Latest District Budget News

This article was in the Times this afternoon. The District has announced a hiring freeze in anticipation of a tough budget cycle next year.

Comments

dan dempsey said…
Currently Robert Femiano is running for Vice President of the Seattle Education Association.

Mr Femiano made the School Board well aware of their coming budget short fall over the next few years, in school board testimony one year ago.

He cautioned the district about choosing expensive unproved programs that needed great additional costs beyond the traditional programs, being replaced.

Now we see programs in use with expensive consumable materials, academic coaches, in-service for implementation and then ongoing in-service to enhance the skills of our professional teachers to enable them to perhaps produce positive results from all this expenditure.

Nice of the board to notice 11 months later that we have a financial problem.

I do not fault the board as much as I fault the administration for their failure to inform the board.

Is it not the Superintendent's job to keep the board fully informed?

Should Michael Hureaux, Robert Femiano, and Patricia Bailey be elected as SEA President, Vice President, and Treasurer, it will be interesting to see how Dr Goodloe-Johnson deals with Union leadership that are aware of the facts and chooses to talk about them.

The atmosphere that was sometimes called collegial and cooperative of the last several years has not served either our children or the union members particularly well.

Hopefully actually looking at the real situation in an intelligent way could help us make significantly better more intelligent choices.
4/12/08, 12:39 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tuesday Open Thread

The speaker list is up for the Board meeting tomorrow; not as packed as I thought with just four people on the waitlist. The majority of the speakers are speaking on high school boundaries (with several wanting to talk about Ballard High). There are only three of us speaking about the Green Dot resolution asking the City to not grant the zoning departures that Green Dot has requested.  It's me, long-time watchdog, Chris Jackins, and the head of the Washington State Charter Schools Association, Patrick D'Amelio.  (I knew Mr. D'Amelio when he headed the Alliance for Education and Big Brothers and Big Sisters; he's a stand-up guy.)
Read more

Breaking It Down: Where the District Might Close Schools

Update 2: an absolutely fabulous interactive map made by parent Beth Day (@thebethocracy on Twitter - she covers Board meetings and is fun to read).   end of update    Update 1: Mea culpa, I did indeed get Decatur and Thornton Creek mixed up. Thanks to all for the correction. end of update   I suspect some who read this post will be irate. Why do this? Because the district seems very hellbent on this effort with no oversight skid marks from the Board.    To clearly state - I do not believe that closing 20 schools is a good idea. I think they hit on 20 because they thought it might bring in the most savings. But the jury is still out on the savings because the district has not shown its work nor its data. I suspect closing schools and THEN leasing/renting them is the big plan but that means the district really has to keep the buildings up.   But this district, with its happy talk about "well-resourced schools" is NOT acknowledging the pain and yes, grief, that is to come fro
Read more

MEETING CANCELED - Hey Kids, A Meeting with Three(!) Seattle Schools Board Directors

 Update 2: So I have seen a message from President Liza Rankin on why she, Director Evan Briggs, and Director Michelle Sarju backed out of this meeting.  In a nutshell: - She says there was no organization to the meeting which is just not true. They had a moderator lined up and naturally the board members could have set parameters for what to discuss, length of meeting, etc. All that was fleshed out. - She also claimed that if the meeting was PTA sponsored, they needed to have liability insurance to use the school space. Hello? PTAs use school space all the time and know they have to have this insurance.  - She seems to be worried about the Open Public Meetings law. Look, if she has a meeting in a school building on a non-personnel topic, it should be an open meeting. It appears that Rankin is trying, over and over, to narrow the window of access that parents have to Board members. She even says in her message - "...with decisions made in public." Hmmm - She also says that th
Read more