School Board President: Kristi Swett
In our July 9, 2013, School Board retreat up at Snowbird, I brought up the issue of the OCR complaint in the midst of audible sighs from a fellow board members Laurel Young and Heather Bennett.
I have already documented the Superintendent’s reaction in a previous blog posting . In this blog posting, I would like to highlight the Board President’s inaction:
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04/09/13 School Board Meeting (audio)
Board member Tiffany Sandberg who was elected with me this past November, asked for the data on the turn over rate of teachers in Title 1 schools.
The superintendent claims the data cannot be released. The board president dances around the issue by stating the following:
- “we look at this issue all the time”
- “we talked about it, you were not on the board at that time”
- “the other part of it too, in my opinion….our Title 1 schools are filled with phenomenal people”
As the board president indicated they had talked about this issue prior to me being on the school board. It came up in the January meeting of 2012:
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01/03/12 School Board Meeting
In the audio, you will hear the board president state that she is alarmed at the high concentration of ‘ineffective teachers’ in Title I schools.
She exclaimed:
- “obviously this is alarming”
- “What do we do?”
- “What are we empowered to do?”
In that meeting they were shown this power point slide by Christine Marriott form the district’s assessment department:
This document states that “students in Title I schools have a five times chance of being with a marginal or ineffective teacher”.
Here is a word document version of the slide:
The flash-point for the OCR COMPLAINT happen when I asked in the February 2013, meeting why there was such a high number of ineffective teachers concentrated in the Title I schools in my neighborhood.
The response was that it as due more to ‘inexperienced’ teachers as a result of the high turn over rate of teachers in those schools.
The point to be made here, is that the board president stated last week that they have data on this issue for the past three years. We have them on record discussing this issue over a year ago. Yet, they have taken no actions to rectify the situation and have not demonstrated a desire to even talk about it.
The board president’s reaction to this issue is a perfect illustration of the mindset we are dealing with. For some odd reason the current School Board will ‘talk’ about an issue, sprinkle it with self congratulatory acclamations about the adults, and somehow feel they have met their obligation to the students of our District.
All the while, the original problem remains in place, allowed to spread like a plague. With this type of mentality in play, we should not be surprised that the dropout rate for ethnic minority students continues to soar.