search did not inform the board that they knew about Mr. Meier’s past.)

If this is in fact the case, this still means that we’ve paid PROACT nearly $80,000 over six months to find exactly three candidates. In other words, we’re paying more than twice the amount that the contract calls for us to pay.

So much for a “new” way of doing business.

And this assumes that the other three all work out.

This is a big assumption where Ray Landers is concerned. Somehow I think once the RSA informs him that this will impact his retirement that he will also quickly discover that he too has a family that he wants to spend more time with (as Merts Center Monitor points out that Dan Meier realized).

By the way, if you’re not following that Blog, you should be.

So that leaves us having sent $80,000 to a Eli Broad connected company to hire two principals, one of whom (Paul Bonner) has already a $1 million dollar Broad Prize (as Bonvillian points out in her article about his hiring).

It’s always nice when Broad Foundation people can keep public money within the Board Foundation Family, isn’t it? I’m sure this should prove to me that Eli Broad cares for my kids nearly as much as I do.

Right?

$80,000 just to find and recommend two principals is an excellent return on investment, supposing that you’re on the receiving end rather than the spending one.

By the way, in case you were wondering why we have to pay our teachers the state minimum salary, we have to free up funding to keep hiring these amazing, awesome contractors to do the work that we already pay the central office to do.

This is why we can’t pay instructional assistants more than they would make working at a fast food joint to work with our children.

Keep this in mind the next time that Dr. Wardynski, or his biggest cheerleader Dr. Robinson, tries to tell you that they are doing all of this, you know, for kids.

;

$80,000 just to find two principals doesn’t sound like it’s going to benefit the kids too much to me. Does it to you?

There were a number of decisions made last night, including the hiring of yet another principal through the PROACT search firm (an organization with Broad Foundation connections). If you’d like to read an excellent summary of those events, please take a look at Bonvillian’s articles on the Huntsville Times concerning this hiring and the proposal to put a security fence around the new Lee High School.

I would instead like to draw your attention to a common and consistent pattern of intimidation employed by the superintendent with any employee who dares to ask questions.

I’ve written before about the importance of questions and the superintendent’s astonishing arrogance in his conviction that his ideas should not be questioned.

He did the same thing to teachers who asked questions about even his oft quoted statement that the STAR test takes only 8 minutes to complete at the Mountain Gap PTA merger meeting on March 6th. (By all accounts, it takes student who are performing above grade level 20-30 minutes at a minimum. Those who are performing at or below grade level take longer.)

His approach is to intimidate teachers into silence.

He did the same thing last night at the board meeting to Ms. Pam Hill, a teacher in our system who dares to ask questions during the Citizen Comments section of the board meeting.

Here’s the video of their exchange.

So what did Dr. Wardynski have to say?

Ms. Hill, you’re an employee of Huntsville City Schools. You do not represent Hampton Cove Elementary School. So that was a misrepresentation. Uh number two, you stood there the night I read the specifications against Principal McGhee. Uh, Principal McGhee was relieved for a whole host of reasons that where upheld in court. That had to do with poor leadership, ethical questions. And so we will relieve such leaders, we will relieve such teachers, and so I would caution you when talking to your employers to speak to them as your employers. The Board is your employer.

First, yes, Ms. Hill is upset. She’s upset with the way the superintendent and the board seem to disregard teachers as a disposable inconvenience in the educational process. I am quite certain that Dr. Wardynski would prefer a school system that was filled with temporary staff whom could be dismissed at will. This is his model “teacher.”

She’s also upset that administration will benefit from others’ hard work. All one need do is look at the salaries Wardynski is paying his friends to see that this is also a model that he follows.

So yes, she’s upset.

She has ample reason for being so.

She is not alone. There is not a single day that I don’t hear from an employee of Huntsville City Schools who is not upset, hurt, demoralized, and looking to do something, anything, else. Ms. Hill is simply giving voice to those who are too afraid to speak out.

She should be praised for speaking for the voiceless, not threatened.

And Wardynski responds to her in much the same way that he has responded to me in the past when I’ve questioned him

Wardynski accuses Ms. Hill of misrepresenting herself as a spokesperson for Hampton Cove Elementary.

What he was referring to was Mr. Blair’s reading of the form that is required to be filled out by anyone who wishes to speak during the citizen comments.In order to be allowed to speak, you have to sign in at least 15 minutes before the beginning of the meeting giving the board your name, address, name of the organization that you represent, and the purpose of your comments.

So, Mrs. Hill’s “misrepresentation” was that she wrote the words “Hampton Cove” down on a sheet of paper. Unforgivable isn’t it? As you can tell from her comments, she did not state that she was speaking for all of the teachers at Hampton Cove Elementary.

For someone who regularly offers “misrepresentations,” you would think that Dr. Wardynski might be a little more cautious throwing around accusations of that nature. But as we’ve seen often before, the standards that Dr. Wardynski applies to himself, and to his friends, are radically different from those he applies to others.

That his actions are often hypocritical is old news.

But then he proceeds to offer a red-herring response to Ms. Hill’s comments by claiming that she was defending Fillis McGhee as having been wrongfully terminated.

Ms. Hill offered no defense of Ms. McGhee’s firing last night. Perhaps if Dr. Wardynski would spend those three minutes actually listening to citizen comments rather than thinking of ways to threaten the speaker into silence, he would have heard this.

But I suppose asking him to actually listen to people for even three minutes is just too taxing.

And then he wraps up his response by threatening Ms. Hill. “And so we will relieve such leaders, we will relieve such teachers, and so I would caution you when talking to your employers to speak to them as your employers. The Board is your employer.”

Again, you would think that someone who regularly speaks disrespectfully to his employers (parents and the public) would not feel comfortable accusing others of doing so, but as I said, his hypocrisy is old news.

What isn’t old news is his systematic attempts to threaten, intimidate, silence and even fire teachers, instructional assistants, therapists and staff who have the audacity to question him on anything.

Anything at all.

He truly believes that we should simply say thank you and move along.

His arrogance is destroying our schools, which is in turn destroying our community.

Dr. Wardynski should be required by the Board of Education to issue a written and public apology to Ms. Hill.

That, of course, won’t happen. This board is, at least in the majority, entirely in his pocket. And they suffer from the same arrogance and desire to cover up their actions that he does.

It’s time for a change.

Some 2,500 years ago, Socrates stumbled upon a truth that hasn’t changed since: those in power don’t like to be questioned. They prefer a populace that is compliant, polite, and disinterested.

It makes life much easier for them.

This is a truism that remains even today.

Another might be that there are only two reasons why someone might resent and oppose questions about their actions. Those who refuse to take questions either believe that they are incapable of making a mistake, or they believe that they have made a mistake and they don’t want anyone to find out.

Neither approach is safe in a democracy.

First, those persons who believe that they are wiser than everyone else find questions irritating and a waste of time. Since they believe that they have always considered every possible angle of a situation, since they believe that their opinion is absolutely correct, questions only slow down the implementation of their perfect plan.

In the words of Colonel Nathan R. Jessup of A Few Good Men:

I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way.

Like the fictional colonel suggests, these persons who don’t like questions would prefer that we simply say, “Thank You” and went on our way.

That’s one motivation for hating questions: Arrogance. Astonishing arrogance that leads to destruction.

Frankly, such people belong in a monarchy or oligarchy. They do not belong in a democracy.

Democracy works because we know that people are flawed and imperfect and that the only pathway to the truth is through dialog because no one of us can hold onto truth on our own.

As Socrates said, a wise man knows that he doesn’t know everything.

It is the fool who believes he does.

But there is another possibility here, another motivating factor for those who dislike being questioned. Those who refuse to answer questions put to them either believe that questions are a waste of time or they believe that the questions will uncover a flaw, an error, a mistake or, frankly, a crime that they hope will remain covered.

People who are convinced that they have done nothing intentionally wrong, invite questions from others to help them understand any unintentional mistakes.

Which leaves us with those who know that they are doing something wrong and are intentionally seeking to cover up their wrong doing.

I really don’t know of any other reason why someone would go out of their way to avoid answering questions about their actions. Do you?

I’ve been asking a lot of unanswered questions of the superintendent and the school board over the past year. The vast majority of those questions have gone unanswered. Of late, I’ve been asking how the district could write checks totaling $28,790.00 with “no documents responsive to request.” He and the board refused to answer any questions about where the $28,790.00 in funds came from.

I’ve asked for a copy of a presentation that Dr. Wardynski made to the Mt. Gap PTA on March 6th concerning the merger of Mt. Gap Elementary and Middle School into one P-8 school. While the superintendent has posted part of the presentation (this portion was posted under the incorrect date of March 13th), he refused to include any data from the First or Second STAR Enterprise testing results with this presentation. This might be understandable if that data were considered too preliminary to be considered reliable, but he has publicly used this data to support the closure of the Seldon Center and he used this data to justify the merger of the two schools.

In short, if the data were reliable enough to justify the closure and merger of schools, then it is reliable enough to share with the public.

And yet he refuses to do so despite numerous requests.

Concerning his hiring of a principal via questionable means intended to circumvent the rules and regulations established in the state for state employees, he refused to “respond to a request for comment.” Instead he writes an editorial claiming that he, and he alone, cares about meeting student needs. In this, he continues to refuse to answer questions about his actions.

He expects us just to say thank you and go on our way.

So, is Dr. Wardynski arrogant? Or is he covering up things that he is embarrassed by?

I’m not sure that his persistent refusal to answer direct questions offers any other option.

However, I know that I don’t know everything. If you, dear reader, can think of another option, please write and let me know.

This posting has been updated with additional information below.

I don’t really know Chad Laqua, but I have met him on a couple of occasions at the central office. On both occasions I found him to be open, approachable, and genuinely excited about education. In particular, during a time when much of the central office leadership was giving off the impression of simply not giving a damn about special education, he spoke to me of his passionate belief that every child deserved an education and that every child could learn if given the resources and opportunities.

Needless to say, I liked him.

He was a first year principal placed at a school that was, in a polite assessment, was not doing well. Due to questionable decisions in districting by the board that they seemed unwilling to actually question, a great school was in decline.

Wardynski seemed to like him too.

At the Saturday Board meeting where he was hired, Wardynski singled him out as one of the best of the eight new hires. He regularly described him in the press as “a great new principal.”

And as reported yesterday, Mr. Laqua, along with the new principal at Davis Hills, Kurus Jamison, have offered their resignations to Dr. Wardynski.

As The Huntsville Times reported, Mr. Laqua said, “I had a discussion with the superintendent and he thought that it would be best.”

When Mr. Laqua was hired, Dr. Robinson sung the praises of Dr. Wardynski’s new “process” for hiring principals saying, “I’m impressed with the process you used, and I hope that you continue to use this process.”

If this were such a great process, why wasn’t it used again? Why did all subsequent principal hires get moved inside the superintendent’s office?

As I said, I don’t know Mr. Laqua very well, but my experience with him was positive. It seems now that Dr. Wardynski has changed his mind about him for some unknown reason.

And that’s the problem. While I agree that personnel issues should be dealt with by using a bit more discretion than he typically uses (particularly since he usually uses these issues for his own political advantage), the process by which principals have been evaluated has not been open to the public.

How is it possible that a process that the board was praising for selecting principals just a short eight months ago have resulted in 25% of the new hires that Dr. Wardynski recommended and that the board unanimously and excitedly approved are now being asked/forced to resign?

At the very least, this should raise questions about Wardynski’s ability to hire people. It should raise questions about the way that the board votes to approve new hires recommended by Wardynski.

Update: Need more evidence that Wardynski doesn’t know what he’s doing? Take a look at the Time’s article on the hiring of Ray Landers. As is common whenever he’s caught doing something stupid, “Wardynski did not respond to a request for comment.”

Spinelli defends this strong leadership by saying that this convoluted method of paying both a principal and a consultant saves “$4,000 per year” (which assumes we would actually have paid him $209,090 for two years of service).

Laurie McCaulley, the board president–who did at least respond to questions–said, “we assumed he was retired.”

Indeed. Our school board has done far too much assuming of late and far too little verification.

As such, it should raise questions about some of the new principals that Wardynski has been hiring from Fairfax, VA without giving them specific assignments. (Why do Wardynski’s “national” searches always result in hiring multiple people from the same districts like Aurora, Colorado and Fairfax, Virginia?)

For example, who is Dan Meier, and what vetting process was used to hire a person who was “linked” to a “North Carolina land scam?” It seems that Mr. Meier was eventually cleared, but this does raise questions about the board’s refusal to question the superintendent’s recommendations. They should at least learn to use google in the process of supporting the superintendent’s recommendations. It might save them some embarrassment of having to force resignations on people they hire after a mere eight months of service.

But that would require them to actually do their jobs of representing the public, which is something that they seem fundamentally opposed to doing.

They would rather, as they did on Thursday night, praise Dr. Wardynski for his visionary leadership and his commitment to “communicating with the public.”

(Yes, I am the one laughing in the background when that was said. Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself.)

If the board were actually doing their jobs, maybe we could manage to create some sense of continuity in this district among those teachers and administrators who actually give a damn about students and education.

As it is, they will simply continue to support whatever bad idea Wardynski will bring to them. They will continue to play fruit basket turnover with our children’s schools and lives.

Disruption for the sake of disruption is not helpful.

I wish Mr. Laqua well in his future endeavors, and I thank him for his service to our schools and our country. He had eight months to effect change. Eight whole months.

Yes, I am a something of a broken record, asking the same questions over and over. But occasionally the Huntsville City School’s district leaders say something new that changes the playing field.

On March 22, Frank Spinelli, the CSFO of Huntsville City Schools, and Dr. Wardynski’s personal friend whom he brought with him from Aurora, Colorado last August, finally decided to respond to a request that I had been making since March 7th.

Specifically, I was requesting from him a copy of the initial LEAN Frog contract for an audit that was conducted from October 2011 through February 2012. This was the audit that Wardynski claimed proved that he was a strong leader and everyone who opposed his ideas were just whiners.

This was the audit that was supposed to change everything.

Except, all it really did was allow Wardynski to redirect attention away from himself and his decision and point the finger at others.

Case in point.

You would think that asking for a copy of a contract would be a simple thing to do. After all, the second contract with LEAN Frog that was approved on February 25th is readily available online. In case you don’t want to download it, that contract was for $152,761 and is scheduled to be completed by September 25th.

A third contract with LEAN Frog was approved tonight to revamp the Human Resources department. I suspect that that contract will be posted on the district eBoards site tomorrow. We’ll have to wait until then to find out how much that contract was for, though, since there was no discussion of the costs of any of the approved contracts during the board meeting tonight.

Nope, the only person who discussed money tonight was me in reference to the first LEAN Frog agreement that covered services from October 2011 through February 2012.

According to the District’s Check Registers, the district paid Mr. Headrick of LEAN Frog a total of $28,790.00 during those five months.

Here’s a listing of the checks if you wish to look for yourself:

• November 2011: ;$2,890.00 (Pg. 20)
• December 2011: $5,760.00 (Pg. 25)
• January 2012: $5,760.00 (Pg. 3)
• January 2012: $5,380.00 (Pg. 9)
• January 2012: $6,480.00 (Pg. 16)
• February 2012: $2,520.00 (Pg. 10)

Since this is about 5 times less than the contract they’ve already published, you would think that they would be happy to share it with the public as required by Board Policy 102-1 Access to Information.

But no.

Spinelli decided instead to stonewall. It wasn’t until I sent my request concerning this contract to both him and the entire board of education that he decided to respond.

Here’s the text of an email that I received from Mr. Spinelli on March 22, 2012 at 6:23pm. This email was sent from Frank Spinelli (frank.spinelli@hsv-k12.org) to myself, every member of the board of education, Dr. Wardynski and J. R. Brooks, the school board attorney.

Mr. Spinelli wrote:

Mr. Winn, the district does not have any documents responsive to your request.

Also, the district had been advised by the school board’s attorney that Alabama bid law does not require bids in this type of contract, Ala. Code Sec. 16-13B-2(a)(2).

Frank

That’s right. Mr. Spinelli was telling me that the very audit that unearthed all the “incompetence” that Dr. Wardynski liked to nearly brag about, was paid for without a contract of any kind.

And evidently, there were no “documents responsive to your request” to be had covering the writing of nearly $30,000 of district checks.

Surely this is a mistake, right? Surely Mr. Spinelli is not saying that he wrote six district checks over a period of four months without a contract approving the expenditures of those funds, right?

Now, the second part of Mr. Spinelli’s email concerning Alabama’s bid law was in reference to my request to receive evidence that the bid law was followed in this contract. Unfortunately the Alabama State Code that Mr. Spinelli referenced in his response to me does not exist.

There is no code section 16-13B-2(a)(2). This is, however, an Alabama code section 16-13B-2(b)(2) which states:

Purchases made by individual schools of the county or municipal public school systems from moneys other than those raised by taxation or received through appropriations from state or county sources.

Thus, Mr. Spinelli seems to be trying to tell me that the funds that were used to pay for the first LEAN Frog audit were not actually public funds. (I don’t know this for certain because Spinelli is refusing to answer my questions yet again.)

He does not say where the money came from to pay Mr. Headrick, but I have an idea about that. Back in July 2011, Dr. Wardynski told a group of Special Education parents that he would be “getting an audit” that he would use to evaluate the special education department with. The implication was that this audit would be paid for by The Board Foundation that had “trained” him in how to be a superintendent.

I am convinced that The Broad Foundation paid for the LEAN Frog audit, and if that does indeed turn out to be the case, the “findings” of that audit should be examined quite closely. For as seen during the give and take between Wardynski and Bryon Headrick on February 16th, the LEAN Frog report was couched in such a way to make Wardynski look as good as possible as a “strong leader.”

Doing so would certainly be worth $28,790 to a man like Eli Broad who is worth hundreds of millions, wouldn’t it?

So with all this in mind, I decided to ask the board about these things tonight:

On February 25th, I began asking Dr. Robinson for a copy of the contract for the services that Mr. Headrick of LEAN Frog offered to the district from October 2011 through February 2012. Since his audit was ushering in, in Dr. Robinson’s words, the removal of “business practices that permitted fraud and negligence,” I was curious how much this new culture was costing us.

In accordance with Huntsville City School Board Policy 102-1 Access to Information, I wrote Mr. Marc Seldon to ask for a copy of the contract with LEAN Frog that allowed the district to pay him $28,790.00 from October 2011 to February 2012.

Mr. Seldon, before being placed on administrative leave, directed me to Mr. Spinelli.

On March 7th, I wrote Mr. Spinelli asking for a copy of the October to February LEAN Frog contract.

Mr. Spinelli finally responded on March 22nd to say, and I quote:

“The district does not have any documents responsive to your request.”

I wrote back to ask him how the district was able to write checks totaling $28,790 to LEAN Frog without producing “any documents responsive to my request?”

He has not responded to my questions.

And so, I’m here tonight to ask the board as I have already asked in emails that have been sent to you, how can nearly $30,000 in checks be written on the district’s checking account to a vendor without a contract?

How does this total absence of checks and balances insure, Dr. Robinson, that we are indeed changing our “business practices that permitted fraud and negligence?”

Did the funding for the October – February LEAN Frog contract come from the Broad Foundation?

As Sue Peters of Seattle asks, Why should Mr. Eli Broad have more say in my children’s schools than I do?

And finally, per Dr. Robinson’s suggestion for the kinds of questions she thinks I should be asking, “What is the impact these actions are going to have on the education of our children?”

Having a district that spends nearly $30,000 without any documentation seems to be bad for our children, don’t you think?

I, of course, received no response to these questions.

That’s right. There were no cries of outrage that I would make such ridiculous accusations. There was no denial. There was no explanation offered of any kind other than Dr. Robinson’s frustrated stares. I guess that she didn’t really want me to ask “what impact these actions are going to have on the education of our children,” after all.

What exactly is Wardynski and the board trying to hide? What could they be afraid of? Why aren’t they required to follow their own policies regarding releasing public information to the public?

It would be nice if some of the news organizations who were present tonight could ask this question. Wardynski and the board have taken to ignoring me of late.

Maybe someday we’ll get the truth.

At the Mt. Gap Merger meeting, Dr. Wardynski did something rather astonishing. Like a student who cheats on his math quiz, he refused to show his work.

As most of us learned in about the second grade, when you’re solving a math problem, it is crucial that you also show your work. It allows people to understand one another. If you know how to solve a problem, and if you’re showing me how to do it, it isn’t helpful to simply jump directly to the solution. Instead, if you allow me to follow your work, step-by-step, I too will learn what you know.

And if we both know the same thing, in all likelihood, we’ll arrive at the same solution.

In other words, showing your work is a great way to avoid misunderstanding, needless arguments, and war.

Showing your work is education, and education when done properly leads to understanding and consensus.

Dr. Wardynski and the Huntsville City Board of Education do not care about consensus, understanding, nor education as our “top educator” is steadfastly refusing to show his work concerning his justifications for closing Mt. Gap Elementary and Mt. Gap Middle by merging them together.

On Tuesday, March 13th during the Merger meeting, Dr. Wardynski presented a slide show for the first hour of the approximately 90 minutes meeting. This slide show contained an overview of his plans and ideas for Huntsville City Schools and eventually the slides offered some “data” directly related to Mt. Gap and her performance on his beloved STAR Enterprise Standardized Test. It contained several slides that were both too dim and blurry to easily see during the meeting. (Mt. Gap clearly needs a better projector, but it certainly served Wardynski’s purposes that night.)

About halfway through the meeting, Dr. Wardynski was asked by a person present at the meeting if he was planning to post these slide on a web site somewhere so that people could review them later.

Here’s how he responded to this request:

No.

No, I prepared these tonight for your meeting. So, and at the first board meeting in April, we’re going to have a lot more of this kind of information, and it will be based on what we call benchmark three, our third assessment. This was based on benchmark one and benchmark two. The slides that we will show to the public on the website will be benchmark two and benchmark three. So this is just to give you a taste of where we’re going. It’s very preliminary. The work we’ll show you in April will be much more detailed.

Dr. Wardynski refused to show his work in a way that was accessible to the public.

I really had a hard time believing what I heard. Here was our superintendent, a public employee, directly refusing a specific request from the public, from his boss and employer.

What’s the word for refusing a specific and direct request from your boss?

Oh yeah, insubordination.

Since this didn’t seem like something that Dr. Wardynski would do, I decided to write him to ask if I could get a copy of the slide show.

I mean, it’s just a simple slide show that he’s likely already shown to the public three times at the Whitesburg merger meeting as well as at the Chapman merger meeting. What could possibly be his thinking in risking insubordination over a public slide show, put together with public funds, containing public data?

On Wednesday, March 14th, I sent Dr. Wardynski an email requesting a copy of this public slide show.

I received no response.

On March 20th, I sent Dr. Wardynski another email requesting a copy of this public slide show. This time I sent the request to Dr. Wardynski and the entire Board of Education as well. Dr. Robinson had suggested to me that perhaps the reason he hadn’t responded to my first email was that the switch over to a “cloud based” email service from TekLinks that the board had approved on Saturday, February 25th meeting was resulting in emails being lost.

When I sent the request to the entire board, Dr. Robinson, to her credit, decided to respond, even though Dr. Wardynski was still refusing to do so.

Dr. Robinson said that she would forward my request to Dr. Wardynski; however, he still refused to respond.

This is truly difficult to understand. In addition to being insubordinate, he is also directly violating School Board Policy 102-1 “Access To Information.” This policy states:

The public shall have the right to any information concerning the Huntsville Public Schools except that which disclosure violates the right of privacy of any employee, student, or person or compromises the Board of Education’s ability to properly protect public interest. Decisions regarding the release of information that is compromising in nature rests with the Board of Education.

Information that is in printed or published form shall be made available upon request. Information or extracts from original documents shall be reproduced upon request and the cost of reproduction charged to the requester.

The only exception allowed to this public right is when “disclosure violates the right of privacy of any employee, student, or person or compromises the Board of Education’s ability to protect public interest.”

Exactly how can releasing a slide show that was shown to a group of about a hundred, parents, children, and employees violate or compromise anything? If it did, then Dr. Wardynski should never have displayed the information to begin with.

So, Dr. Wardynski, by refusing to release this information that has been requested four separate times, has violated Huntsville City School Board Policy.

And the Board of Education, whom I have informed of this request, has been silent about this violation of their own policy.

Would the Board be silent if someone outside of Wardynski’s inner circle violated board policy? Would the Board be silent if a teacher violated board policy?

The clear answer to that is no, no, and no.

So why does Dr. Wardynski get a free pass?

You know, I honestly don’t care if Wardynski violates board policy. That really isn’t the issue or the problem. The problem is that the “top educator” of our district is specifically and intentionally refuses to educate. As I explained to Dr. Robinson in an email exchange about this issue on March 20th, Dr. Wardynski used that public slide show to support his arguments, thin though they were, to merge the two schools into one. By refusing to show his work, Dr. Wardynski, Dr. Robinson and the entire Board of Education are refusing to engage in one of the oldest and most important of educational principles: Where there is confusion and misunderstanding, a teacher attempts to explain and correct the misunderstanding.

By refusing to show their work, none of these people, Wardynski, Robinson, Blair, Birney, McCaulley, or even Morrison, deserve the title of educator.

And just like in the second grade when a student refuses to show his work, he gets no credit for getting the right solution, Dr. Wardynski deserves no credit and no trust for his insubordinate refusal either.

__________

There’s an article about what happens to your school district when it is invaded by “The Broad Virus” making the rounds this week. It’s an excellent article that I’ve recommended before and that I still highly recommend.

Number two, on the list of identifiable symptoms for “How to Tell if Your District is Infected by the Broad Virus” is as follows:

Even top-performing schools, alternative schools, schools for the gifted, are inexplicably and suddenly targeted for closure or mergers.

The first step in getting better is to realize that you’re actually sick. Huntsville City Schools is sick and infected. And our Board Members are the carriers.

I just received a comment on an early post that greatly concerns me, and so I want to make sure that my position concerning the Mt. Gap Elementary School PTA is crystal clear: I greatly appreciate and support the work that our PTA leadership team has done this year. It is in no way my intention to criticize the organization, the leadership, nor it’s members in any of the posts that I have made about the plan to merge/close Mt. Gap Elementary School.

Here was the reader’s comment:

At least three emails were sent out to all parents in the middle school about the meeting. It was also posted on the sign in front of the school. There are only so many things they can do to notify parents. If they send home papers they end up left in the kids lockers. No need to blast the PTA. We don’t need to turn against each other. The elementary PTA president planned the meeting. That was when he said he could come. All three schools were invited. I have three kids at 3 different schools. My husband and I have to split up all the time got meetings and such. It’s a way of life when your kids get to a certain age.

I really appreciate it when readers take the time to comment, or send me private emails. It helps me understand when I haven’t made my self clear enough in my writing.

Clarity in thought and word is the single most important part of being a writer, and it is what I strive for above all else.

Since it seems that I may have been misunderstood, let me make my opinion as clear as I can.

I greatly appreciate the endless and tireless work that the PTA leadership, and in particular our president, has done this year. It has been an extremely difficult year for everyone connected to the school system (including the superintendent and the board even though I believe them to be the cause of most of the difficulty).

Our teachers and administrators have operated under more stress, pressure, and both overt and covert threats from the state and the city leadership than in any year in recent history. Our PTA has been under a similar stress. While their “jobs” and livelihood are not on the line, clearly these are concerned parents, each and every one of them. And when our teachers are stressed, good parents become concerned and stressed as well.

I know for a fact that this is true of our PTA leadership, and it is certainly true of our president. Gwen Lindsey is an excellent parent and a caring leader for our PTA.

It has not been my intention to be critical of the PTA’s attempts to schedule the meeting with Dr. Wardynski. All of my criticism for the delays in scheduling the meeting are directed toward Dr. Wardynski and Dr. Robinson.

I am convinced that Dr. Wardynski intentionally delayed having a meeting with parents in order to be able to approach the meeting as if it was a completed deal.

And that is exactly what happened.

The reason that attendance at the Merger Meeting (it’s difficult to call it that since the vast majority of the meeting was spent talking about everything but the merger) was low was because Dr. Wardynski with the support of Dr. Robinson designed it so.

Why would busy parents whom, as the reader stated, have to “split up” to attend meetings bother to attend a meeting to discuss a plan that was introduced six months earlier, and approved and implemented four months earlier?

Truthfully, as Tuesday is “date night” for my little girl and me, I nearly talked myself into not attending the meeting as well. If I hadn’t been able to reschedule our typical dinner together until after the meeting, I probably wouldn’t have gone.

But you see, that was exactly what Dr. Wardynski intended when he finally agreed to meet with parents. He was counting on people staying away.

So, no, I do not believe that there was anything else that the PTA leadership teams could have or should have done to promote attendance at the meeting.

I am not attempting to “blast the PTA.”

I consider our PTA president to be a friend, and I am not attempting to criticize her or her actions in any way. While I have not had the opportunity to discuss the merger meeting with her since Tuesday, I believe that she, in principal, supports the idea of the merger. She sees it as a way of keeping Mt. Gap open. While we may disagree on the merger, I do not hold any ill will toward her for viewing things differently than I. It is not my intention to “turn against each other” in this discussion.

To the contrary: the only persons that I am attempting to blast here are Dr. Wardynski and Dr. Robinson for pushing through this decision without, as Dr. Wardynski promised, discussing it with parents first. I think doing so was a blatant attempt to disenfranchise anyone who opposes his ideas.

How we do a thing is just as important as what we do. One cannot make a good decision in a bad way. The ends never justify the means.

How Dr. Wardynski is running our system is wrong. It is rife with opportunities for fraud, and I believe that is reason enough to oppose the decisions he is ramming through.

I think he is destroying our school system with his methods, and I am doing what I can to oppose his attempts to hurt my, our, kids’ education.

So, just so we’re clear, I oppose Dr. Wardynski’s plan to harm Mt. Gap Elementary School. I oppose his refusal to answer questions or discuss reasons for the merger.

I do not oppose the Mt. Gap Elementary PTA. These dedicated women and men are the reason that we’re celebrating my daughter’s Reflection video. They are a crucial part of the reason that Mt. Gap Elementary is such as wonderful school, and they have my thanks.

I’ve gotten many questions about my posts over the past few days, and so I feel that I need to summarize where we are in the process of the merger between Mt. Gap Elementary and Mt. Gap Middle.

On September 15th, Dr. Wardynski first introduced the idea of merging Mt. Gap Elementary and Middle Schools into a Mt. Gap Pre-8th Grade school. During this presentation, he stated:

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.

On the morning of September 26th, Dr. Wardynski and Dr. Robinson met with the PTA boards for Mt. Gap Elementary and Middle Schools to discuss this merger. These meetings were not open to the entire PTA membership of either of the schools, and so far as I am aware the only public details released from this meeting to the PTA of the elementary school may be seen in the two posts below. This was shared on the Mt. Gap Elementary School PTA Facebook on September 26th:

At the board meeting on November 3rd, briefly after the Lee High naming debacle, the board of education, with Dr. Robinson’s full and vocal support, approved Dr. Wardynski’s recommendation to merge Mt. Gap Elementary and Middle Schools. You’ll note that there is no discussion about why he believes the merger is necessary.

There is no justification for the merger offered of any kind.

We were told that “all along the way” Dr. Wardynski “will be working with our PTA and families to seek input and ideas on the proposed changes.”

So far as I am aware, the only meeting that Dr. Wardynski had with our PTA and families was this past Tuesday, March 13, 2012. During this meeting, he pointedly refused to accept any input and ideas on the proposed changes.

I feel it necessary to point out that I am was not convinced that this merger was a bad idea. On September 15th, shortly after the announcement of the idea, I posted on Mt. Gap Elementary’s Facebook page the following:

If I, as a parent, could find those two examples in about 15 minutes of looking, surely, Dr. Wardynski has far greater access to research on this plan than I. I mean, that is what we pay him for right?

And yet, when I asked him for specific evidence showing that P-8s perform better than separate elementary and middle schools, his only response, his only evidence was to say that a closed school doesn’t out perform anyone.

In other words, the top educator of Huntsville City Schools refused to educate the public when offered the opportunity.

A teacher never misses an opportunity to teach. Dr. Wardynski is no teacher.

But my point here is that until they refused to talk with the public, until they decided to pretend that public opinion doesn’t matter, until they decided to attack people who are simply seeking information, my mind was open concerning the merger. This is why I did not actively write about this issue until after the meeting this past week.

As I wrote on November 4th, Dr. Wardynski broke his promise to meet with the community to discuss if this merger plan was what we wanted.

So, yes, the decision to merge the two schools has been made. The board approved this decision four months ago. Since that time, there has been one and only one meeting with Dr. Wardynski and the whole PTA. During this meeting, he spent an hour talking about the system as a whole and approximately 30 minutes responding to a few questions concerning the merger.

He accepted no suggestions or input concerning the proposed changes.

He offered no justification for his actions other than, Mt. Gap Elementary is inefficient. He offered no evidence of this at all. Not one single, verifiable piece of evidence.

Thus, despite having an open mind six months ago, I now believe that this merger plan is wrong.

Dr. Wardynski works for us; we do not work for him. We do not need to be afraid to ask questions; he must be afraid of not answering them. We do not need to go to him with our hats in our hands begging him to have mercy upon us; he needs to be asking us for our forgiveness for breaking his word to us.

Will contacting Dr. Robinson, as I suggested in an earlier post, keep the merger from happening?

Honestly, probably not.

But that doesn’t mean that contacting her to let her know that we’re dissatisfied with Dr. Wardynski’s broken promise will accomplish nothing. Call Dr. Robinson and Dr. Wardynski and insisting that they offer an educational justification for combining the two schools will let them know that we are here, and that we are paying attention to what they are doing to our schools.

It will remind them that education is entirely about the asking and answering of questions. It will remind them that they must do more than just say “this is what we decided to do regardless of what you think or want.”

It will remind them that this is not a monarchy, and Dr. Wardynski is not our king.

If you agree, please contact Dr. Wardynski and Dr. Robinson and tell them so.

If you disagree, please contact Dr. Wardynski and Dr. Robinson and tell them so.

Either way, they will be reminded that they work for us.

You may reach Dr. Robinson at personalbest@knology.net. You may reach Dr. Wardynski at drw@hsv.k12.al.us or via telephone at 256-428-6810.

On Thursday night, I had planned to speak to the Board of Education during the Citizen Comments section at the end of the meeting. However, due to inclement weather, the meeting was adjourned before I was offered the opportunity to speak. I had intended to offer the board my thanks for honoring my daughter during the Celebrations section of the meeting earlier that evening. My girl has won First Place in the Primary Division for Film Production in the State’s PTA Reflections competition this year. Her video, which you can see below, is on diversity. Specifically, she is talking about the diversity that we have in our family as a result of her brother’s autism.

And just in case you were wondering, yes, we’re extremely proud of both our kids. As I hope every parent feels, my kids bring joy to my life in ways that constantly surprise and amaze me. My daughter’s unconditional love for her brother, even when his illness disrupts her life, never ceases to inspire us.

I think this comes through clearly in her video, and I believe that’s why it’s winning. The video has been sent on to the national competition as well.

The comments that I had planned to make Thursday night were to thank the board for their support of our PTAs and for honoring my little girl. They were also intended to encourage them to learn from her about how to care for people.

Here’s what I had planned to say:

Thank you for honoring my daughter tonight. My little girl loves her little brother more than nearly anyone else on this planet. Your recognition of her video about him is appreciated both by her and by all brothers and sisters of special need children.

This is a testament to the teachers, administrators, and parents of Mt. Gap Elementary School.

It is a testament to all siblings of special needs kids.

Thank you for finally coming to Mt. Gap this past Tuesday to discuss why you believe it necessary to close the school that has given so much to my daughter and merge it with Mt. Gap Middle. As her video shows, not all indicators of efficiency can be evaluated by a standardized test.

Thank you for acknowledging that my son’s classroom has been understaffed and unsafe this year by adding an aide to the room. I have received reports from across the district of special education students who have been put at risk as a result of their teachers having too little support in the classroom. Although you like to believe and tell others that this is a teacher problem, it isn’t; it’s a systematic failure on the part of this superintendent and this board to understand what it means to work with special education students. Without knowing the children, you cannot adequately evaluate their needs. This is why you must trust your teachers and principals. Frankly, you seem incapable of doing that. Your insistence on ruling from the top down has made our children unsafe.

So, I thank you for honoring my daughter’s work; however, if you truly want to honor her, here are a few suggestions:

First, make sure that our all of our classrooms are adequately staffed and safe.

Second, please restore funding to special education. Do not balance your budget on the back of my daughter’s little brother.

Third, and this one comes directly from my daughter’s heart, leave Mt. Gap Elementary School alone. Inefficiencies, sir, can be addressed without mergers and without closings, and you should know this.

Beginning when she was 16 months old, we noticed that my girl was “scary smart.” She also loves others more than any one I have ever known. You could learn a lot from her.

I wish I had had the opportunity to say this. I hope that the Board will listen to our students and repeal their decisions to pointlessly merge/close Mt. Gap Elementary and to defund special education.

Maybe if she wins at National, we can say this to them together.

On Tuesday night, Dr. Wardynski told a gathered group of parents and teachers of the Mt. Gap and Weatherly communities that Mt. Gap Elementary School would be closed because it was “inefficient.” To support this claim, he cited one and only one statistic: classroom usage.

He claimed that Mt. Gap Elementary had a total of 29 classrooms, but that only 18 of them were being used. As such, Mt. Gap Elementary School and Mt. Gap Middle School must either be merged or closed. He also cited the same problem at Mt. Gap Middle.

Here’s a quick question though: If two schools are operating “inefficiently,” how is merging them going to help?

While I realize that expecting logical consistency, or frankly any logical support for his arguments at all is a futile exercise, I expect it still. I’m silly that way, but really, shouldn’t we be able to expect the head educator of the town to at least attempt to support his suggestions with an argument that makes sense? His desire to close and merge schools has no basis in logic. None at all.

We’re not becoming more efficient in building size. If anything, once the merger is completed, there will likely be more under utilized classrooms and space than there was before. There will be one nursing office and one library in the future. Thus, there will be at least two extra rooms in the building after the merger.

Then, there must be more students coming to the new “one” school right?

Nope. The new merged school will have 671 students. This is the combined enrollment of both schools now. The merger isn’t going to result in more students attending the new school.

Well, clearly there will be fewer personnel, right?

Nope. Wardynski said, and I quote, “No one will lose a job” and he’s “not moving any of your teachers.” So, the faculty will remain exactly the same. (Just for the record, Wardynski was speaking out of both sides of his mouth when he was talking about this. Anyone who believes that he’s not going to move teachers is deluding themselves. Teachers will absolutely be moved at the Superintendent’s discretion. This is why he emphasizes that teachers are district employees rather than school employees.)

Then, there will surely be fewer administrators at least?

Not according to what Dr. Wardynski had to say on Tuesday. Currently there are two principals and one assistant principal at the two schools. After the merger, there will be one principal, one assistant principal, and a “Teacher on Special Assignment,” who will be an “administrator in training.”

So the administration will stay exactly the same.

All that will be saved are one nurse, and one librarian. That’s it. Does that sound more “efficient” to you? (Since the work load on the remaining nurse and librarian will be overwhelming, it doesn’t sound more efficient to me.)

This isn’t about efficiency. It’s about control.

He’s using the same arguments that the overpaid demographer from the summer was making, and these arguments make even less sense now. In support of the report, Dr. Richardson released a Expenditure_School_FY10.pdfreport showing the costs per student of operating the two schools. Mt. Gap Elementary spent $9,718 per student. Mt. Gap Middle spent $10,948 per student. The system as a whole spent $10,040 per student.

Neither of these schools are extreme examples of inefficiency. In fact, Mt. Gap Elementary is a model of efficiency when compared to the system as a whole.

So, what’s this about?

Both of the current principals of these two schools are tenured. This is strange among principals in the system these days. (In fact, we now seem to be contracting our principals out, but more about that later.) Both of the principals at Mt. Gap are tenured, and dramatically altering the structure and organization of the schools is the only way Wardynski can control them.

As a result of the changes, Mrs. Murphree has announced her retirement.

Wardynski doesn’t care about schools. He doesn’t care about teachers or educators who have dedicated their lives to education. He doesn’t care about communities. He doesn’t care about parents, and he doesn’t care about students.

All he cares about is control. And this is why he’s merging Mt. Gap.

If you think this is a mistake, contact our board member Dr. Jennie Robinson. You may email her at personalbest@knology.net. Let her know that you think this is wrong for Mt. Gap. Tell her that she needs to be concerned about the impact this radical decision is having upon our kids because it doesn’t seem that neither she nor Dr. Wardynski care right now.

So the long promised meeting to discuss the merger of Mt. Gap Elementary and Middle schools in to one Pre-K through 8th Grade school finally occurred.

Remaining true to form, Dr. Wardynski used the majority of the meeting to talk about his own talking points. (This was quite similar to a meeting that he had with Special Education parents back before the beginning of school. Parents were told that the meeting would be to discuss the planned consolidation of Special Education children, but surprisingly, that topic never came up during that meeting.)

Tonight’s meeting to discuss the board approved merger was similar in tone.

As I stated earlier today, I had planned to video tape the meeting, but I was told before the meeting began that “we’ve been told that we cannot video tape the meeting.”

This came as quite a surprise since my understanding of the Alabama Open Meetings Act is that any public meeting can be recorded via any means, but since I wanted to attend the meeting to hear our superintendent’s explanation for his actions, I did not video record the meeting.

As such, I am relying upon my notes from the meeting instead.

Dr. Wardynski arrived at the meeting at about 6:05pm, and the meeting was called to order. The crowd was significantly smaller than had been planned for with Mt. Gap Elementary parents, faculty and staff making up the majority of the crowd.

He began his prepared presentation at 6:10pm after brief introductions and a discussion about the procedural vote to dissolve the Mt. Gap PTA boards in order to formulate a new board for next year. This presentation consisted of approximately 10 slides describing the current state of the entire district as he sees it. The superintendent led the crowd through a discussion of why he is making the significant number of changes to the district. This speech was quite similar to others that he’s offered at Board meetings as well at other public venues. As the majority of this presentation had little to nothing to do with the merger of Mt. Gap Elementary and Middle schools, I’ll leave it to others to summarize.

His slide show did, however, contain several slides that displayed Mt. Gap Elementary and Middle in relationship to other schools in the district. All of the displayed slides showed Mt. Gap Elementary and Middle as two of the top performing schools in the district. However, Dr. Wardynski’s assessment of the Elementary school in particular was that between the first and second rounds of Star Enterprises assessments, Mt. Gap Elementary students we’re “not advancing as rapidly as other schools in the district.”

He offered no explanation of this and seemed disinterested in any discussion of why this might be. He also offered no supporting documentation to back up the data that was displayed on the slide. (Due to the poor quality of the projection, my photographs of the slides are not clear enough to be useful.)

Dr. Wardynski also refused to allow his slide show to be distributed to the crowd. He said that the presentation would not be shared publicly. Despite claiming to be all about operating in a transparent manner, he didn’t want the presentation videotaped, and he refused to share the presentation with the public. (I’m sure I’m dating myself here, but “Hmm?”)

Frankly, it was as if he were attempting to use one single data point to justify the merger of the two schools. When questions arose about the data that he was “presenting,” when people in the audience attempted to offer some context to the idea that Mt. Gap wasn’t “advancing” as rapidly as other schools, he dismissed these ideas with a wave of his hand claiming that he’d heard those excuses before.

After a fifty minute presentation on his attempts to improve education in the district, Dr. Wardynski posted the first and only slide concerning Mt. Gap of the night. It was a listing of capital improvements that would be made over the next two years with a break down of the total cost which was about $6.2 million dollars in improvements.

This listing should not, however, be considered firm as it is, according to Dr. Wardynski, under review by the two consultant firms the district has hired to review all of the capital improvements in the district. (Yes, we have not one, but two firms who are getting paid simply to provide oversight to building projects. They are in addition to the Johnson Controls contract that the district had before Dr. Wardynski arrived. So, I suppose that means that there are at least three consultants reviewing construction projects to make sure they’re cost efficient.)

The improvements, once begun, would take approximately 18 months to complete.

At 7:00pm, the meeting finally began to discuss the planned merger between the two schools when Dr. Wardynski started reading some of the pre-submitted questions about the merger.

He was asked for a timeline for the planned renovations. He responded that the 18 month project would begin at some point in the future. He had no idea if there would be a common student entrance that both schools would share, but it was likely that visitors would be required to use a single entrance. The Nurse’s office and Library would however be centralized.

(Yes, both 3-4 year olds and 13 year olds will share a library and a nurse’s office, as well as a single principal. What could possibly go wrong?)

He was asked about the impact the changes would have on the administration of the schools. His response was to claim that the district was planning to announce changes of that nature in mid-April, but that everyone in the district should expect for there to be numerous changes in the assignments of Principals. He was quite adamant that he would be moving principals around from school to school on a regular and consistent basis. This is consistent with his statements in the past.

When asked if teachers would be moved, his answers were less clear. While he stated during his presentation that he was “not moving any of your teachers,” when the same question arose during the Q&A, he was much less definitive. Then he made a point of asking an employee of Mt. Gap if she “worked for Mt. Gap, or Huntsville City Schools?”

This approach of answering a question with a question was one that he employed through most of the Q&A. (He also used it when talking to SPED parents back before school started.)

He was asked about staffing changes. He responded that the new school would have the following staff:

• A Principal
• An Assistant Principal
• A “Teacher on Special Assignment” (This will be a new “administrative” teacher who will be in training to potentially become an administrator at some point in the future. He offered no details about how this person would be selected or chosen.)
• A Librarian (Yes, one librarian for approximately 671 students.)
• A Nurse
• Enough PE teachers to support 671 students
• An indeterminate number of secretaries

I’m sure that there will be other changes in staff as there was no mention of lunchroom changes or custodial staff at all during the meeting, but that’s the list of staffing that the new merged school would have.

He was asked about what steps could be taken to ensure that Weatherly Heights Elementary Students don’t feel like outsiders. He responded again with a question, “Do they feel like outsiders now?” He then followed up by saying that while that could be an issue that he was confident that counselors and other staff could certainly help with the transition.

He then read one of the two questions that I submitted to him. His response to this question was the first and only time that he mentioned any justification for the merger at all.

I asked: What specific evidence can you offer to show that elementary schools with historically high test scores perform better after being merged with a middle school?

His answer, unsurprisingly, offered no specific evidence that any elementary school performed better after merger, but rather ran in a wholly new direction. Dr. Wardynski said that if the schools were not merged, that he would bring a recommendation to the board to close Mt. Gap Elementary School.

I’ll give him credit for not attempting to pass the responsibility off on the State for this claim. (Although, he did mention that the state, had it taken over the district, would have closed Mt. Gap.) He said that he, himself, would recommend closure to the board.

So, that’s it.

Dr. Wardynski’s reason for the merger is that the elementary school is operating below capacity, and as such it must either be merged or closed. There were no other options allowed. At one point a parent attempted to point out to him that the reason that Mt. Gap was operating below capacity had more to do with the zoning for Challenger than anything else. Dr. Wardynski quickly dismissed this suggestion by saying that there would be no discussion of other possible solutions to the enrollment issues at Mt. Gap Elementary.

It was either his way or he’ll close the school. And he’ll do so without concern for the well-being of the students. He’ll do so without receiving input from parents. He’ll do so without considering any other alternatives.

The final impression that I had from the meeting was that Dr. Wardynski, as I have noted before, hates having to respond to questions. He hates getting them from parents and he absolutely refuses to accept them from people who are employed in the system. Tonight, he was rude to parents who had the audacity to question his decisions. And he was threatening to the teachers who were brave enough to raise their hands. The one good thing to come from the meeting was that now more people are aware of the type of man we have running our schools.

By the way, he chose to ignore my other question: Why was this merger approved and finalized before this discussion took place?

Then again, I guess such a question is just redundant at that point. Dr. Wardynski never had any intention of taking parental concerns into consideration before making his decision. He doesn’t see the need to study any issue from the perspective that it might or might not have an impact on student performance.

His only concern is his own personal agenda. Strike that: his only concern is the Broad Virus agenda.

Two days shy of six months ago, Dr. Wardynski promised that he would meet with parents and the community to discuss the merger of Mt. Gap Elementary and Mt. Gap Middle Schools into one P-8 school. At the September 15th board meeting, he said:

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.

On November 3rd, without having a discussion with the community, without making sure that the concept fits with “what the community would like to see,” without meeting with parents at all, Dr. Wardynski brought a recommendation to the board to approve the merger of Mt. Gap Elementary and Middle into one P-8 school.

Tonight, four months and ten days after the decision has been made, Dr. Wardynski has finally agreed to meet with parents of MGES, MGMS, and Whitesburg Elementary to discuss with them the decision that he has already started implementing.

Again, not once has he discussed this “with the community” to see if it is a “concept that fits with what the community would like to see.”

Tonight, in a highly controlled, one-hour meeting where all questions from the public are required to be submitted in writing before the meeting begins, Dr. Wardynski is finally consenting to meet with the parents of these high-performing schools to explain why merger is necessary.

I’m not expecting much of an explanation.

It will likely be something like, “We have to merge the schools because the state is pushing to close them.”

Really? Who, exactly, at the state level is pushing Huntsville City Schools to close Mt. Gap Elementary and Middle Schools? What’s the person’s name? Why aren’t they making this claim/request publicly so that we can ask questions of that person?

In short, this argument is just another form of “the boggy man is going to get you.”

There will be no evidence offered that the State is pushing to close the schools. None, whatsoever.

This is simply another play taken out of the Broad Virus playbook that Dr. Wardynski has been following since he arrived on July 5th.

He wants to merge the schools because it will make them easier to control.

And then, a year from now, when test scores have fallen as a result of the disruption that he has caused, he will use that as evidence that public education has failed and needs to be replaced with Charter schools.

But we should be happy and respectful tonight that he’s willing to offer us even an hour of his time to meet with those lowly parents, who just don’t understand education.

The meeting will begin at 6:00pm and end promptly at 7:00pm. I will be live tweeting the meeting and video recording it. It will be important to preserve this moment for the future.

Remember back with Dr. Moore was our superintendent? It was an interesting time right there toward the end of her tenure. It was “clear” that Huntsville City Schools was in trouble. It was also clear that the board was looking for nearly anyone to take the blame for that trouble other than themselves.

And yet, at Dr. Moore’s final evaluation, the board gave her a perfect evaluation. Not only that, but at the previous evaluation in 2009 (before everyone was aware of the issues facing the system), she also received, you guessed it, a perfect evaluation.

Strange, don’t you think?

Dr. Robinson thought it was strange as well. In fact, she said as much in May of 2010. She complained that, “if we have an instrument that does not permit us to accurately evaluate the superintendent, I think there’s a problem.”

That’s right, Dr. Robinson, defender extraordinaire of the new Superintendent and all of his work to change the culture of our system by forcing strict evaluation of teachers based on student performance on standardized testing scores, was two years ago complaining about the failure of a standardized test for Dr. Moore.

So she criticizes standardized testing when it doesn’t suit her purpose (to get rid of Dr. Moore), and she specifically volunteers to develop a personalized evaluation test for Dr. Wardynski to convince the city that he is in fact worth, in her words, “every penny.”

Dr. Robinson developed these standards of evaluation specifically for him with specific input from him concerning what and how he should be evaluated.

So let’s follow the logic here for a minute.

• Standardized testing is flawed when it comes to evaluating Dr. Moore. (It was flawed in 2009 and again in 2010 even though nothing was done to change it during the intervening year.)
• Since standardized testing was flawed with Dr. Moore, the evaluation tool we use for Dr. Wardynski must be personalized to him and by him.
• However, Dr. Wardynski’s constant claims that standardized testing is the only way for teachers to know how well their students are performing in the classroom are in no way hypocritical. We should simply realize that like the double standard in hiring and salaries (and bonuses before employees even start), means that there must be a double standard in evaluation of those employees.

So we have two standards when people raise issues about professional misconduct, two standards for complaints about employees, two standards for hiring policies, and two standards for evaluation. Our superintendent has the benefit of having an evaluation that was designed specifically for him. In fact, he had significant input into the method of evaluation that would be used.

If he fails his evaluation, he won’t get an additional $10,000. I’m sure that will be just terrible for him.

If our kids fail their evaluation, they’re marked for life, and their teachers are threatened or fired.

It must be nice to be able to evaluated on your strengths rather than others’ weaknesses.

A “strong leader” leads by example, not by hypocrisy.

There is an idea in this town that if it isn’t happening at my school, I don’t need to worry about it.

There are a lot of reasons for this. One might be that people are simply too busy to keep up with more than one school. As a parent who has children at two different elementary schools, I really understand this one. Even though the boy and the girl are a mere 19 months apart in age, they’re in separate schools and have been since they started thanks to the decision of the central office to move special needs kids out of their home schools and consolidate them in just a few schools in the system. One school has enough politics, programs, and problems of its own. There just isn’t time to worry about the other schools in the system.

Another reason is that life itself tends to intervene enough. Not only is one school enough, usually, one school is simply too much. There just aren’t enough hours in the day for everything that needs to get done. Work, kids activities, health question, car trouble, cleaning the house, church commitments and occasionally sleeping later than 6am, all take priority over the politics of the school system, especially when my kid’s school isn’t affected.

I’m hopeful that these are the primary reasons why when some bad decision doesn’t directly affect us, we find it easy and frankly justifiable to ignore what’s happening with other schools and other demographics.

If it doesn’t affect my kids, I simply don’t have time to worry about it.

I’m hopeful that’s it. I’m hopeful that it isn’t a deeper, more troubling reason like maybe “those” schools don’t deserve more resources, better buildings or good teachers. I’m hopeful that isn’t the case.

In our recent questions, comments and debates about Teach For America, I’ve occasionally sensed from people the attitude that since TFA isn’t coming to my kids’ schools, it’s not worth being concerned over.

Or as one commentator stated, “Those schools are failing. Anything is better than what they have now.” Beggars can’t be choosers, you know. So, why worry about TFAers?

The best answer is: Because it’s the right thing to do. If my children deserve teachers who are properly trained and committed to the goal of educating our children, then all children deserve similar teachers. If my children deserve teachers who are experienced, and who work everyday to apply that experience to the craft of education, then all children deserve such teachers.

A secondary answer, a more pragmatic answer is: If the district believes it’s okay to put inexperienced, untrained, uncertified “teachers” (who don’t want to be teachers) in one classroom, it can and will place them in every classroom.

But that won’t happen, right? The TFAers are going to schools that are failing, right? They, surely, won’t be placed in my child’s school.

Right?

The best answer that I can give you is that despite nearly a month of asking for details on where the TFAers will be placed, I still haven’t been able to get a straight answer.

No Straight Answers

Straight answers: Why are they so difficult to come by from Huntsville City Schools?

You should know that I am arguing from an absence of evidence in this case. Most of my posts are not based upon my opinions or assessments. I typically stick with exactly what a person says. Arguing from a lack of evidence is fraught with issues, but sometimes a lack of evidence is also telling. I believe that it is in this case as well.

I am convinced that Dr. Wardynski is planning to hire significantly more TFAers in August 2012 than the 30-40 he has previously indicated, and I believe that he is planning to place TFAers at schools all over the district.

Over the past month, I have been asking Dr. Robinson for details concerning the placement plan for the TFAers.

On February 9, 2012, I wrote Dr. Robinson to ask which schools would be receiving the TFA recruits in the district. On the 10th, Dr. Robinson responded:

A placement plan for TFA teachers will not be created until we know which teachers at which schools are retiring. That could be as late a June.

This is as close to a direct answer as I was able to receive, but as I told Dr. Robinson, this answer did not satisfy me. I wrote back to ask:

I am sure that someone in the central office has at least an idea where they are planning to place the TFA recruits starting in August, otherwise it would have been foolish to enter into a contract in November of 2011 to hire at least 30 TFAers [no later than] 14 days before the start of school. This is particularly true since we will have to pay $40 a day for those recruits that do not have positions on the first day of class.

Let me see if I can rephrase my question in such a way that you might be able to provide me with at least the beginnings of an answer.

Which of the schools in the district will not, regardless of retirements or non-renewal status, be receiving these TFA recruits? We can get to the actual numbers and placements later in the process. For now, I’ll be satisfied knowing where they won’t be placed.

Since she wasn’t willing to say how many and where those recruits would be placed, even though we’re going to have to pay at least 30 of them regardless of whether we have a job for them or not, I decided to ask where the TFAers will not be placed. Surely this should be a simple question to answer, right? After all, nearly every public discussion of the TFA contract has implied that these recruits are only placed at schools where the students are at high risk. In other words, TFA typically only serves schools where 70% or more of the school’s population are receiving free or reduced lunch.

Poverty and School Performance

Poverty, in other words, is one of the most accurate indicators we have for the potential success of a student. The lower the family income, the higher the risk for students to underperform in schools. If you want to get into the scientific evidence supporting this thesis, take a look at “Childhood Poverty, Chronic Stress, and Adult Working Memory” by Gary W. Evans and Michelle A. Schamberg. You may see an abstract here.

As I said, TFAers are typically placed at schools with 70% or more of the school’s population receives free or reduced lunch. The contract itself requires this.

Or, as we’ll see in a moment, it implies that this will be the standard.

In response to my follow up question, Dr. Robinson told me later in the day on February 10th:

I have asked the staff to provide the information you requested.

I expected that she would let me know that the TFAers will be placed at our Title I schools here in Huntsville. After all, the Title I schools are Title I schools because of the percentage of students they have receiving a free or reduced lunch. This is why Dr. Wardynski was pushing for students to complete the forms required for the Free or Reduced Lunch at the beginning of the school year. Here’s a listing of the Huntsville City Schools Title I schools as of August 15, 2011.

• Butler High
• Chapman Middle
• Davis Hills Middle
• Ed White Middle
• Highlands Elementary
• Lakewood Elementary
• Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary
• McDonnell Elementary
• Montview Elementary
• Morris Elementary
• Ridgecrest Elementary
• Rolling Hills Elementary
• University Place Elementary
• West Mastin Lake Elementary
• Westlawn Middle

The reason that I started asking about the placement of the TFAers was that there is only one high school on this list. As you’ll recall, Dr. Robinson stated that our TFAers will be primarily placed at secondary schools rather than elementary schools.

The problem is that there just aren’t that many secondary schools on the list.

I asked Dr. Robinson about this when I noticed that Dr. Wardynski was regularly talking about placing TFAers at elementary, middle and high schools. He said as much in his interview with Rocket City Mom on January 31st. When I asked Dr. Robinson about this on February 2nd, she told me that it had in fact “always been the plan” to place TFAers at both elementary and secondary schools.

Still No Answer

About two weeks later, I followed up with Dr. Robinson asking if the “staff” had responded to her request for a listing of schools where the TFAers will not be placed.

She responded on February 22nd:

Any determination about which schools will and will not receive TFA teachers will be made at a later date.

As I stated, the most informative response she gave me was the very first one, we won’t “know” until late June.

I wrote her back quoting the TFA contract which states on page two paragraph I.A.v.:

School District will restrict hiring of each such Teacher 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.

And so I asked:

The hesitancy on the part of the school district to inform the public which schools will or will not be receiving TFAers leads me to believe that the school district and Teach For America have arrived at a mutual agreement to allow TFAers to be placed at schools where less than 70% of the attending students are eligible for free or reduced lunch. Is this the case?

Has the district and TFA arrived at an agreement to place TFAers at schools where less that 70% of the student population receives a free or reduced lunch? If so, when will this agreement be made public?

What is the new cut-off percentage being employed, and what schools meet that new requirement? If not, why is it so difficult to provide me with a listing of schools that have a percentage of free and reduced lunch that is below 70%?

If they’ve not come up with a new standard by which they will decide where TFAers will be placed, why is it so difficult to give me a straight answer about where they will or won’t be placed?

I’m convinced that Dr. Wardynski and the Board are planning to place TFAers at schools with a standard significantly below 70% free and reduced lunch.

Dr. Robinson’s response did nothing to change my mind. On February 22nd, she wrote back:

We are still determining which schools qualify for TFA teachers.

Unless their standard of 70% free and reduced lunch has changed, why would they need to be “still determining which schools qualify?

Why is the district unable to communicate the criteria by which they will decide which schools will receive and which schools will not receive the TFA recruits?

Can You Think of a Reason?

The only reason I can think of is that the district is planning to use TFAers are significantly higher levels than the contract calls for (30 or more) and significantly higher than the number that Dr. Wardynski shared with Dr. Robinson via email when I asked about the cost of the contract (40).

Dr. Robinson’s hesitancy to provide me with a simple and direct answer combined with Dr. Wardynski regular claims that, “Many people who think they were going to be tenured will not,” leads me to one and only one conclusion: Dr. Wardynski is planning to hire significantly more TFAers than he has revealed publicly.

The contract is loaded with clues to this effect.

First, there is not an upper limit to the number of TFA recruits hired by our system (30 or more, 40 or more).

Second, the contract allows for both parties to change the placement rule of at least 70% or more free and reduced lunch by mutual consent. Since TFA Alabama would love to place record numbers of recruits in Huntsville, and since Dr. Wardynski is constantly raising the number and cheerleading for TFA, what, other than public opinion, is to stop both parties from raising the numbers?

Nothing. Nothing at all.

Sometimes we speak loudest, Dr. Robinson, by saying nothing at all. Right now, the district’s silence is screaming that they’re planning to hire far more than 30 or 40 TFAers. The district’s silence is screaming that they’re planning to place these recruits at all of the schools in the district.

So What’s A Parent To Do?

Ask Questions.

As you can see, my questions often go unanswered. If you think these are valid questions, ask them yourself. Perhaps you will receive a different answer than I have received.

When your child is assigned a classroom teacher for the fall, request that the school provide you with a completely and detailed accounting of that teacher’s training. You may do this by filing out a “Parent’s Right-To-Know” request. This form will advise you concerning your teacher’s and paraprofessional’s credentials.

If your children are being taught by a teacher teaching under a “provisional” or “emergency” status, if his or her undergraduate degree is in something other than Education, and he or she doesn’t have a master’s degree in Education, I would advise you to request that your child be transferred out of that teacher’s classroom.

All of our children deserve the best opportunity to succeed in their education. I, for one, do not want my children taught by a “teacher” who doesn’t want to be a teacher. TFA “teachers” don’t want to be teachers. We should make it easy for them to do something else.

As jaded as I like to think I am about the school board, and the senior administration of our district, I have to say, there are times when they still manage to shock me. Last night was just such a night.

As I mentioned in my last post, I had asked Dr. Robinson for an explanation of a few of the recent actions (or lack of actions) on the part of the board.

Specifically, I wanted to know:

• When did the board approve the contract with Mr. Headrick and LEAN Frog to conduct the audit that was completed with a reporting of his findings on February 16th?
• How much did the audit cost?
• Why is the company that conducted the audit now being hired to recommend changes to the business practices of the district based upon the findings of the audit?
• Was this contract with LEAN Frog executed in accordance with the bid law?

Interestingly enough, LEAN Frog was specifically hired (at some undetermined point, but probably around October) to review the business practices of the district.

One significant part of the findings that Mr. Headrick presented to the board on February 16th had to do with the Procurement Department. This department is responsible for overseeing the “Bid Invitation/Analysis Process,” “Purchase Orders,” and “Inventory Control.”

As I pointed out, I had no recollection of the board actually approving the hiring of Mr. Headrick and LEAN Frog Consulting. A subsequent review of the minutes of the meetings since that time confirmed my recollection as correct. Since through January the district has paid Mr. Headrick, $26,270, I was surprised that I could not find any record of the board approving his contract for those services conducted from October 2011 through February 16, 2012.

Yesterday at 9:31:48 PM CST, Dr. Robinson responded to my questions with the following email:

As necessary to ensure the integrity of district financial and business activities, and to ensure to their conformity to statute, and regulation, the CFO engages auditors and other experts to review transactions, policies, and regulatory guidance and to render opinions. In audit functions, discretion in the use of external auditors is particularly important when fraud or abuse are suspected as was the case in the present situation. Therefore, in such cases public BOE (Board of Education) discussion is inappropriate.

Funds expended for Leanfrog we disbursed from the board approved budget and the CFO has authority for certain budgeted expenditures.

Also note that Lean Frog has moved beyond an audit function to the creation of processes and operating procedures and thus their services have been engaged via BOE action.

Jennie Robinson, PhD.

Lets unpack this response just a bit.

It’s Not the CFO’s Job

First, Dr. Robinson seems to be quoting a specific policy statement in her opening comment. I’ve asked her where that policy can be found, but she hasn’t responded yet. Since I’ve never been good at waiting, I went online to review the policies myself.

Guess what, that is not a Huntsville City Schools policy. In fact, nearly the only comment that the Policy Manual makes on audits is found in Procedure 100-1P “Functions of the Board of Education” Paragraph C, on page 2 of that procedure entitled Audit states:

The accounts of the Huntsville City Schools shall be audited annually by a certified public accountant selected by the Board of Education. Reports of such audits shall be delivered to the Board of Education, the superintendent of schools, and others as the Board may direct. (Emphasis Added)

So you see, it is not the job of the CFO to “engage auditors and other experts to review transactions, policies, and regulatory guidance and to render opinions” as Dr. Robinson claimed. It is instead the job of the Board of Education to select the auditor to be used.

This kinda makes sense, doesn’t it? I mean if an audit is going to be conducted of the business practices of the district, the Chief School Financial Officer also needs to be audited, doesn’t he?

Who Is The Discretion For?

Second, Dr. Robinson claims that, “In audit functions, discretion in the use of external auditors is particularly important when fraud or abuse are suspected as was the case in the present situation. Therefore, in such cases public BOE discussion is inappropriate.”

Who is the discretion necessary for? Should we keep the audit quiet from the public? If so, then why did Dr. Wardynski, in one of his first meetings with the public on July 25, 2011 tell a group of Special Education parents that he would soon be conducting a full audit of the Special Education and other Departments in the central office.

Discretion wasn’t necessary for the public.

How about the people being audited? Well, we certainly don’t want them to know they’re being audited. But, of course, the first people in the district to know that they were being audited were the directors and their directorships. Mr. Headrick stated that he began the audit by “conducting interviews” with the directors.

It’s kinda hard to conduct an audit interview without the person being interviewed knowing that an audit is going on, isn’t it? I began hearing from multiple district personnel that LEAN Frog was conducting an audit beginning in November 2011.

Discretion wasn’t necessary for the district personnel.

So, who exactly was the discretion for? Perhaps the discretion was for the board as they seemed to be the only group in the city who didn’t know it was happening.

CFO Has Authority For Certain Expenditures

The next second of her response contains the true kickers. Dr. Robinson stated that, “Funds expended for Leanfrog we disbursed from the board approved budget and the CFO has authority for certain budgeted expenditures.”

Dr. Robinson seems to be claiming that Mr. Frank Spinelli has the authority to expend district funds, accepting of bids, and contracting with vendors all without any board or public oversight. As I mentioned on Saturday, through January, the district has paid LEAN Frog $26,270.00. As the report to the board did not take place until February, once the check register is published for that month, I’m sure we’ll find that the $26,270.00 has increased to nearly $30,000.

So, according to Dr. Robinson, Mr. Spinelli, has the authority to commit and expend $30,000 in public funds without any oversight.

You’ll note, as I did, that there was no discussion of the questions concerning the bid law. While there are perhaps hundreds of Lean Six Sigma consultants in the country, and surely dozens of them in Huntsville (as this is a standard evaluation for military contractors), did Mr. Spinelli issue a call for bids?

I have no idea.

Significant Opportunity For Fraud

Mr. Headrick stated in his presentation on February 16th that the current business practices and System-Wide Issues/Opportunities for Huntsville City Schools presented:

Significant opportunity for fraud, waste and abuse and legal liabilities associated with non-compliance to state and federal law.

It’s a shame that Mr. Headrick wasn’t tasked to audit the means and methods that were used to actually hire him. Perhaps then his findings wouldn’t be tainted by the superintendent having refused to bring a recommendation to the board to hire him as is required by board policy and state law.

As it stands, the audit that will be used on Thursday night, March 1st to fire up to one hundred directors, coordinators, principals and teachers, and staff should itself be considered in non-compliance. Thus every single one of the district employees who are fired tomorrow night should challenge their dismissal in a court of law.

Wardynski’s going to be known as the best friend to lawyers in this town as he’ll not have doubled legal fees but rather quadrupled them.

Is it possible that there were some legal violations found by Mr. Headrick? Yes, there are. Three of the five board members who are allowing Mr. Spinelli to expend district funds without oversight likely did the same thing five years ago. And anyone found breaking the law should be punished.

If this contract was not approved by the board, and it doesn’t appear that it was, the money should be refunded, the findings should be dismissed, and those violating standard practices should be fired.

However, Dr. Robinson, the ends never justify the means.

Since Mr. King has been advertising positions for the district on his Facebook wall since January 2nd, he can just add a few more positions to his list.

Tomorrow night’s board meeting is the culmination of a witch hunt that is being used to cover up current violations. It’s time that we the public take back our school system.

On Thursday, February 16th, Dr. Wardynski began to make public a process that he started in private in October with the hiring of Bryon Headrick of LEAN Frog. Speaking of the findings, Dr. Wardynski has claimed, “this is what incompetence looks like.” Dr. Robinson, as usual, praised Wardynski for bringing in a “culture of change.”

There are going to be “firings, demotions, and transfer,” and everyone said, “STRONG LEADER, STRONG LEADER” because that’s exactly what Wardynski paid them to say. And when they didn’t say it often enough, he led the chorus himself.

And much of the public buys into the message that our schools are finally going to be run by people who do things the right way, who follow the rules, who don’t just put their friends, regardless of their inexperience or incompetence into highly paid positions of power.

So where’s the evidence that Dr. Wardynski and his administrative team are doing things any differently?

There doesn’t seem to be any, and as Mr. Blair pointed out on Thursday, February 16th, that doesn’t make us feel any better.

Everyone knows that Dr. Wardynski has made a habit of hiring his friends. That’s old news.

Everyone knows that Dr. Wardynski is bringing in TFAers, even though they cost more and there is no shortages of highly qualified and fully certified teachers in the district.

As I said, old news. What have they done lately?

What about these two tidbits of information:

On Thursday, Mr. Headrick criticized the District’s Procurement Process. He claimed that there was “Significant opportunity for fraud, waste and abuse, and legal liabilities associated with non-compliance to state and federal law.”

The bid law is indeed state law. Was this contract with LEAN Frog executed in accordance with the bid law? That the school board approves the contracts that Dr. Wardynski enters into is also a requirement. (And since they’ve approved every single recommendation the man has brought so far, that shouldn’t be too onerous of a requirement, should it?) Was this contract approved by the board? If so, when?

Also who paid for this LEAN Frog evaluation that is offering Dr. Wardynski political cover to do whatever he wants? The first time that the school board voted to approve hiring Mr. Headrick of LEAN Frog was yesterday at a special called board meeting. AND YET, Huntsville City Schools has been paying LEAN Frog since November. Here are the numbers

• November 2011: ;$2,890.00 (Pg. 20)
• December 2011: $5,760.00 (Pg. 25)
• January 2012: $5,760.00 (Pg. 3)
• January 2012: $5,380.00 (Pg. 9)
• January 2012: $6,480.00 (Pg. 16)

So, the Huntsville City Schools has paid LEAN Frog at total of $26,270.00 since November 2011, but the first time the board approved hiring of this company was February 25, 2012. I have asked Dr. Robinson about this oversight in oversight, but as of this writing she hasn’t responded to my question.

A culture of change indeed, Dr. Robinson.

What about hiring practices, and the posting of jobs?

On Thursday, February 16th, Mr. Headrick pointedly stated that the Human Resource department was “inefficient” and “2.5 to 3 months behind at time of assessment.” He claimed that HR received “32 hours of interruptions in two days.” (You’ll note that he did not offer any details to put these numbers into context like sharing how many total working hours were performed in that office in those two days. That would be helpful information, wouldn’t it?) Mr. Headrick claimed that the department was having to waste time examining and re-doing work.

Perhaps one reason that HR is running behind is because Dr. Wardynski and his Administrative team aren’t following the standards and procedures for hiring themselves.

Goodness, but wouldn’t it be embarrassing if, say the then Director of Transition and the now Director of Operations were, oh I don’t know, posting jobs that haven’t even opened yet on his Facebook Wall?

That would require some additional oversight and re-doing of work on the part of the HR department, don’t you think?

Here’s a screen shot from Mr. Aaron King’s Facebook Wall. Assuming that he doesn’t lock his Facebook account down in the near future, you can see this for yourself if you wish. Just scroll down to a post on January 2, 2012.

In addition, I’ve “shared” this posting on the Geek Palaver Facebook Page. Here’s a screen capture of the posting for those of you who don’t use Facebook.

I wonder if this posting, “for all positions (directors, coordinators, principals, teachers, etc)” is following the standards established by the HR department, state and federal law? Perhaps the New Employee Orientation Materials that Mr. King received were not current. That must be the problem, right?

Giving your friends a two month head start on applying for state jobs, jobs that must be open to everyone, jobs that were not open on January 2nd, is a violation of the state requirements for hiring. And as Mr. King posted, he and Col. Wardynski, should “take ownership for their decisions.”

Doesn’t this basically prove that the current witch hunt that Dr. Wardynski is engaged in is politically motivated? I mean, why else would he instruct his XO to talk to his buddies about jobs nearly two months before he discusses any of this with the public? It would seem that he is hoping to take advantage of the public outcry over this issue to place yet more like-minded, inexperienced people into positions of power (that pay well) throughout the district, don’t you think?

See, I’ve gotten a good amount of grief since the 16th of February for questioning our “Strong Leader.” I’ve been told that I should just support what he’s doing to clean up Huntsville City Schools. I’ve been told that these changes, this culture of change that he’s bringing in, will be good for our schools. I’ve been told that ultimately these changes will be good for the system. I’ve been told I should quit being apprehensive and that the whining must stop.

But the simple fact of the matter is that all this talk of inefficiencies and criminal behavior that happened in the past is simply being used to cover up inefficiencies and criminal behavior that is happening right now.

As I said long ago, the new boss is the same as the old boss, and anyone telling you differently isn’t paying attention.

Wardynski: “Now, what is, what’s the word? Apprehension?

Headrick: “That’s a soft way of saying it.”

Wardynski: “In the Army, we call that whining.” [Greeted with laughter and smiles by several of the board members.]

Tonight, I guess I’m just going to whine a bit.

It’s always nice when the superintendent of the school system decides to engage in ad hominem attacks by referring to anyone who is apprehensive about the changes he’s forcing through, or anyone who just has questions about his actions, as a bunch of whiners.

I’ve been called worse.

So the witch hunt continues, and tomorrow (February 25, 2012) at 10:30am, the Huntsville City School Board will meet to potentially fired, demote, reprimand, or otherwise embarrass up to eight departmental directors for actions that may have, or may not have, taken place up to ten years ago.

Mr. King, Dr. Wardynski’s XO, has been appointed as his new “acting director of operations,” while receiving a 49% raise. This is just a sideline job however as Mr. King is quickly on his way to becoming one of the new principals who will be replacing one of those ineffective principals (you know, one of those whose job is on the table) starting in July. The Director of Operations gig is scheduled to end June 30th. Not bad for a guy who spent a year or so slaving away in a Chemistry classroom. (Of course, he still has more experience than his superintendent.)

Mr. King will be making $88,000 a year a 49% raise over his $59,211 salary to make PowerPoint presentations about topics for which he has no training or experience. Nice work if you can get it.

In case you haven’t heard, Dr. Wardynski announced to the board back in September that Mr. King would be “transitioning” into a principal’s position beginning in the 2012-2013 school year. Funny, I thought those positions were required to be posted before a specific person could be promised a position.

I guess, again, that the rules don’t apply to Dr. Wardynski and his friends.

But that doesn’t matter, does it?

All that really matters are problems that were uncovered in 2005. Problems that Dr. Moore decided, with approval of three of our current board members, to ignore. But we need to address them now because, well because people must be held accountable and responsible for things that they might have, or might not have done back then.

It certainly has nothing to do with redirecting our attention away from Dr. Wardynski’s current actions such as hiring friends, and defending their actions at all cost even if they’re supposedly accused of sexual harassment.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

None of that matters. All that matters is that you believe that Dr. Wardynski is a “strong leader” for taking a hard line on issues for which he cannot be blamed.

All together now: Strong Leader. Strong Leader.

And we should just trust him when he says that he’s not doing the same thing. It’s such a good thing that we have a school board to watch over his actions, and to vote against them when they have questions.

Oh, wait . . . our board members with questions just go right ahead and vote along with him even when his answers leave them not “feeling better” about his decisions.

Tomorrow, everything will be made clear. And we’ll understand that it he really is the best kept secret in Huntsville as Dr. Robinson likes to claim. And anyone left asking questions at that point, assuming that we haven’t fired them in this process, well, they’re just whiners anyway.

After all, “effective” teachers, administrators, directors and even parents “have no need to be concerned” about the direction Wardynski is taking us. Surely he has our Broad interests at heart. Right?

Right?

I’ll be whining away on Twitter @russwinn during the meeting. You can also catch my posts on the Geek Palaver Facebook Page. You can also watch the meeting on ETV (Comcast 17, Knology 99), and at the Huntsville City Schools website.

Back when Dr. Wardynski was still in his honeymoon period, one of the most common phrases used concerning him was, “There’s a new sheriff in town” in reference to the discipline that he was directing toward his faculty and staff. He was a superintendent who was quick, often times too quick as it turned out, to pull the trigger. In rapid succession, teachers and administrators were being told it was time for them to leave. Their services would no longer be needed.

It was my belief then and remains so today that Dr. Wardynski cultivated that reputation intentionally. He wanted his “human capital,” as he liked to refer to them, to be afraid of him.

After all, a demoralized and frightened work force is a compliant work force. They don’t ask questions about policy changes. They don’t ask questions about curriculum shifts. They don’t ask questions about decisions that hurt our kids.

His goal was and is to frighten, berate, intimidate and fire anyone who works for him who dares to ask questions. This is his same approach with those few who don’t work for him who are challenging his decisions. He has implied at least twice (here and here) that I was a liar despite evidence to the contrary. In short, he is quick to respond to complaints about teachers and principals who had the audacity to actually work for our schools before Wardynski was hired.

There are two classes of employees in Huntsville City Schools these days: those hired by Wardynski (along with a few who have seemingly earned his trust) and those who were already working here before he arrived. We’ve already seen that these two classes have different hiring standards. We’ve seen that there is no formal way to lodge a complaint against the board or superintendent. Now we’re seeing that filing a complaint against those brought in by the superintendent will be summarily ignored.

For example, I wonder what would happen if a teacher in Huntsville City Schools had a complaint of harassment brought against him or her? Anyone want to take a bet that that teacher might at least be placed on administrative leave while an investigation followed? How about if a teacher had a sexual harassment complaint brought against him or her?

Anyone think that teacher would need to report to school tomorrow after the holiday?

Anyone?

Nah, me neither.

But just as some are more equal than others in regards to their salaries, it now seems that some are more equal than others in regards to complaints that are leveled against them.

Let’s take a look at what Dr. Wardynski had to say on Thursday night during Bryon Headrick’s Lean Frog presentation on the inefficiencies he discovered in the business practices of the district during the past ten years. At the end of Mr. Headrick’s presentation, Dr. Wardynski offered a seven minute sermon on the importance of “strong leadership,” and the poor educational practices employed in the system during the past ten years.

(No, Dr. Wardynski did not make it clear why following a presentation on poor operational decisions he felt it necessary to preach about poor educational decisions, but more on that later.) You can read my transcript of the entire seven minute speech here.

Near the end of this sermon, when he finally returned to talking about the business practices of the system (you know, the actual subject of Mr. Headrick’s review), Dr. Wardynski had the follow to say:

So on the business side, the measurement, what does that look like in apprehension?

Mr. Spinelli is charged with the business activities of this district. I brought, I recommended him to this board, and this board selected him on my specific recommendation based on his abilities. Um, on any given day, any number of people with apprehension are claiming any number of things. Um, we haven’t got a lot of time for nonsense. The kids need to be well educated. We’ve got a lot of work to do. Uh, my CFO is doing an excellent job, and he has my full support. (Emphasis Added)

Honestly at this point of the evening, I had no idea what Dr. Wardynski was talking about. (Although I did enjoy his Freudian slip where he had to correct himself from saying, “I brought,” to  ”I recommended him to this board . . . .” I’m sure the board appreciated that correction.)

I hear all kinds of rumors about the school system and employees in the system. As someone who is regularly writing about the system, people often come to me with rumors. Only occasionally have I had anything to say about them. My standard mode of operation is to evaluate the validity of the rumor and the importance of the rumor. If I can’t verify it, or if it seems simply frivolous, I ignore it.

I’ve never published anything that I wasn’t able to verify for myself usually several times over. On the occasions where my interpretation may have been wrong, I’ve corrected my mistakes.

I share this with you to say this: I am not aware of any claims concerning Mr. Spinelli. I’ve met him and spoken with him on several occasions. He strikes me as a friendly guy. That there seems to have been people “claiming any number of things” about Mr. Spinelli was news to me.

But if Dr. Wardynski said it in a board meeting, there must be some truth to the idea that there have at least been “any number of people with apprehension . . . claiming any number of things.”

Dr. Wardynski continued his sermon about the business practices in the system:

Um, we will be coming to the board subsequent to this presentation in the coming days with recommendations regarding employees who need to be apprehensive, who have not done their job, who needed to do their job and have cost our children vital years of educational opportunity.

But apprehension will not stop us. Claims of harassment, claims of sexual harassment, all sorts of nonsense, will not stop us from giving our children what they need. And I know our board certainly won’t tolerate it.

Uh, but the apprehension takes many, many forms from missing documents, to calls to the media, to complaints about oversized district overhead and GNA, and so forth. So at this point, I just wanted to draw that out and say, strong leadership is critical because with weak leadership, the rest will fall apart. (Emphasis Added)

So, it would seem that Dr. Wardynski felt it was necessary to offer Mr. Spinelli his “full support” in the face of apprehensive “claims of harassment, claims of sexual harassment, all sorts of nonsense . . . .”

I wonder why he felt this was necessary to say?

It would seem that Dr. Wardynski has received “any number” of complaints about Mr. Spinelli including “claims of harassment” and “claims of sexual harassment” that he considers to be “nonsense.”

Please note, I am not claiming that any of this is true of Mr. Spinelli. I’m only attempting to interpret Dr. Wardynski’s statement. I have no reason to believe that Mr. Spinelli has had any claims of any kind filed against him. I have no reason to believe that if there have been claims filed against him that those claims have any validity.

So why am I bringing this to your attention. One simple reason: Dr. Wardynski is quick to respond to questions of wrongdoing on the part of those he didn’t bring into Huntsville. He is quick to raise questions about teachers who aren’t doing their jobs based on flimsy evidence. He is quick to fire teachers who offer the appearance of wrongdoing.

So why is he quick to dismiss claims brought against his friends from Aurora?

Why is he quick to insist that the board should ignore complaints against his friends from Aurora?

Ask yourself this one simple question: in an environment where fear, intimidation, and at times direct threats to jobs rule the day, where even tenure is no longer a protection, would you bring a frivolous charge of harassment or sexual harassment against the first person that Dr. Wardynski brought into the system?

Strong leadership does not accept double standards. Strong leadership sets a standard and applies that standard to everyone. Dr. Wardynski believes that our teachers should be held to high standards. He believes that our business operations should be held to high standards. But evidently he doesn’t believe that standard should apply to himself when complaints are brought about him. Evidently he doesn’t believe that standard should apply to his friends–people he brought to the system–when complaints are brought about them.

Dr. Wardynski appreciates a plainly spoken phrase (as you can see in his sermon from Thursday night), so I’ve got one for him.

You know what we call having a different standard for yourself and your friends that doesn’t apply to anyone else? We call that hypocrisy, plain and simple hypocrisy.

As has become Dr. Wardynski’s habit at board meetings of late, this past Thursday night during the presentation by Mr. Bryon Headrick of Lean Frog concerning the lack of efficiency in the business practices of the district prior to 2011, the superintendent offered the following comments. Although these comments were made following the assessment of the business practices, his comments were dominated by a discussion of the educational practices of the district.

Exactly how one relates to the other really isn’t clear to anyone other than Dr. Wardynski, yet he certainly made an attempt to taint teachers with as much blame for the state of the district as he directed toward the business end of the district which was actually reviewed by Mr. Headrick.

He never misses an opportunity to blame teachers for things beyond their control. I will be referring to these comments in several coming posts, so I thought it fair to post them here in unedited form. Please read and refer back to them as needed during future posts.

Wardynski: [Speaking to Bryon Headrick of Lean Frog at the conclusion of his "Non-Instructional Operations Work Systems Assessment Results" presentation.] So before you depart the scene, where are we with those four items?

Headrick: I think we’re already seeing the strong leadership. Just the fact that we’re seeing the current administration address items. We still have needs regarding human capital flexibility that have to be addressed. And we still have to train and develop people. And we still have at this point a need to identify operational performance measures so that we can start holding people accountable to them.

Wardynski: And as we do number four, operational accountability, what are we likely to see as within our culture?

Headrick: You’ll drive continuous improvement.

Wardynski: No. I was getting at a different point.

Headrick: Oh.

Wardynski: Apprehension?

Headrick: Oh. Uh, yes. Anytime you create change, you’re going to see apprehension. You’re going to see resistance. You’re going to see people delay and try to hinder or undermine the change. The Huntsville City Schools System will be no different. There will be people who actually try to undermine being held accountable.  I mean this is a new standard. If you roll that out, some people are going to be worried.

Wardynski: So, um, we’ve got business practices and we’ve got educational practices. Uh, it’s amazing the mirror of each other in this district. The educational side, we went from a picture in August in which folks waited until ARMT and graduation came out in August to do an autopsy of the previous year’s education. To the first nine weeks of schools, our first benchmark assessment, which gave us exact information on the reading level and numeracy skills of our students at a national level of competency. So, benchmarked against what would loosely be call the common core standards.

Uh, disparity was startling. We’ve got schools that are by ARMT (Alabama Reading Math Test) are pegged out at 80% proficient, 90% proficient, 70% proficient. When you go to national levels of accountability, and you do it in the process of educating children, you find that we have schools that are 30% proficient, 17% proficient. Um, so first, you have to hold them accountable and then you have to have high expectations.

The accountability in education come in when you begin looking at how fast are we moving students in a classroom. So first benchmark sets the baseline.  Second benchmark, which was completed end of February, end of January, gives us our second data point. We already know that as a school district. We haven’t shared it with the public yet because we want to make sure people took the first benchmark seriously. By the time we got to the second, we had already gone through a round of virtual school date site, uh, site data reviews in this very room. We do a VTC with each of our schools and everybody else in the district can listen in. And see where we are school by school with discipline, with student performance, grade by grade. Uh, after we went through a round of that, it was clear we were serious about monitoring performance in education.

Benchmark two came in, and we saw some pretty good growth. We have classrooms that moved from 19 from kids being at the 19th percentile in the nation up to 30th in nine weeks. When you measure and you hold people accountable, amazing things happen.
So that’s happening on the educational side. We didn’t wait, uh, for an assessment there. We already knew what the issues were and implemented those immediately in September.

Uh, the third benchmark is due, Barbara when?

Cooper: I’m sorry, March.

Wardynski: March? So March will be our third benchmark, and once we have that in, we’ll be publishing that classroom by classroom, school by school. So parents can look and see which classrooms are moving and which ones aren’t. And we have classrooms that are going backwards. That school is being closed. The board voted last time we met to close the Seldon Center. That school is going backwards. Actually the kids are moving in the wrong direction. Uh, so, we were well justified in calling for the closure of that one.
We have other schools that are doing amazing things. Many of our classrooms, amazing things are happening. So on the educational side, accountability and measurement, we’re bringing in writ large.  And I can see us heading in a direction where it will happen monthly.
Now, what is, what’s the word? Apprehension?

Headrick: That’s a soft way of saying it.

Wardynski: In the Army, we call that whining. [Greeted with laughter and smiles by several of the board members.]
And what it looks like is we’re teaching to the test. Why all this testing? Well, for those who don’t understand, the reason for the testing is, you can’t hold people accountable until you finally do test. Which would be August, er March with the findings coming out in August. That’s way too long to find out we had a classroom that was moving backwards instead of forwards. Um, can you teach to the test? So we’re teaching to tests. Uh, the methodology we’re using is a computer adaptive test. Every child is taking it on a computer, and every child is likely to be on a different question at a different level. Because computer-adaptive means, they’re immediately moving to a level of their knowledge and just beyond to find out where we’re exhausted their abilities. And then it zeros in on exactly where are we. And for every child, that’s a different place and a different time on that computer. It takes eight (8) minutes to twelve (12) minutes to do this. So we’re not wasting a lot of time. But we would be wasting a lot of time if we didn’t know where our kids were.  Cause we’d be covering things they’ve already got. Or we’d be moving ahead, and they haven’t gotten the things they have to have as a foundation. So this business of measuring is not unique to the business processes, it’s vital to education. And we began that in September, and we’ll continue to do that.

So where’s there apprehension, I strongly encourage staff to become comfortable with this process. Because we’re going to know where our children are, and we’re going to make sure they’re moving forward.

And in the classrooms where that’s not taking place, we’re going to become very interested in those classrooms. And if there’s classrooms where extraordinary things are happening, we are interested in those. Because those where things are going wrong need to go look at those where things are going right, and there’s plenty of examples of things going right.
So on the business side, the measurement, what does that look like in apprehension?

Mr. Spinelli is charged with the business activities of this district. I brought, I recommended him to this board, and this board selected him on my specific recommendation based on his abilities. Um, on any given day, any number of people with apprehension are claiming any number of things. Um, we haven’t got a lot of time for nonsense. The kids need to be well educated. We’ve got a lot of work to do. Uh, my CFO is doing an excellent job, and he has my full support.

Um, we will be coming to the board subsequent to this presentation in the coming days with recommendations regarding employees who need to be apprehensive, who have not done their job, who needed to do their job and have cost our children vital years of educational opportunity.

But apprehension will not stop us. Claims of harassment, claims of sexual harassment, all sorts of nonsense, will not stop us from giving our children what they need. And I know our board certainly won’t tolerate it.

Uh, but the apprehension takes many, many forms from missing documents, to calls to the media, to complaints about oversized district overhead and GNA, and so forth. So at this point, I just wanted to draw that out and say, strong leadership is critical because with weak leadership, the rest will fall apart. And, I think that’s it for you Bryon, right?

Headrick: Yes.

As I mentioned, I will be commenting on these comments in future posts, including one going live tonight.