Adventures in Town Government
So when I arrived at last Tuesday’s Tiverton School Committee workshop on merit pay for teachers, I set up such that I could capture the faces of speakers in the audience. But the committee out-thought me and positioned a microphone at the table typically set aside for the stenographer, and by the time I realized…
Thankfully, the Tiverton School Committee’s workshop on merit pay is much better attended than has been, well, any other meeting since the poorly considered passage of the retroactive teacher contract. Maybe 50 people. School Committee Chairman Jan Bergandy mentioned some communications that he’s received from teachers to the effect of: “How dare you let people…
I’ve got a letter in the online version of the Sakonnet Times (prospectively in the print edition out tomorrow) that begins thus: Residents who wish to understand the gradual deterioration of Rhode Island’s public school system need only contrast school committee meetings addressing two issues: teacher contract negotiations and abysmal standardized testing results. The passion…
The Tiverton School Committee meeting has gotten around to the abysmal NECAP science scores, which I described when they came out. Superintendent Bill Rearick has run through the process of evaluating the problem, yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda. It takes some years to turn things around. The East Bay Collaborative is attempting to come up with…
On my way home from the school committee meeting, I caught part of Matt Allen’s conversation about towns (including Tiverton) requiring residents to put out their recycle bins in order to have their trash picked up. I share Matt’s impulse to decry the nanny-state aesthetic, but having sat through a number of town-hall discussions on…
I hadn’t intended to attend tonight’s school committee meeting in Tiverton, but I saw on the agenda that they’d be discussing the item on the floor today: full-day kindergarten, rather than the current half day. Superintendent Bill Rearick put the additional cost at $223,953 per year, although he noted that, with next year’s financial difficulty…
My latest video blog is about open negotiations, drawing on material from Tiverton, but applicable elsewhere. I’d be especially interested in feedback on this one, inasmuch as I tried some new tricks (in an effort to throw myself at the learning curve) and am still trying to get a sense of appropriate content for the…
Yes, this is a local instance, but I’ve no doubt whatsoever that similar opinions exist — and the same arguments would be made — in towns across Rhode Island, were school committees to begin considering a demand for open negotiations. I’ve posted video of the discussion about the topic at the last school committee meeting…
From a press release just out from the East Providence School Committee: The proposal calls for a collaboration among “stakeholders” in developing the system of evaluating teachers that will be the basis for paying them beginning in 2011. The “stakeholders” would include parents, teachers, administrators, the teachers’ union and educational experts from Rhode Island and…
Doesn’t it seem that school districts somehow always just happen to find money? I mean, sometimes a car’s brake lines just happen to go the day after it’s been in the shop for a tuneup, but it’s difficult to know what to make of the Woonsocket superintendent’s claim that the district can now hire a…