Short Shrift for Education

As I headed off to my church men’s club meeting this morning I thought back on yesterday’s Education meeting in the safe surroundings of my Toyota I cut lose with a string of vivid imprecations. Reading today’s Trib story about the meeting you would not imagine that it could have had such a dramatic impression on me. But the second sentence highlights the gravity of what we barely discussed because we scheduled the meeting on the same day as township elections and thus only allotted fifteen minutes per agenda item:

That second sentence?

With 75 percent of its freshmen class deficient in math and 67 percent in reading, the school [Denfeld] can only do so much, she said.

When I ran for the school board I had the Trib publish my thoughts that “gangrene” had set in in ISD 709. I’m furious to say that every news paper story of late has verified the sentiment I expressed even though it provoked a bit of a backlash. I told the Board that back in 1987 I was teaching in Morgan Park Middle school and was concerned because too many of my seventh and eighth graders were not proficient in reading and writing. But……and this is critical, there was nothing like a 67 percent deficiency in my student’s reading. Thirty percent would be a fair guess (and this is only a guess) but not double that percentage plus.

This is as close as I can come to confirming my long suspicion that student needs utterly fell by the wayside as we built our monument to education called the Red Plan. We switched kids and teachers and schools around for five years at the convenience of contractors and JCI as it sped along to grab our money and run. Education was an after thought. Now, years later, we are seeing the Red Plan’s most costly legacy – our utter failure to educate our children. And we Board members were given a lousy fifteen minutes to discuss this.

That’s not completely fair. After my light for questions was ignored to move on to the next fifteen minute subject I finally got a chance to ask some questions when we ended the meeting with ten minutes to spare. Chair Harala allowed us to return to the subject before the 6 PM cut off. By that time one of two teachers who had come to talk to us had left, Mr. White, a math teacher. He had told us before he left after our first fifteen minutes that he had students in his trigonometry class who didn’t know their multiplication tables.

I didn’t even know we had any of the two dozen Denfeld teachers in the audience who had corresponded with the Board as we began eating up our first fifteen minutes with a lot of Boardroom pontificating. It was only after I expressed frustration that the meeting with the teachers long sought by Art Johnston and me had left us a miserable fifteen minutes with no teachers that they were introduced for seven minutes of interrogation. Talk about short shrift. I was embarrassed for myself for the Board and for our “shabby, shabby, shabby” treatment of these teachers. That’s what I wrote in my notes of the meeting.

When told we had to go on with our next agenda item I left the table to talk to the remaining teacher to ask my question. I told him that I had the same question for him and the faculty that I had given his principal last year. If it was in the School Board’s power to grant any wish what would he/they ask for? I was told that he didn’t feel he could speak for the entire faculty and that, anyway, the teachers realized they had not offered us any solutions. (and solutions will be hard to come by because most likely they will all involve money)

I also briefly chatted with his principal, Tonia Sconiers, at the end of the meeting to make sure she didn’t object to my coming over and talking to the faculty. She was most gracious and suggested that she could set up a meet and greet for me.
by pointing out that Chair Seliga-Punyko had forcefully refused to let me meet with the Quality Steering Committee. This is a committee made up of administrators and teachers to discuss joint concerns. Instead I had to rely on her appointee to the QSC, Member Rosie Loeffler-Kemp, to tell us what was discussed. I hadn’t heard back from her appointee so as per usual I was left in the dark. I may have made some people feel a tad defensive. As we hurried on to our adjournment Rosie offered some generalities that only whetted my appetite for real information.

As we abruptly quit two hours later I commented that this was the second important board meeting that had been cut short this year. Chair Seliga-Punyko looked over at me and said she thought we had had a satisfactory discussion or words to that effect. She feels the same way about the topic of the Red Plan.

The only person in the room during the meeting that I know for sure lives in a township told me afterward she was unimpressed with our reason for quitting our so early even if the early adjournment was mandated by state law. She was a former township officer.

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