BCPSS School Board Commentary

After attending the BCPSS School Board Meeting on Tuesday, March 13^th, I have been reflecting on the happenings at this meeting as well as the overall productivity of the meeting. The meeting, which started approximately 15 minutes late and lasted approximately 3 hours, was quite different than I expected it to be. Growing up in a small community, I attended our local school board meetings several times as a middle and high school student, and in fact knew most of the board members by name. I was familiar with the process and on goings at these meetings. Therefore, I was quite surprised to notice so many differences at the Baltimore City meeting. To begin, I do realize that Baltimore City is quite large in comparison to my own small district back home, and is thus responsible for so many more people and schools. This being said, I was appalled at the length of the general processes of the school board meeting, and was particularly surprised with the public commentary section.

As I had taken the time to get there early, I was surprised upon my arrival to find all seats filled. In fact, many people were sitting outside of the main room watching the meeting via a television screen. I had gone in thinking that people did not really care about the happenings at these meetings, and was initially filled with hope at seeing so many people. This being said, I was shocked when person after person left the meeting throughout the public commentary section, after they had stated their part. I was surprised at how many different people addressed the board, mentioned that they were not going to bring their ‘dirty laundry’ to the table, and then proceeded to do so. While I do understand the board’s need to communicate with the public by listening to their comments and concerns, I was also surprised at how much time was given to this portion of the meeting. Although each group and/or person is supposed to be allocated a certain number of minutes, very few if any stayed within their time limit, thus extending the meeting far beyond its expected duration.

Finally, I was frustrated toward the end of the meeting as more and more people left and the building cleared out. When the board finally moved on from the public comment section to its next step on the agenda, there were only 16 people left in a now practically empty room. At this time, the board presented the Budget Proposal for 2008, and described its alignment with the Master Plan. The board explained how much money was being allocated to each Goal of the Master Plan, and how the money would be divided within each section. Clearly, the proposed budget will affect every single person involved in Baltimore City schools. Looking around the empty room, I kept thinking that more people should hear this information. Even though people came to voice their own valid concerns, they did not stay to hear anybody else’s, nor did they stay to hear something as important as the budget proposal for the upcoming school year. This only validated my prior thought that many of our priorities are awry.

Although currently the minutes for this meeting have not been updated, I am hoping they will be posted shortly at the following address: http://www.bcps.k12.md.us/School_Board/index.asp. Also, if you are further interested in the budget overview, the board will be adopting this budget proposal during the 3/27 meeting, and then hopefully posting it for the public to view shortly after.

The Brand New Budget

Driving home the past few days, I have been struck by how Congress is debating the exact same issues that we are in our “Urban Reform” class, namely how to ensure the quality of teachers and what measures can be used to determine the level of a school’s achievement. With NCLB up for reauthorization, these are very important issues to be considered, and I am glad that Congress is taking such a long look at them. Unfortunately, from NPR reports it sounds as though the debate is mired in the huge numbers of recommendations from individual legislators, many of whom are proposing 20-80 addenda to the already labyrinth NCLB legislation. Still it is interesting to listen to people who have no experience teaching in public schools debate how we, as teachers, ought to be judged, measured, and qualified.

Judging from the school budget released today, it sounds as though Baltimore is sticking to its guns when it comes to counting teachers as highly-qualified based on their undergraduate degrees, but is becoming more progressive when it comes to giving hiring bonuses in hard to staff areas. You can read the whole article from the Baltimore Sun here, but essentially the city is zeroing in on remaining middle schools, elementary schools that will become K-8s and family involvement. For once, I think BCPSS has its priorities in the right place. It is going to put a lot of strain on the system to convert existing elementary schools into K-8 and they should dedicate as many resources to the project as possible at the outset. As a teacher at a K-8, I know that we could use new, age-appropriate library materials as well as literacy interventions for struggling readers. So, for recognizing where to invest in the future, and hopefully giving its reforms a chance to produce strong results, I applaud BCPSS. May you see these efforts out, give them time to succeed, and work for the remaining students who enroll in your schools. (At present count, only 38% of school-age children living in the city enroll in BCPSS. Now there's some food for thought.)

whats going on in the county

As I opened the Baltimore Sun’s website today I read that there was an audit conducted on Baltimore County Public schools and results revealed that teacher training lacked proper programs protocol. This shortcoming ‘has perpetuated a minority achievement gap that could take 50 years to close’ according the to article. Upon further reading it revealed that the majority of teachers felt uncomfortable implementing computers into their curriculum even though the teacher to computer ratio is 1:6 of the teachers they visited. Clearly my issue from this article, and the cry of every Baltimore City public teacher is, “When will our turn come?” I am unsure as to the auditing process of Baltimore city, and if it has an auditing process. They discuss the disparity between passing scored in Baltimore city as 35.5 percent, but what about my school that can only pass 18% of its students on the HSA in Biology? Reading articles like these somehow angers me because the idea that we get the short end of the stick is thrown in my face. Maybe there are audits in Baltimore city, but it seems to that as soon as the city or an individual school proposes and implements a project it is abandoned after positive results fail to peak in a short amount of time. It is just a frustrating time for me because at this point in time working for my school teachers are expected to do everything without being told anything. Little planning is involved to execute an HSA mastery course after school, while administrators argue over the type of food to serve to the students, rather than determine times, dates, objectives and other logistical needs. As I sit in the conference room, I can see why so many schools lack organization. Time management is a skill to have when running a school, yet administrators allow minutes to pass by without facilitating a conversation or realizing the same point has been made four different ways by four different people. I wonder about this…

It is true that teaching training is an issue, but in BCPSS an audit would simply show that teacher quality is down. There are teachers teaching subjects to which they are not highly qualified or even knowledgeable in, and PIP’s only go as far as a post-observation conference with no improvement plan laid out by the administration. Let’s take the first step in holding administrators accountable for their teachers, and teachers accountable for quality teaching.