January 14, 2009 • 10:58 pm
With $40 million needing to be cut from the school district budget, the school board has approved cuts of $31 million this week. Part of the cuts include Data and Literacy coaches that work with students that are having trouble keeping on grade level or need extra attention to complete the material to move forward with the needed achievement. Also going are the ITT’s or Instructional Technology Trainers. This takes the district from 43 in the 2007-08 school year to 17 in 08-09 to zero in 09-10.
While we continue to here that the cuts are supposed to not impact the students directly. I don’t see how the above cuts fall into that line. Certain School Board members have been quoted as saying that these cuts are not to be excuses for not continuing to achieve higher or better scores next year, but with all the structure that has already been placed on the teachers in their teaching day, I don’t know where they are going to find the time to add what is being taken away. Reading blocks, writing blocks, mandated 150 minutes of PE a day, lunch, testing, the list of things the teachers have to do is long and barely fits into the 7.5 hour day. Teachers are going to be overwhelmed, scores are going to plummet, they are going to stop using the new technology because they are not getting the continued training, or they don’t have time to call the service desk to get a piece of broken equipment fixed.
Here are some ideas for things to cut:
- The extra busing to the Gifted school
- All Field Trips
- Extracurricular activities in middle schools
- The $12 million for the AS400 upgrade
- Sports that are not breaking even
- Extra sports assistant coaches
- Administrative positions like the school district police force
- Energy savings like I suggest in the post: Holidays, Technology and Energy
The energy savings alone add up to $676,000.
Filed under: Education, Educational News, Family, K-12 Education, No Child Left Behind , Budget, Sarasota, Schools
January 2, 2008 • 6:58 pm
Ed Darrell writes about Class sizes swell, teacher incentives shrink in his blog Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.
In Florida we have mandated class sizes, but unfortunately the districts use loopholes in the way you average or count classes to say they meet the class size when they really don’t.
Technorati tags: Class Size, Education, FCAT
Filed under: Education, Educational News, K-12 Education, No Child Left Behind , Class Size, K12
December 8, 2007 • 12:58 am
With all the emphasis on Reading and Writing in the FCAT and other standardized tests, History, Social Studies and Civics have all taken a back seat.
I appreciate and respect the teachers at our school, but I found it odd with all the new technology, including ActivBoards, Discovery Streaming and just plain old Google that not one teacher that I asked was doing a presentation about the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. It isn’t hard to find something. Are we so pressed to teach reading (90 minute required blocks), writing blocks and now science with it being part of the FCAT?
So, where do we really fit in the history of our country? Do we forget about 9/11, Vietnam, Korea, World War II, World War I, the shuttle disasters, the Boston tea party, the Cuban missile crisis and I can go on and on. Do we just teach selected history or do we do a creative rewrite of history to condense the intimate parts or dates into just main era’s like the Wars of the 20th century? I find it hard to believe that a date that brought us into one of the major wars of recorded history is being forgotten because it’s been 66 years since it happened and the people that were there are either in their 80’s or have passed away. Is it that we are so intent on reading and writing or is it being one of the worst countries in the world in education that we’ve decided that we have to push reading and writing in spite of our history?
I believe we could have taken a piece of our planning time to prepare a lesson on Pearl Harbor. Of course these lessons could have taken just as little as a brief half an hour of class time.Here are just some of the places that I found using technology and just good old Google.
Some others that I can’t post links because they are on sites that are for use by educators with access, such as Promethean Planet and Discovery Streaming. I found more than one video on Discovery Streaming and one FlipChart on Promethean Planet. Here are the image grabs from my searches:
Have we forgotten?
“A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it.” – Winston Churchill
“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” – George Santayana
Technorati tags: Pearl Harbor, History, Educational Technology, Education
Filed under: ActivBoard, Educational News, K-12 Ed Tech, K-12 Education
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