In a weak moment I was talked into running for the school board. I have dodged it for years, but ran out of excuses. This was a typical small town (village) election: two of us ran unopposed for two seats. It's one of those stupid legal points that we have to hold an election even if it is unopposed, so the district pays for printing the ballots, programming the voting machine, and staffing the polls. The two seats were the only thing on the ballot, so there really wasn't much of a reason for anyone to vote. Even so we still got a pretty good turn-out. I received 100 votes. The school district serves 152 students over 45 square miles. Being an elected official, I expect to be treated with more respect on this board from this point forward. Tom
Be careful -- remember what that elected official Aaron Burr did to Alexander Hamilton -- Now, all that's left of Alex is a $10 bill ...:fencing:
Congrats on your "victory." But be careful...sometimes school boards can get nasty! We had plenty of entertaining meetings a couple of years ago, when the board was very anti-teacher and did some things of questionable legality. The high (low?) point of the year was when they had a local preacher arrested for crashing the meeting - as if you could crash an open public meeting. Now the preacher is on the board and those who had him arrested were voted out of office. Good times, I remember the meetings becoming the bi-weekly entertainment. Of course it gets old listening to a 20-minute tirade on why teachers are a bunch of lazy bums who should just shut up - isn't that why we pay them so much, so they'll be quiet? Some of the meetings are on youtube. Search for PUHSD and you'll see some hijinx - the best ones are titled "the harangue."
To get some respect you have to show some respect! eep: Shouldn't be a problem, come to think of it. Your posts are among the most respectful -- and informed -- around. Assuming your face-to-face discourse is comparable, the board and the village are among the winners. Congratulations!
Thanks guys, I appreciate the comments. As for school boards getting nasty, I am going to inherit a nasty issue right from the start. One of the current school board members is the parent of a special needs student. This parent/school board member has decided the district is not doing enough so he has sued the school while refusing to step down from the school board. We have already spent over a quarter of a million dollars on legal fees, which is a lot of money for a school district with only 152 students. You've got to love our legal system. A recall effort is presently under way. Tom
Please remember to respect your teachers as professionals. They aren't the teen-age high school graduates filling in until they get married of a hundred years ago. They are educated professionals. So please listen to them and trust they might know what they're talking about. As for the parent, I sympathize with the parents of special needs students. But.....they can suck a budget dry. I was out supervising for testing today. I observed the special day class who don't test. 8 students. 5 adults. A teacher and 4 aides. That teachers is probably paid about $45,000, plus benefits and retirement. Each of the aides gets about $25,000-$30,000, also with benefits. For 8 students. There is no budget for special ed from the state or the district. So the money to pay for those 8 students comes out of the same budget that pays for the rest of the students in the school. That means the other classes are larger so 5 adults can serve 8 students. (These students will never graduate from high school. They will probably never be independent enough to hold a job....or pay taxes.) You school board parent is looking at their kid and is very emotional about it. The rest of you need to look at the big picture and be very detached and impartial about it. While every child deserves an education, they don't deserve one at the expense of all of the other children. (This goes for behavior issues too.)
Congrats, remember that you represent people, not control them, listen to the people. As for the parent that is on the school board, that parent should be recalled, and reprimanded by the entire village, the board memeber just wasted $250,000 and not helped the school district one iota, the member was elected to look out for the school district, not cause the school district waste and fees.
We have our problem with special ed parents as well. The father of one has said that the minute we put a "quota" on the number of SPED kids in a classroom, he will sue. OK...let me figure this out...you don't WANT your kid in sped classes, so there was a push to mainstream them. Now there are so many kids who are sped, the mainstream course are ending up with higher and higher ratios of sped to non-sped. But if the district tries to cap the number of speds to less than 50% in each class, you have a problem with it? Isn't that the point of mainstreaming, so you DIDN'T have sped classes? It seems that once the class is majority sped, you are no longer a "regular" mainstream class, but now a sped class!
