School
Board Update
November 9, 2005
Dear Five Sisters and South End neighbors,
If you have felt a lack of exciting school board news lately, fear not. The next few months promise a host of discussions about the future of our schools that will be interesting, difficult, and hopefully in the end produce genuine progress for our most important constituents – the children of Burlington.
There are quite a few issues on the burner right now, so I hope you all will forgive a somewhat lengthy review. The easiest news is that our updated policy on gifts to the district passed “first reading” unanimously last night. If all goes well, the district will sign off on the policy next month, and from then on we will not accept gifts that are deemed to promote “commercial interests” in the schools. The policy has been discussed and quoted fairly extensively in the media – please let me know if you have any questions.
Many members of the public came last night to express their support for a resolution favoring a livable wage for the district’s paraeducators, custodial, and food service staff who currently earn less than the roughly $12.00/hour calculated as ‘livable’ in Burlington. These voices were compelling, poignant, and the merits of the cause are obvious. The Board strongly supports the goal of paying our valued employees a livable wage. It may seem then to be counterintuitive that the Board defeated the resolution by a vote of 7-5. Your Ward 5 reps Fred Lane and I both spoke and voted strongly against the resolution (I even forced a vote on tabling the discussion). Why does that make sense? This is entirely a matter of process, rather than end result.
At our (seven-hour) Board retreat in August, we unanimously identified raising the salaries of our lowest-wage employees as one of our six top priorities for the year. The Board directed the administration to crunch the numbers so that we could best move forward on this goal even within the larger context of a financial mess (lower state and federal funds paired with higher energy and health care costs, etc.), with the understanding that real dollar benefit to these workers would be accomplished within the context of the (seven) contract negotiations the Board will engage in the coming eighteen months. The paraeducator contracts, for example, come up eleven months from now.
The resolution proposed last night was not typical of the items usually on our agenda. In general, the committees of the Board (finance, curriculum and policy, and technology) hash out the language of proposals for action, and then present polished text to the full Board when consensus in the committee has been reached. Because the finance committee already was making progress towards this issue, it had no need for a resolution to do what it already was doing. What was presented last night as a resolution would not have caused a single worker to bring home a higher paycheck. Instead, it was drafted for the purposes of political grandstanding, and primarily was designed to placate the men and women who really need the raise. I believe that my role on the Board is to improve the lives of our children and employees, not the political prospects for people who want to get their name in the newspaper. As I said last night, I am one hundred percent for Board action that puts more money in the paychecks of our lowest-paid employees, and one hundred percent against the Board wasting its time debating rhetoric. Fred had a great quote on the front page of the Free Press this morning on this issue. We will have to be smart and careful this year to get our paraeducators, custodial and food services staff the generous raises they deserve. Defeating this resolution was, ironically, a great step in that direction.
Speaking of wasting time, it is hard to imagine getting through the year if we do so. Contract negotiations with our teachers have kicked off, and we already have in hand two applications for the Superintendent’s position, with more expected between now and mid-December. In even bigger news perhaps, the administration presented its first stab at a budget and reorganization plan that “implements (stated) Board objectives,” most notably our goal to close the achievement gap between students from higher-, middle- and lower-income households and cut hundred of thousands of dollars from our budget. The administration plan should be all over the news before this e-mail makes it into your inbox. The most controversial element in the proposal is the re-purposing of Barnes (great bureaucratic-speak) from elementary school to administration headquarters, early education, Horizons and Ontop center. Also in the plan is the goal of selling our Taft and Ira Allen buildings, and redistricting the elementary schools so that the kids at Barnes would be divided between Champlain, Edmunds and C.P. Smith schools. Wheeler would become a ‘magnet’ or enrichment school that would attract kids from other areas of the city with a K-5 foreign language program, a laptop initiative for all 4th and 5th graders, and special math curriculum. The goal of all this is to meet the objective of having every elementary school reflect a heterogenous sampling of the city’s socioeconomic strata, with each school having roughly 45% kids who qualify for “free and reduced lunch.” I will be writing a lot more on this idea in the future (as will the press), and feel free to contact me and/or Fred for further info. on the process as it evolves. In the meantime, please be assured that this is not even close to a “done deal” but rather a first contribution to the dialogue about how we solve our stratification and budget issues. You might want to mark the following dates on your calendar: The Board will hold public hearings on the budget on December 20th and January 3rd, with a final vote on the budget at our regular meeting (7 p.m.) on January 10th. The first two sessions will be held at the high school, and the Board meeting most likely will be held in our Ira Allen building on Colchester Ave.
Amy Werbel
12 Catherine Street
contact info:
awerbel@bsdvt.org /
flane@bsdvt.org / jcollins@bsdvt.org