Grand Jury: San Diego schools improperly siphoning student funds | California Watch

Grand Jury: San Diego schools improperly siphoning student funds | California Watch

Grand Jury: San Diego schools improperly siphoning student funds

June 3, 2010 | Corey G. Johnson

Student money earmarked for band, cheerleading and other extracurricular activities are being improperly raided by San Diego Unified school administrators to pay for faculty supplies, equipment and events, according to a grand jury investigative report released Wednesday.

Photo by Karl-Erik Bennion

From March 2008 to October 2009, at least $107,882 in student extra-curricular funds were used by various schools to benefit the faculty.

The practice is so widespread, the Grand Jury reports, that 75 percent of district schools routinely take from the student funds.

This occurs while students at nearly all district schools are required to pay fees to participate in extracurricular activities, in apparent violation of district policy and a 1984 state Supreme Court ruling banning the practice.

In one instance during the 2006-2007 school year, San Diego's School of Creative and Performing Arts (SCPA) snatched its students' entire extracurricular savings – $65,568 – and deposited it into the schools' main account.

A 2009 School District audit of SCPA discovered additional withdrawals from the students' account were used to pay for the staff's Christmas party, drinking mugs, polo shirts and other unauthorized expenditures. School officials denied that the money was ever student funds, but repaid $19,000 at the urging of district auditors. The rest remains unpaid.

At the same time, music students at the school were required to pay for their own instruments and performance clothing, the probe found. According to the report:

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Ownership Society school reform

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Ownership Society school reform

Ownership Society school reform

by Mike Klonsky

Debunking the "Portfolio District"

Latest from EPIC/EPRU comes from DePaul prof, Ken Saltman who exposes the latest business-model reform model whereby school district leaders compile and run a "portfolio" of independently operated schools. It is currently being used in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and Washington D.C., and it is being considered by other districts. Yet little or no evidence supports the expansion of such radical experimentation, a new Policy Brief reports.

The Washington Teacher Reactions Vary On Ratification of DC Teachers Union Contract: What's Your Reaction ?

The Washington Teacher

Reactions Vary On Ratification of DC Teachers Union Contract: What's Your Reaction ?

by The Wash. Teacher

DC teachers and school personnel ratified a five year WTU contract (2007-2012) of which three years have already passed. The WTU contract has been three years in the making by chief negotiator teachers union president George Parker.

For those active union members who were working in 2007 - they will receive retro active pay raises dating back to 2007. For those who began working after 2007, they will receive retro pay dating back to their start date with DCPS. According to the WTU Tentative Agreement : "The 2007-2008, 2008-2009 and the appropriate portion of the 2009-2010 raises shall be paid retroactively to all DCPS employees who are members of the WTU bargaining unit as of the date of WTU ratification of this agreement and all WTU bargaining unit members who were separated or retired as a result of the November 2009 Reduction-in-Force. Retroactive payment of raises shall be made following ratification of this agreement by the WTU membership and approval by the DC Council."

Teachers who retired prior to the 2009 reduction in force, although union members during the contract period have been excluded from receiving retroactive pay raises and will have to file unfair labor practices if they want to see any of their money.

While the contract is more than just pay raises and gives Chancellor Rhee greater reign to fire teachers and school personnel, reactions varied from highs to lows on news of the contract ratification today.

I am curious what was your reaction to the ratification of the Washington Teachers Union contract ? I am particularly interested in hearing from those DC teachers and school personnel who will remain in school year 2010-2011. Please feel free to weigh in with your comments.

Posted by The Washington Teacher, Featuring Candi Peterson, Blogger in residence

Schools of thought on looming teacher layoffs

Schools of thought on looming teacher layoffs

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Schools across the country are facing the worst layoffs in half a century. As many as 300,000 school employees are in danger of losing their jobs. If that happens, class sizes will explode and educational opportunities will decline drastically for millions of children. Education will become a "risky" career choice for a generation of potential teachers.

Communities are facing this emergency through no fault of their own. The collapse of the financial system devastated all economic sectors, leaving state and local governments in a huge budget crisis that's just reaching its peak despite the improving economy.
We have two choices: We can sit, frozen in the ice of our own indifference, as Franklin Roosevelt once said, or we can take action to save these jobs.
By arguing that we should "Fail this jobs bill," as the headline on a May 28 editorial put it, The Post has

Free Technology for Teachers: Mathematics Blog Carnival - Call for Submissions

Free Technology for Teachers: Mathematics Blog Carnival - Call for Submissions

Mathematics Blog Carnival - Call for Submissions

In late March I discovered theMathematics and Multimediablog and shared it here on April 1. Mathematics and Multimediaimpressed me with its depth of tutorials for teaching mathematics with Google Sketchup and GeoGebra. Now the author of Mathematics and Multimedia, Guillermo Bautista, is organizing a mathematics blog carnival. Topics to addressed in blog carnival submissions include integration of technology in teaching mathematics, connections among different topics and mathematics as well as connections of mathematics to other fields, and pedagogy and teaching mathematics. Click here to read more about the

NorthJersey.com: Students protest Christie education cuts outside Bergen courthouse

NorthJersey.com: Students protest Christie education cuts outside Bergen courthouse

Students protest Christie education cuts outside Bergen courthouse

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

BY MICHAEL GARTLAND

THE RECORD

STAFF WRITER

About 25 student demonstrators gathered in front of the Bergen County courthouse Wednesday to protest Governor Christie’s cuts to education funding – just hours before the Board of Freeholders voted on the next county budget.

LESLIE BARBARO/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Students students march down Hackensack Avenue to protest the proposed budget cuts.

Members of the Democratic Youth National Organization demanded that the Republican governor consider alternative ways to save the state money, such as cutting administrative costs and regionalizing school districts.
“We want to start a dialogue on real education reform,” said Simon Li, the protest organizer. “We’d like Governor Christie to have a dialogue with the students.”
Li, a finance and policy major at New York University who graduated in 2008 from the Bergen Academies, said administrative positions in many school districts are not needed. Eliminating those jobs and regionalizing districts could help address the financial problems that Christie and the state are now facing, he said.
Li was also critical of Christie’s description of students who have protested on behalf of teachers as “drug mules.”
“I don’t think that’s the way to go,” Li said. “Students don’t have a union to

Free Technology for Teachers: More than 100 Webcam Resources from Simple K12

Free Technology for Teachers: More than 100 Webcam Resources from Simple K12

More than 100 Webcam Resources from Simple K12

by noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne)

Back in April I announced on this blog a partnership with Simple K12. This is not a financial relationship, we simply swapped advertising space on each other's blogs. For the last two months Simple K12 offered a virtual field trip kit through Free Technology for Teachers. This month, Simple K12 is offering their free Web Cam Toolkit. Simple K12's Web Cam Toolkit has two parts; a guide for

Reading Rewards - Track Time Spent Reading

by noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne)

Reading Rewards is a free service that allows parents and teachers to track the amount of time their students spend reading. Students create goals in Reading Rewards then parents and teachers can reward them for reaching their goals. Every minute students read equals one Reading Reward (RR) mile. Parents and teachers can determine what the rewards will be and how many RR miles students need to earn to receive a reward.

Willie Nelson and What the Web Can Answer Today

by noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne)

It seems that whenever I go somewhere to give a presentation about teaching with technology, there is someone in the audience who will say something to the effect of "this is great, but all of those sites are blocked in my school." This then leads to conversation about strategies for convincing administrators to relax strict filtering policies. One of the places I usually direct people to in those conversations is Unmasking the Digital Truth created byWes Fryer. Yesterday, I had an experience that led me to drafting an activity that could possibly help critics of open access to the web to understand how valuable the web can be in education.

Yesterday, as I was listening to Willie Nelson I got the urge to look up some information on the web about the hole that appears in his guitar. This led me to thinking about the number of questions that pop into my head every day and how many of those questions would have either gone unanswered or taken a long time to research before the advent of easy Internet access.

Here's my activity idea:
1. Have a person opposed to open Internet access in schools record the number and type of questions they encounter in a given school day or week.
2. Have that person then record the number of those questions that can be answered by resources located in five

A closer look at the city’s salary freeze savings math | GothamSchools

A closer look at the city’s salary freeze savings math | GothamSchools

A closer look at the city’s salary freeze savings math

by Philissa Cramer

Earlier today, I wondered how the city figured that eliminating planned 2 percent raises for teachers and principals would save $400 million next year, considering that an identical cut to this year’s budget in January was projected to yield just $148 million.
Now I have the answer.
Each time planned raises were reduced — in January from 4 percent to 2 percent, and today from 2 percent to nothing — the city cut next year’s budget by $150 million, according to Department of Education spokeswoman Ann Forte. Together, the two reductions amount to $300 million in savings.
The extra $100 million is what the city set aside this year in case it reached a contract deal with the teachers union to turn Mayor Bloomberg’s intention to give 2 percent raises each year for two years into reality. But

Remainders: D.C. teachers union approves new contract

by Maura Walz

• A study reports that teachers with good value-added scores are the ones principals hire anyway.
• The final version of the common core standards for math and reading were released today.
• The D.C. teachers union ratified its new teachers contract, produced after years of negotiations.
• The first research on Denver’s pay-for-performance plan shows reported positive results.
• A new study (pdf) reports that teachers’ effectiveness is unrelated to the colleges they attended.
• The state teachers union posted a long Q & A explaining the new teacher evaluation plan.
• The Hechinger Report has a handy map of which states applied to each round of Race to the Top.
• GOOD magazine’s “guide to education innovation” includes a lot of online learning.
• The city says its push towards virtual education is not a strategy to replace teachers.
• And in honor of today’s start of the National Spelling Bee, here’s the “top ten spelling bee freak-outs.”

Bay Area Cities Take Budget Mess to Voters - WSJ.com

Bay Area Cities Take Budget Mess to Voters - WSJ.com

Cities Take Budget Mess to Voters

Measures on June 8 Ballot Seek New Taxes, More Control Over Union Contracts

By ROBERT A. GUTH And BOBBY WHITE

Getty Images

Bay Area cities and counties, their finances hammered by state budget cuts, are turning to voters for help.

A raft of measures on next Tuesday's ballot are aimed at shoring up finances in local communities. Many center on proposed parcel taxes to offset declines in state funds. The city of Vallejo is pushing a measure to stop using outside arbitrators in disputes between the city and its workers, aiming to squeeze more money for its budget by whittling away public employee benefits.

The initiatives are crucial for the municipalities. California is grappling with a $19 billion budget deficit and has slashed services across the state.

In a sign of how hard hit municipal finances have become, school funding in the state—including taxes and state and federal sources—fell to $66.7 billion in the 2009-10 school year from $71.1 billion in the 2007-08 year, according to EdSource, a Mountain View nonprofit group that tracks education issues.

"I expect to see a lot more ballot initiatives over the next few cycles that are focused on finding new revenue or that will give cities more tools to deal with the down economy," said Eric Zeemering, a professor of public administration at San Francisco State University.

Here is a look at some of the June 8 ballot measures.

Bang/Zuma Press

Bay Area residents will be voting on whether to levy new taxes to help local governments. Students at Skyline College in San Bruno protested funding cuts in March.

Parcel Taxes

Voters in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties will decide on new taxes to help K-12 schools offset declining state funding.

The parcel taxes, which levy a flat tax on landowners, are increasingly common in California communities, which raised $251 million with parcel taxes in the 2008-09 school year, compared with $114 million in the 2003-04 year, according to the Education Data Partnership, a group of education nonprofits and the California Department of Education.

The parcel tax is particularly favored by Bay Area cities. Of the 83 school districts that passed parcel taxes between 2001 and 2009, 66 districts were in the Bay Area, according to EdSource. In the Bay Area, "there is a more liberal attitude towards taxation than you will find in many other areas of California," said Mary Perry, EdSource's deputy director.

In more economically robust times, school districts typically relied on bond issues to pay for programs and services.

But the down economy has pushed districts away from bonds to parcel taxes, said Valory Logsdon, research specialist at California State University, Sacramento's Institute for Social Research.

While no firm figures are available yet for the current election, a preliminary look indicates there

“From Monologic Teaching to Dialogic Learning” | Learn Out Live

“From Monologic Teaching to Dialogic Learning” | Learn Out Live

“From Monologic Teaching to Dialogic Learning”

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Asher Idan is the Manager of Future Studies of Social Media, in The Department of Management in Tel Aviv University. Lecturer about Web 2.0 in Bar Ilan University. Consultant to top Israeli boards and R&D: Intel, SAP, Comverse, Cellcom, Orange, Superpharm, Tnuva

Almost every day he is speaking at different conferences, universites and assemblies about Medicine, Business Management, Politics, Private Innovations and Education.

We are very grateful that he took his precious time to answer a few of our questions.

Hello Mr. Idan, first of all I think it would be very interesting for our readers if you could briefly summarize what issues you are dealing with as “Manager of Future Studies of Social Media”, in The Department of Management in Tel Aviv University. That sounds like a very exciting job and – as far as I am concerned, not many universities offers “Future Studies of Social Media”, or at least – not yet.

Future Studies of social media watch the future trends of the social media (SM): If Web 2.0 is social media, than what is Web 3.0 ? Web 3.0 is the Semantic Web or the Intelligent Web that Tim Berners Lee, envision in the Year 2000 in a paper in Scientific American. What is Web 4.0? The Nano-Bio Web.

Social Media is undoubtedly having a very big impact on the way human beings relate to each other. What would

Hechinger Report | Common standards debate takes center stage – what will be different this time?

Hechinger Report | Common standards debate takes center stage – what will be different this time?

Common standards debate takes center stage – what will be different this time?

by Justin Snider

After a year of development, the much-anticipated “common core standards” for English and mathematics were unveiled this morning, just a day after states’ second-round applications were due in the federal Race to the Top competition.
Officially named the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), the effort was spearheaded by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, not the federal government. The Obama administration has kept its distance during the development of the common standards because of a general wariness at both the district and state levels of federal involvement in education. And yet, adopting these

How to Deprogram Bullies: Teaching Kindness 101 - TIME

How to Deprogram Bullies: Teaching Kindness 101 - TIME

How to Deprogram Bullies: Teaching Kindness 101

During a Roots of Empathy Family Visit to The Carleton Village Public School in Toronto, these 8 and 9 year-olds observe Baby Stephana's problem solving skills, reading her cues to understand when her interest turns into frustration. Neuroscience and social-emotional understanding are a part of this experiential learning.

Finn O'Hara for TIME

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At a public school in Toronto, 25 third- and fourth-graders circle a green blanket and focus intently on a 10-month-old baby with serious brown eyes. Baby Stephana, as they call her, crawls toward the center of the blanket, then turns to glance at her mother. "When she looks back to her mom, we know she's checking in to see if everything's cool," explains one boy, who is learning how to understand and respond to the emotions of the baby — and to those of his classmates — in a program called Roots of Empathy (ROE).

After the recent bullying-related suicide of a 15-year-old in Massachusetts, parents and educators around North America are wondering: Could her death have been prevented? What can schools do to stop the taunting that takes place on and off campus? And most important, can positive qualities like empathy and kindness be taught? In December, the Campbell Collaboration, an international research network, published an examination of decades of data from the bewildering array of school antibullying programs (with names like Expect Respect, Youth Matters and S.S.GRIN) and found that the ones that work best have many different elements — including engaging and training parents — and last the longest, sometimes for years.(See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.)

One of the most promising antibullying programs, ROE (along with its sister program, Seeds of Empathy) starts as early as preschool and brings a loving parent and a baby to classrooms to help children learn to understand the perspective of others. The nonprofit program is based in part on social neuroscience, a field that has exploded in the past 10 years, with hundreds of new findings on how our brains are built to care, compete and cooperate. Once a month, students watch the same mom and baby interact on the blanket. Special ROE instructors also hold