Here's the column that Kate Fratti promised last week from her recent discussions with the Emperor and Angry Al.
Roadblock to drastic changes
Continuing their investigation into ways to reduce costs in Morrisville School District, Bill Hellmann and Al Radosti met with a Delaware Valley High School representative Tuesday afternoon.
She arrived at Hellmann’s West Bridge Street office just as a reporter and I were leaving it. We’d spent 90 minutes with Hellmann, Radosti and board member Bill Farrell, who agreed to share their rationale for proposing drastic changes to the financially strapped school system.
How drastic? They seem to have given up hope of any merger with neighboring Pennsbury. So, by September 2009, some board members hope to have closed at least one grade school, maybe two, and consolidated all grades in the middle/senior high school building. That is unless, by then they’ve been able to tuition highschoolers out at substantial reductions in cost per student. In that case, the current high school building would hold just K-8.
DVH is best known for educating at-risk kids, but President Dave Shulick has said it is accredited and experienced in regular education. Although Shulick has expressed interest in privatizing Morrisville High, Hellmann maintains he met with DVH this time to learn more about how alternative schools work. I have trouble buying that, but he’s insistent.
As for changes, Hellmann acknowledges the high school would need renovations to accommodate new grades, but that’s the least of obstacles.
The roadblock to consolidation and severe cost-cutting is a 5-year teacher contract that prevents furloughs or any substantial change to the student-staff ratio until 2012. Morrisville’s student-staff ratio stands at12.3 to 1, which doesn’t always give a true picture of class size, but does dictate the number of professionals who must stay on the rolls. There are 71 teachers, 1 psychologist, 3 guidance counselors and a nurse and two gifted/instructional support aides for fewer than 1,000 kids.
Hellmann said savings realized by farming out high-schoolers could be used to reduce teaching ranks. “Maybe retirement incentives,” Hellmann said.
He conceded Morrisville, under the direction of Superintendent Beth Yonson, is successfully educating children in its elementary schools, but says the high school has become a last resort for kids failed by the Trenton school system across the river. They move into Morrisville at very low reading and math levels. “We can’t be the special education center for Bucks and Mercer counties,” he laments.
Radosti, whose gruff way of expressing his unfiltered thoughts about kids today, changes in society and Morrisville’s proximity to the Trenton school system has won few friends among more liberalminded residents, says he’s weary of being accused of being racist and anti-education just because he wants to cut costs so people his age can keep their homes. He raises his voice two decibels to explain to me just how weary.
A Morrisville grad and a retired police officer, he worked two and three jobs to send a son to Notre Dame High School and a daughter to Grey Nun Academy. In each case, because he feared Morrisville classrooms were too disruptive. Nothing like the school system he enjoyed years before them. Don’t tell him he doesn’t value education.
Hellmann sent all but one of his kids to Conwell-Egan Catholic. He has approached CEC about a tuition program for Morrisville.
Neither man pretends to have any warm and fuzzy emotional ties to a school system they say is a drain on its townspeople. It’s a problem, Hellmann says.
It looks like he’s working to be rid of it — and soon.
Monday, June 16, 2008
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5 comments:
DEAR NEIGHBORS,
The primary election is May 15th, 2007. You will be voting for six school board positions. This election will decide the future course of education in our school district..
We are the candidates that pledge to work together with the parents and residents, in an open and honest partnership in the best interest of our children’s education.
With your help we pledge:
to provide a quality education for our children.
a curriculum that will enable our children to achieve proficiency on the PSSA tests and academic excellence.
state of the art technology for grades K through 12.
a financial management plan to assure every possible dollar goes into educational programs and materials and stops waste.
to STOP the outrageous yearly double digit tax increases.
We are the candidates that DO NOT want this proposed pre K-12 school building as we believe it is poorly designed, will be cheaply constructed, and could never be built for only 30 Million. The plan originally described by the current school board has been downgraded into an inferior, substandard building that will have 5 year olds mingling with 18 year olds on the same campus.
Our children and our future children deserve better than a school not meant to last more than 20 years. The current school board has refused to consider any alternatives since the feasibility study was prepared by the same architects hired for the project. They have not included the people of this community in the planning.
We are paying the highest school taxes in Bucks County while our students’ test scores are among the lowest in the state. Administrative costs per student are among the highest in Pennsylvania. Are you aware that the current cost to educate a student in the Morrisville School District is $22,000.00 per student per YEAR? Did you know that projections increase costs to over $30 thousand dollars per student per year by 2012?
WE CAN AND WILL DO BETTER!
We will address the physical condition of our buildings!
We will form Community Advisory Panels comprised of residents, parents, seniors, etc. to take suggestions and make the school board a more transparent governing entity!
We will implement a maintenance plan with accountability to assure that buildings are never allowed to deteriorate again!
We will demand that administration have accountability standards for instruction to assure that our children learn!
We will stress academic and behavioral standards for our students. Every child needs to feel safe in our schools!
Where exactly do they plan to cram all the kids? Seriously. How many classrooms are vacant in the high school? I'd really like to know. I know the elementary schools are pretty well packed.
On another note, what experience does DVHS have in "regular education," as stated by David Schulick? Here's how their website describes themselves: "Delaware Valley High School is one of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s oldest private licensed, accredited and "approved" high schools specializing in "at risk" high school youth with motivational and/or behavioral issues.
A full service alternative educational facility, offering a range of unique educational services for "at risk" youth, designed to teach responsibility, instill motivation, and turn potential "drop outs" or "problem students" into High School graduates, and facilitate post graduate education." No mention of regular education anywhere on their website.
Don't get me wrong, I am glad that there are schools like DVHS that do what they do, and they appear to do it well. I'm just not convinced that they *are* experienced in regular education and I am skeptical that there would be an attempt to combine our school with an alternative school, which is unacceptable, or how they can educate the kids at significant savings without drastically cutting the curriculum and programs.
And I certainly do not believe the gang of three met with DVHS "to learn more about how alternative schools work."
I'm not buying it. Nope.
....all the time that some spend reading what we are writing could of been used to search the world wide web to do some research on alternative schools!
Who says the Morrisville School Board isn't ahead of the curve? Why, they're trying to wash their hands of the entire district! From today's BCCT.
Schools whitewashing the importance of hand washing
By REBECCA SCHWINDEMAN
Spend time at Pennsbury school board meetings and you will notice that it is not about the kids. It is also not about the parents as they have only five minutes each after the technology hype, fluffy PR demo, or meaningless carefully selected statistical monologues have ended, cameras have packed up and gone home and the citizens who are left have almost lost the will to live much less argue. The presence of the press is irrelevant because next to nothing about the meeting appears in newspapers and little in the minutes of public comment.
One could have already guessed that it is not about the kids from the chaotic school calendar. Experts agree that kids need structure. They learn better, behave better, and are more secure.
With an array of circles, squares, slashed diamonds, and a confusing half circle, for six conference half-days, 11 teacher workshop days, and 18 holidays, it takes some effort to decipher — much less coordinate — it with having a life or holding down a job, unless you work for the school system.
This doesn't even include the kindergarten conference days that do not appear on any calendar; or the “elementary professional teacher half days,” which appear only on the “activity calendar”; and the fact that the last day of school is a half day, which is noted only on the cable channel.
One could have guessed that it is not about the kids or parents at Edgewood because scheduling of author appearances and children's holiday sing have “no capacity” for parents because they do not stagger assemblies like other schools across the country.
One could have guessed it from the baby wipe donation requests because “the bathrooms by the cafeteria are too small to accommodate an entire grade level” coming from recess into lunch. Having always taken for granted that kids are washing their hands in a safe healthy school environment in adequate facilities; in Pennsbury, nothing can be taken for granted.
One could have guessed by the lack of a hand washing policy like the State Department of Education Action Plan for Hand Washing and Hygiene, which puts the responsibility of monitoring and implementing hand washing with soap and water on staff, not kids. Sanitizers, whether gels or wipes, are approved only as an adjunct or when soap and water is not available. Bucks County Deptartment of Health requires soap and water to be available.
Pennsbury wants the kids to be independent and responsible, because the adults have abdicated their responsibility to them. Kids at Edgewood, for example, have to ask for a pass, compete for four sinks for every 100 kids, get back in line and wolf down lunch in 20 minutes. Lunches already run from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., an hour past federal guidelines.
How did schools get so overscheduled that they cannot spare time for hand washing in an age of MRSA, viral skin disease, superbugs, norovirus epidemics and looming threat of bird flu? Or maybe this is the link?
Administrators think they know more than the CDC, FDA, Bucks County Department of Health, and Pennsylvania Department of Education experts and say that sanitizers are good enough. But research shows wipes to be only 50-percent effective vs. soap and water at 99-plus percent. Even cruise ships have started adding hand washing fountains by the restaurants as sanitizers have had little effect against the hardy norovirus.
Pennsbury has raised capacity to school buildings by adding modular classrooms WITHOUT upgrading cafeteria, gym, restrooms; not to mention adopting less-stringent international fire code regulations to calculate capacity.
Kids need BASICS FIRST like sinks, restrooms, safe modern playground equipment and structure not chaos.
Property values and the quality of residents an area attracts and retains depend on the quality of the schools. A community is only as good and as healthy as its schools where children are taught to follow the rules. What are they learning today? That knowledge is something to tuck away like that bottle of sanitizer they carry around; something to give their parents false security and prevent them from getting involved, like supporting strike free education, and voting out those who don't put the kids first.
School board and administrators, what IS it about?
Rebecca Schwindeman, Lower Makefield, mother of four, ages six to 26. She holds a master's degree in library science and a bachelor's degree in biology.
OH PLEASE!!!! Angry Al Radosti is a bitter old man who chooses to take his bitterness out on the students of the district.
One would think that as an alumnus of the school system he would have some pride in it. As a shcool board member and graduate of Morrisville HS he should be showing support and positivity instead of his constant put downs to the children and the administration. What purpose does that serve???
He may have valued education for his own kids but he certainly doesn't value it for the kids of this community and he has no business being on the board. He and the emperor's other cronies have not had one original thought of their own since they became the majority in December. They basically follow Bill Hellman's lead without question
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