August 21, 2014 Board Meeting

As always, these are my opinions only and not the opinions of the Pendleton County School Board or any other individual board members.

 

Tonight, we honored 14 retirees at our board meeting- Leonard Whalen, Gary Grigson, Virginia Wright, Cheryl Hughes, Kim Simpson, Karen Delaney, Lynn Orr, Debra Holland, Brenda Kells, and Charles Elliot.  Retirees honored but not present were Barbara Hutchinson, Bill Ockerman, Helen Haywood, and Joel Nahari.  I thank each of you for your commitment to the Pendleton County Schools and most importantly to the impact you have had on each of our students’ lives.  I have a plaque next to my desk and it reads “A teacher takes a hand, opens a mind, and touches a heart.”  While it says teacher, it could easily read a bus driver, a custodian, or a counselor.  My point is that each of you has been instrumental in the emotional and educational development of our students.  Thank you for getting our students home safely at night.  Thank you for cleaning up after them at school and for preventing others from getting sick.  Thank you for making an impact on our students that you will never see or even know.

July 31, 2014 Board Meeting

As always, these are my opinions only and not the opinions of the Pendleton County School Board or any other individual board members.

 

In the spring of 2014, the Kentucky Center for School Safety performed a safety assessment at Pendleton County High School and Southern Elementary.  Mr. Chad Simms (PCHS Principal) and Mr. Mark Hegyi (Southern Elementary Assistant Principal) presented the safety assessment findings to our board.  They addressed issues such as building access, tobacco use, bullying, consistent rule enforcement, and active supervision.  In fact, if everyone in our district participated in the active supervision of our students, issues such as bullying, smoking, etc. would become less of an issue.  Active supervision, similar to active parenting, is the key to addressing many of the issues plaguing our schools.  When a parent is present, children are less likely to get into trouble.  The same holds true for active supervision at the schools.  Thanks to both of them for sharing their insight.

 

July 14, 2014 Board Meeting

As always, these are my opinions only and not the opinions of the Pendleton County School Board or any other individual board members.

 

Director of Special Programs Pam Harper addressed our board tonight regarding the Pre-school program.  Because of the elimination of mid-day transportation, our Pre-school student enrollment has gone down significantly.  This elimination of mid-day transportation was done to save the district $50,000.  To get enrollment back up, Ms. Harper suggested that we implement a Four-year-old Pre-school Wrap-around Program.  Essentially, Pendleton County Schools would provide instruction to the students for a half-day.  Then students would be transported to local contracted day care programs for the remainder of the day.  Transportation would be provided to the day care program through the school bus system.  Some of the students may start their day at the daycare facility, and then they come to Pre-school in the afternoon.  I strongly support early Pre-school education and this is why:  Research strongly supports that early learning plays a crucial role in helping students prep for kindergarten.  Many of our students in Pendleton County (68.5%) are not kindergarten ready.  In our March meeting, Ms. Harper mentioned that Pendleton County scored 13^th from the bottom of all districts on kindergarten readiness.  The only districts in Northern Kentucky falling below Pendleton County are Gallatin County, Newport, Dayton, and Augusta.  The children in our county are coming to school with great needs.  It is difficult to catch them up if they enter kindergarten already behind.  If we don’t reach these students early, it impacts each and every one of us.  When these students fall behind, they become disruptive in the classroom.  This disruption prevents every child from learning, not just the disruptive student.  If they fall behind, they are more likely to drop out of school.  Dropping out of school puts them at risk of earning less income.  Over a lifetime, they will earn an average of $375,000 less than high school graduates, and roughly $1 million less than college graduates (Center for Labor Market Studies, 2007).  This ultimately impacts the tax base in our county.  High school dropouts are more likely to get in trouble with the law.  If they are incarcerated, who pays for it?  We pay for it as taxpayers.  Therefore, I strongly support Pre-school education because of all of these reasons and more.

 

During board comments, I mentioned my school board training in Lexington this past weekend.  I heard one of the most inspiring messages I have ever heard at our board trainings.  Dr. John Draper shared with the audience that students should be able to nominate successors, someone who has supported their success.  I recommended that a program be established that allowed students to do just that.  A successor program would allow employees to feel valued and appreciated.

 

June 16, 2014 Board Meeting

As always, these are my opinions only and not the opinions of the Pendleton County School Board or any other individual board members.

 

Tonight was Courtney Moore’s first school board meeting.  Courtney was elected by the student body to serve this year as Pendleton County’s first school board student representative. I am so glad we brought student representation to the board last year.  Having Courtney there will remind each of us of why we are serving on this board and the impact our decisions can have on students.  I look forward to having her on our team and learning from her this coming year.

 

May 29, 2014 Fifth Thursday Meeting: Pendleton County Schools Pay Scales 2014-15

As always, these are my opinions only, and not the opinions of the Pendleton County School Board or any other individual board members.

Pay scales for Pendleton County School employees were up for Board approval at this meeting.  My reasoning for opposing these scales will sound eerily similar to last year’s reasoning (May 30, 2013 Meeting that was blogged on June 1, 2013).

Classified Salary Schedule There will be debate about the size on any raises, but the pay raises were applied fairly across the entire Classified Salary Schedule.  Therefore, I was in favor of this portion of the 2014-15 proposal.

Certified Salary Schedule As was the case last year, this fair and equitable treatment of compensation was not the case for the Certified portion of the proposal.  The best description I can find for these pay scales is “targeted favoritism”.  In order to understand the trends, one should have all three of the 2012-13, 2013-14, and 2014-15 Certified Pay Scales.  You then need to simply compute the percentage change from the prior year’s scale for every spot (or cell) on the scale (every step and Rank column).  This might take 1-2 hours for both year’s changes.

Problem #1: The Senior Rank 1 Group Last year’s trend was continued this year by applying approximately 2% increases to the cells of those hired in 1991 (or before) that have their Rank 1.  There is a significant reduction (-7.1%) in the cell just behind this group.  This year that cell is the 22 year step.  Last year it was the 21 year step (-6.4%).  If this trend continues, you could expect an even larger correction (8% or more) to the 23 year step next year.  This “snowplow wave of money” is good news if you were hired in 1991 or prior, and terrible news to those junior to this cell.  Interestingly, Mr. Strong states that he is doing this to smooth out the bumps in the pay scale and make sure that each year everyone is seeing an increase.  However, what is alarming is an even greater bump is being created in the pay scale where Mr. Strong will be attached this coming July (2014).  Mr. R. Anthony Strong will now be attached to the teacher’s pay scale with an index of 2.44.  This year group has cumulatively received an increase of 6% the last two years.  In my opinion, this is why our superintendent’s salary should never have been linked to our teacher’s pay scale.  Coincidence?  I leave that up to you to decide.  The temptation is simply too great to “scale up”, or protect or improve one’s own paycheck.

Problem #2: The Junior Rank 3 Group Another Certified group sure to be extremely disappointed this year is our Rank 3 teachers.  These teachers face a requirement to get their Master’s degree by their tenth year, which will move them to the higher paying Rank 2 column.  The 7-10 year step in this column took hits ranging from -3.4% to -9.6%.  The district currently has no teachers in this group, but there are 14 teachers in the 1-6 year steps that will be in these cells in the next several years until they complete their Master’s degree.  Just when these junior teachers need the money to help pay for these self-funded graduate degrees, the rug is being “pulled out” in order to “smooth out” this column’s step increases.  How fair and equitable is this treatment from our Board that completely pays for our Superintendent’s doctorate degree?  Another consideration is that it becomes more difficult to attract new talent to our teacher ranks when the junior teacher pay scales become less attractive.

Ever-Growing Administration A very disturbing process added an administrator to our ranks at this meeting.  Best practice would be to address additions to our staff as an action agenda item on the Pendleton County School Board Meeting Agenda.  This was not the case for this meeting, as embedded in the salary schedule was the addition of a second Director of Curriculum and Assessment.  This staff addition leaves the general public in the dark, as they are not aware that a staff addition is occurring.  This is especially disturbing when conducted by a Superintendent that has been noted in an article in Kentucky Teacher (June 7, 2012) for “transparency”.  I also disagree with this staff addition because I believe this district is “administration heavy”, and I am reluctant to vote for additions especially when we have cut two teachers this year.  I did suggest converting the “Director of Districtwide Programs” to one of the two “Directors of Curriculum and Assessment” to make it administration neutral for this coming year.  Our board should be voting on added positions as separate action items and not buried in the middle of the approval of salary schedules.  This is bad business practice and doesn’t hold board members accountable to the ever increasing size of central office administration.

Why I voted “No” As was the case last year, I made a motion to separate the certified pay scales and the certified administrative salary indexes from the proposed action item, and vote on them separately.  Unlike last year, this motion failed when I did not get a second from my fellow Board members.  Therefore, I voted “No” on this large action item.

May 15, 2014 Board Meeting

As always, these are my opinions only and not the opinions of the Pendleton County School Board or any other individual board members.

 Welcome Courtney Moore!  Courtney has been selected by her classmates as Pendleton County’s first school board student representative.  Congratulations to you and your family.

We approved the tentative budget and the PGES evaluation model.  Northern Elementary piloted the PGES last year.  Mr. Pugh reported that the teacher peer evaluation has been received positively among his staff.  We also approved a paving project at Southern Elementary, which is in much needed repair.  Michele Crowley presented a technology report to the board.  I was really impressed with the sessions that were offered for the SpecTECHular PD Academy last year, and I am hoping my schedule will allow me to attend this event on August 6^th.

April 17, 2014 Board Meeting

As always, these are my opinions only and not the opinions of the Pendleton County School Board or any other individual board members.

 Custodial outsourcing was a topic that generated much public discussion for this board meeting.  The research I have read does not support outsourcing custodial services in small districts. 

·        The main reason is that custodians in small districts often wear many hats.  When bidding these services out, it is difficult to identify the portion of the costs that are “pure” custodial.  I believe our bids produced mixed results because of these hybrid positions.

·         When I attended the KSBA Conference in January, I spoke to a vendor that provides custodial services.  This vendor told me that the savings is primarily because the vendor can buy the cleaning supplies in bulk.  What impact would this outsourcing have on our local economy when the supplies are purchased from other parts of the country and brought here?

·         The vendor also told me that if we used their services, they would have to bring someone into our district to “manage” the custodians.  I immediately thought to myself the last thing we need in our district is another manager.

·        One final note on custodial outsourcing.  The custodians in our district have helped care for our students.  They have cleaned up after our children when they have been sick in the classroom.  They assist our kids when they need help tying their shoes.  They provide an extra security measure in our district because they often know who should be on the school grounds or who shouldn’t be.  It takes many people to educate our students-our teachers, our counselors, our cafeteria workers, our bus drivers, our custodians, etc.  Let us value each member of the team and not treat them like they can be easily discarded.

We voted (3-2) to move forward on a school board student representative.  I am very excited about this and glad I pushed to have this introduced in our district.  While at NKU, I have seen firsthand how much student voice can add to the discussion.  I believe this will be beneficial to our district and help keep us focused on what is important- student success.

The Board voted to add a full-time school psychologist in our district.  In previous years, we had a school psychologist come into our district once a week to do the necessary assessments.  Sam Jones, Director of Special Education, mentioned that our students needed to be seen and services were being delayed because they were not able to be assessed in a timely manner.  Because of my work at the hospital, I have cared for many people that have overdosed on heroin or have struggled with addiction.  Many of these patients are from our county and have children in our district.  I want to ensure that we have the resources available to identify students that may need psychological help because we cannot grow them academically until these issues are identified.