Chalk up another one for the Emperor. For all his public posturing and eyebrow wiggling about the tech school budget, instead of doing the hard work of talking to the other districts and working collaboratively toward a common goal, the Bensalem school board approved the budget, making Bristol's unanimous veto and Morrisville's delay actions irrelevant. The budget is now law.
BUCKS COUNTY TECHNICAL HIGH SCHOOL
Tech school budget approved
Expenditures for 2008-09 are up 4.4 percent over this year’s expenses.
By JOAN HELLYER
STAFF WRITER
Bucks County Technical High School will be able to implement its estimated $21.7 million budget for 2008-09, now that enough sending districts have approved the financial plan, the school’s administrative director said.
The budget had been in limbo for about a month by a perceived lack of movement in efforts to revise the school’s funding formula for future budgets, officials said.
It left the comprehensive high school that serves the Bensalem, Bristol, Bristol Township, Morrisville, Neshaminy and Pennsbury school districts just short of the approvals needed to enact the budget. The tech school bylaws require at least four of the six sending districts and at least 28 board members from the districts served by the school, which is in Bristol Township, to approve the budget.
The Bristol, Neshaminy and Pennsbury school boards approved the proposed budget in April, with 26 board members from those districts voting in favor of it.
However, the Bristol Township board unanimously rejected the budget to protest inaction on proposed changes to the funding formula involving special education students. In addition, the Bensalem and Morrisville school boards delayed votes on it.
The logjam ended Wednesday night when the Bensalem board voted unanimously to approve the budget after the tech school’s joint board committee agreed to tackle the funding formula issue this summer.
Morrisville’s board again postponed its vote on the tech budget last week, but that will have no impact now because enough sending districts and board members have already approved it, officials said.
The 2008-09 budget is almost $1 million greater than this year’s budget, administrators said. Each district’s cost share will increase 4.4 percent, they added.
About 1,500 students in ninth through 12th grade attend the school, which offers studies in approximately three dozen trades.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
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5 comments:
Can we just pull out of the Tech School too, or were our hands tied by the prior board?
I don't want to give anyone ideas like this, but I'm sure it has been thought of.
I'm sorry I ended the last sentence in a preposition.
was it a vote won by a landslide?
We can not pull out. Even if we relocated students to a different tech school (an idea explored by past boards) we are still obligated for bond monies floated for the building of the comprehensive school.
This, by the way, is one other reason why we won't seriously be considered as a candidate for merging, we bring along the Tech School bond obligation which any school accepting us would have to take on.
I understand the idea and reasoning behind the delayed vote, but if it was delayed without working toward progress, we become nothing more than a festering abscess.
I'm afraid most people don't know or care what all the pus is about, as long as their taxes go down.
Guest opinion from today's BCCT.
Parents? Teachers? Teachers Unions? Students? Seniors? Yuppies? Prior Boards? Special Ed.? Communism? The CIA? The Mafia? The Freemasons? Lyndon Johnson? Man, I wish we could just settle on one thing to blame and focus all scorn and ridicule on that. Otherwise, we're just gonna keep spinning our wheels forever, as if it's a complex tapestry of inter-related societal forces that requires a broad-minded holistic approach at the local, state, & federal levels.
Public schools aren’t failing our kids — parents are
By PETER WAITZE
Bucks County Courier Times
Arecent Celebrity Cipher (Apr 8, 2008) was quite apropos: “We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.”
In the same edition of the newspaper that ran that quote, syndicated columnist Morton Kondracke wrote under a headline that said candidates should debate the failing public schools: “How many wake-up calls does America need before we make our failing public schools fit for the competitive challenges of the 21st century ... The United States today has one of the lowest high school graduation rates in the industrialized world. Three out of every 10 ninth-graders — and nearly half of all African-American and Hispanic ninth-graders — do not graduate on time.”
On May 13, Joseph P. Ryan echoed that sentiment and he too blamed the teachers and administrators and then went on to lament the cost to run our public schools. Space does not allow the cost topic to be discussed in this essay so I’ll stick to the performance of our schools.
I say the failures in the public schools are the parents’ fault because too many parents are not preparing their children to appreciate the value of an education. All too often kids in the classroom are falling asleep because they were up too late the night before or they are fooling around instead of paying attention to the teacher, wasting their time and the time of every other child in the classroom.
The best teacher in the world can’t teach a child who is not properly motivated or who is falling asleep at his desk. The teacher’s job is to teach and the student’s job is to learn. The teachers know their job. Now it’s time for the parents to teach their children that they are in school to learn. I have to hope that if the children knew why they were there, maybe they’d pay attention, maybe they’d learn, and maybe they wouldn’t drop out.
Kondracke went on to state that teacher’s unions object to accountability requirements — also opposed by right-wing Republicans as a federal takeover of state primacy over education. In other words, according to Kondracke, children fail because teachers aren’t doing their job, and that is a lie that flatters us.
The education of our youth is not just a civic responsibility; it’s a national necessity. The sad truth that we find bitter to swallow is that the students who are failing in our schools are failing because their parents are failing them. To be blunt, if we want better public schools we need to first find a way to create better parents. Blaming the teachers or the administrators for the performance of the students is putting the blame where it doesn’t belong and this misappropriation of blame insures that the problem will continue forever.
Private schools have it easy. They not only get to pick what students they want in their classrooms, they also get to pick the parents of the students who sit in their classes. Simply stated, if the parents haven’t convinced their children that an education is important, the private school has the option of refusing to enroll that student. Similarly, if a student in a private school is acting out, the school can expel him.
The end result is that classes in private schools are not as likely to be disrupted by disciplinary problems so more time can go into teaching. And since the children there are already motivated, the teachers don’t have to waste their time trying to motivate the class to learn. That is why private schools have a better chance of successfully educating our youth than public schools.
The obvious conclusion is that public schools aren’t failing our children and we aren’t going to solve the problem of educating our youth by blaming teachers for something over which they have no control. We have to find a way to make parents understand that once they create a child, they have responsibilities and priorities.
Peter Waitze, Bensalem, is a retired businessman, father and grandfather and former chairman of the Bensalem Democratic Party. Waitze is a former member of the Courier Times Editorial Board; he served six years in the U.S. Air Force, achieving the rank of captain.
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