A nearly packed house at the Emerson School Wednesday night had chance to hear all 14 candidates. They were seated by slate with the 2 independents ingeniously separating the "slates".
After brief opening remarks some cut short by the time restriction, the candidates were fed questions from the moderator who moved proceedings rapidly.
I do not intend to quote any individual candidate since I might unintentionally indicate for whom I was going to vote. Suffice to say though I have whittled my list to 4 not favoring any slate or individual for the 3 three year slots. Among them could be from the incumbents seeking reelection. However of that group all have been on the Board some for 9 years and must bear some responsibility for today's mess despite redeeming factors.
In response to a question about renting unused school space to Charter Schools I was surprised to hear about half being in favor of such action as a source of income! Since the district has to provide funds at least equal (and I may stand corrected) to the amount expended on in-system students for each attendee to a charter school, this seems like a matter of "taking money out of one pocket to place in the other". I can not see why we the public must pay to support somebody's unique idea of curriculum at the expense of the public facilities. Next we will be forced to allocate funds to private schools by vouchers or direct subsidies.
Responding to questions about seeking a superintendent for the system, the incumbents all said they had used a "headhunter" firm to find acceptable candidates meeting the standards the Board desired and they had interviewed the final 5? before making their selection. In essence they are denying responsibility for the farce. Their reaction was similar to a question regarding the CAP report, stating that it was Gallon's job to prepare that document by State regulations.
I left before the final 20 minutes and I am sure both Plainfield Plaintalker and Plainfield Today will have a report in detail.
This was a well organized session and I hope that the public interest shown here will be reflected on election day. Unfortunately as some one remarked to me the composition of the audience seemed to be that of grandparents.
9:30am: Addendum; I would clarify my statement about a final 4 which is actually 5 list of candidates for my note. I did not expect to come away from the forum with a cast in stone list of 3 for the 3 years and 1 for the 1 year terms. Instead, and what did take place was to eliminate those who by 8:30 pm last night I felt could not have the impact on the Board to effectively change the present Board/System status. So the five lucky ones (3 years) are diributed over incumbents, former members slate members and independents. One thn g I will not vote for a slate, I do not wish to have group of 3 or 4 with "political" ties as part of the 9 membership.
B
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Hello Doc,
ReplyDeleteAs I mentioned the other evening when I saw you, I would like to take this opportunity to briefly "educate" you on charter schools. The most important thing is that charters are public schools who are run like provate schools but are still accountable to the DOE just as a traditional public school is. We are unable and therefore do not cream our students. Student enrollment is done via audited public lottery 3x per year once a particular grade is filled with first-come, first-serve students, creating a wait-list situation for each grade. The K-8 configuration the Plainfield district instituted is a charter school model; the uniform policy is practically straight out of our (The Queen CIty Academy Charter School) student uniform policy. When charters were created about 15 years ago, the mistake made by the DOE was to have the traditional districts pay the funds for the charters out of their budgets, as opposed to paying dollars directly from the DOE. This is what has helped to establish the adversarial attitudes regular districts have against charters. The important thing to remember is although they (the Plainfield district) cuts the check to the charters, they retain a 10% administrative fee for doing so - and the money follows the student. So the districts actually make money from charters as they have no financial obligation or repsonsibility for the children who do not attend their schools. Also important to note is the Plainfield district spends almost $17K to educate a student, as opposed to the charters' $11K. We receive 90% of the dollars allocated to educate our students with a budget lower than regular districts and with which charters must pay rent, utilities, and other expenses that traditional public schools do not have to pay. When it is all said and done, we receive about 65% of actual funds with which to be competitive on salaries, and provide rigorous academic programming and a very limited amount of extra-curricular activities to our students. Our results are higher in most cases than the district, the school is safe without security, the students play chess during lunch, the class sizes are smaller and we have a special education program that is gaining quite the reputation for which we are now seeing more special ed students coming into our district. (Each charter is its own district). We have a wonderful school and I would welcome you and anyone else who has an interest to come for a tour during the school day and see what great things our kids are doing.
If you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail me at juljerome@yahoo.com.
Thanks for your attention and interest. Keep on writing! Regards, Julie