Odds and Ends

Executive Director

Some readers have been doing some investigating and found a real puzzler:  how did Bree Dusseault get her job?  She doesn't meet the qualifications currently listed for someone to fill her old regional position:

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:

Education:Master’s degree in education or closely related field
Experience:
Five (5) or more years of successful experience as a Principal, Supervisor or District Administrator
Preferred Qualifications:
Demonstrated experience across grade spans (Pre-K - 12)

She has one year of experience as a principal of a small charter middle school that had only 50 students and 5 teachers.    She claims to have been Founding Principal of New Orleans Charter Middle School but checking, it looks like the school was founded in 1998.  It was a good school until Hurricane Katrina wiped it out.  She re-opened it in 2007 and left at the end of the school year.

  

She has had three years experience teaching high school math, one year as a middle school principal, and  has no experience teaching in or administering elementary schools.  

Granted, sometimes candidates can prove their worth beyond their qualifications but given her performance with the Ingraham situation, you have to wonder.  

Budget

I'm hearing that 6 administrative employees in Nutrition Services got raises.  This as we continue to cut counselors, teachers and maintenance staff.  I wrote to the Board to ask this about this but no answers yet.

After the Legislative Session, we find our district still $4M in the hole.   From the Super:

We will be discussing potential solutions to the $4 million gap during our June 8 work session with the School Board. We will bring a proposed budget to the Board on June 15, with scheduled action on July 6. There will be a public hearing on the proposed 2011-12 budget on Wednesday, June 22 in the John Stanford Center auditorium.

Ingraham

The Washington Policy Center's Liv Finne weighs in on the Ingraham situation at the Times.

Public schools are not organized to maximize the energy and talent of educators. For example, school principals in Seattle lack the authority they need to improve student learning. Instead, Seattle Public Schools has chosen a command-and-control strategy to run the schools, with the five-year strategic plan, Excellence for All.

This plan, now in its third year, has failed to raise student achievement. Its central feature is to require school principals to meet mountainous paperwork requirements, including the writing of Continuous School Improvement Plans, to name just one.

By now it's obvious that Excellence for All is not working.

She does get a few things wrong:

Consider Ingraham's staff. The principal cannot decide who does or does not teach at Ingraham. 

Not true.  The principals are part of the hiring committee.  Can a principal prevent some assignments?  Not all the time.

Further:

 Teachers at Ingraham High are micromanaged by the central district. For example, the district requires Ingraham's teachers to use the weak Discovery Series math curriculum, a curriculum judged "mathematically unsound" by the state Board of Education. 

Interesting reading.

Playground

Need a new playground for your school?  A national organization, KaBoom! is accepting applications from non-profit, child-serving organizations and schools serving low-income, high-need communities.  Please contact Sara Fry at (202) 464-6411 or sfry@kaboom.org with any questions.