Shameless
On September 17th, the Gazette ran an opinion piece exposing the fact that School District 11 has filed a lawsuit against the State Board of Education for requiring that D11 enter into an operational agreement with an online charter school, the Hope Academy. In setting a new standard for shameless behavior, D11 CFO Glen Gustafson has sent a letter to surrounding school districts begging them for money to help D11 in its lawsuit. In other words, not only is D11 throwing away D11 tax payer dollars towards this ridiculous lawsuit, but it is asking citizens of other districts to help defray the cost of this very stupid decision by the D11 board and administration.
D11 is facing a financial crisis that began in the 1990s as labor union purchased school boards turned a blind eye to poor classroom performance by teachers who were being led by inept administrators. Due to the decrease in the quality of education being offered by D11 schools, parents began to move to districts that tended to show an interest in educating kids. Those parents who remained within D11 boundaries began to home school, permit their kids into surrounding districts, or send their kids to charter schools.
To this day, D11 administrators and board members simply don’t get it. They somehow believe that they have a right to take ½ billion dollars from the tax payers, fail to use this money to adequately educate kids, and then force parents to send their kids to the failing schools. They are outraged when parents and business leaders take the initiative to create alternate choices for their children in efforts to give their kids the type of education that D11 personnel are simply not qualified to offer. Now they have stooped to a new low, begging surrounding tax payers to keep D11 students in rotting schools.
Not only is D11 begging for help to finance an absurd lawsuit, it once again has its hand ready to reach into the D11 tax payers’ pockets for an additional $20 million to add to the already $500 million budget. The last mill levy passed in 2000, and D11 made bold promises to the business community to garner support from the business community for that tax hike. These promises included a guarantee to meet 11 performance goals and to allow a bi-annual review of the district by a group called QPG. In each of the district reviews since the passage of the levy in 2000, QPG has noted that D11 has not kept its promises on these 11 goals. Each year, D11 tells the business community that they just need one more year and then they will meet those goals. The business leaders have been foolishly buying the district’s pleas for more time.
What does the district plan to do with this additional money that it can’t accomplish with its ½ billion dollar budget? They went to the old standby pledge: reduce class size. Yes, that’s right. Here you have a district that is hemorrhaging students, and they are telling us that they need money to reduce class size. D11 already has enough teachers to have class sizes of 16 or fewer per class. The goal based on the 2000 tax increase was an average class size of 22 students. The district is well below that average right now. If we are to believe that the addition of more teachers is the trick that will finally stop the train wreck that is coming in D11, then how can the district explain the poor performance of those schools in the district with the smallest student to teacher ratio? Oh wait a minute – that’s right. The explanation is what it has always been. Those students, well, you know, they are poor and minority, and everyone in the labor union and everyone with a higher level education degree in D11 will tell you that “those” students just can’t learn. So give them $20 million and that money will apparently be used to educate those students who can learn.
Remember the good old days when all of D11’s problems were blamed on those nasty board members who were elected in 2003? Remember how those nasty board members were causing undo stress by demanding that people be held accountable for their performance? Remember how all it would take to stop the sinking D11 ship was for those nasty board members to go away and allow people who care about children to guide the district? Welcome to the fantasyland that is D11. The ship continues to sink, the board continues to sleep, the labor union continues to do nothing, and the six figure earning bureaucrats continue to laugh at the tax payers for allowing them to play pretend with the lives of their students.
D11 is facing a financial crisis that began in the 1990s as labor union purchased school boards turned a blind eye to poor classroom performance by teachers who were being led by inept administrators. Due to the decrease in the quality of education being offered by D11 schools, parents began to move to districts that tended to show an interest in educating kids. Those parents who remained within D11 boundaries began to home school, permit their kids into surrounding districts, or send their kids to charter schools.
To this day, D11 administrators and board members simply don’t get it. They somehow believe that they have a right to take ½ billion dollars from the tax payers, fail to use this money to adequately educate kids, and then force parents to send their kids to the failing schools. They are outraged when parents and business leaders take the initiative to create alternate choices for their children in efforts to give their kids the type of education that D11 personnel are simply not qualified to offer. Now they have stooped to a new low, begging surrounding tax payers to keep D11 students in rotting schools.
Not only is D11 begging for help to finance an absurd lawsuit, it once again has its hand ready to reach into the D11 tax payers’ pockets for an additional $20 million to add to the already $500 million budget. The last mill levy passed in 2000, and D11 made bold promises to the business community to garner support from the business community for that tax hike. These promises included a guarantee to meet 11 performance goals and to allow a bi-annual review of the district by a group called QPG. In each of the district reviews since the passage of the levy in 2000, QPG has noted that D11 has not kept its promises on these 11 goals. Each year, D11 tells the business community that they just need one more year and then they will meet those goals. The business leaders have been foolishly buying the district’s pleas for more time.
What does the district plan to do with this additional money that it can’t accomplish with its ½ billion dollar budget? They went to the old standby pledge: reduce class size. Yes, that’s right. Here you have a district that is hemorrhaging students, and they are telling us that they need money to reduce class size. D11 already has enough teachers to have class sizes of 16 or fewer per class. The goal based on the 2000 tax increase was an average class size of 22 students. The district is well below that average right now. If we are to believe that the addition of more teachers is the trick that will finally stop the train wreck that is coming in D11, then how can the district explain the poor performance of those schools in the district with the smallest student to teacher ratio? Oh wait a minute – that’s right. The explanation is what it has always been. Those students, well, you know, they are poor and minority, and everyone in the labor union and everyone with a higher level education degree in D11 will tell you that “those” students just can’t learn. So give them $20 million and that money will apparently be used to educate those students who can learn.
Remember the good old days when all of D11’s problems were blamed on those nasty board members who were elected in 2003? Remember how those nasty board members were causing undo stress by demanding that people be held accountable for their performance? Remember how all it would take to stop the sinking D11 ship was for those nasty board members to go away and allow people who care about children to guide the district? Welcome to the fantasyland that is D11. The ship continues to sink, the board continues to sleep, the labor union continues to do nothing, and the six figure earning bureaucrats continue to laugh at the tax payers for allowing them to play pretend with the lives of their students.
posted by Craig Cox | 6:19 AM
3 Comments:
Note that D11 has already spent in excess of $100,000 on its lawusit against the State Board of Education and Hope Online. Last night, at their Board meeting, D11 requested additional funding for legal expenses which were described as necessary to "maximize opportunities for student achievement by positioning D11 school[s]to offer online educational programs." Wouldn't it be better to spend $100K developing a quality online program in D11 instead of funding lawyers? I don't understand how legal expenses equate to student achievement.
Of course you know that legal expenses have nothing to do with student achievement. Unfortunately, in D11, academic spending is equally lacking in relationship to student achievement. D11 needs money to fund its staff - that is what the mill levy is all about. Student achievement can be explained away easier than actually making the effort to educate kids.
Craig,
Here we go from Sheridan to...proxy boy strikes again leadership based on the opinion given to him by others.
D-11 narrows list of superintendent candidates to 3
http://www.gazette.com/articles/superintendent_47709___article.html/education_school.html,
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