On Board Online EXTRA • November 5, 2012

By Jeffrey S. Handelman

Memo to school board members and school administrators: Do not refer to last year’s tax levy legislation as a “2 percent tax cap”! This misnomer has contributed to misperceptions about the law’s impact on taxes, according to a presentation at NYSSBA’s 93rd Annual Convention & Education Expo in Rochester on Oct. 27.

Capital Region BOCES presenters Deborah Bush-Suflita and Michele Levings explained that the legislation does not cap anyone’s tax bill, but it does have a real impact on contingency budgets. The misperception over the law has caused credibility problems for school districts with taxpayers.

The message from the presenters at the workshop, called “Lessons Learned from Year One of the NYS Tax Levy ‘Cap’ ” was that educators need to wage an aggressive campaign to help taxpayers understand what the law really means. Despite the fact that state aid increased this school year for the first time since 2009-10, this is not a time to celebrate. State aid is now limited to growth in personal income, there is no aid increase for districts without an approved evaluation system in place by January 2013, and it will take districts a while to recover from the painful cuts they made over the last few years.

Bush-Suflita and Levings advised districts to:

• Get out in front of difficult issues. It is up to districts to clear up any myths and misperceptions, and you should not rely on politicians or reports.
• Critique your district’s communications efforts.  You no longer have to rely on traditional media to tell your story. Use social media to get your message out. Sharing information, not hoarding it, is key to success.
• Pay special attention to communications with faculty and staff. This is the group most directly impacted by a district’s fiscal realities. Boards faced pressure from employees to exceed the tax levy cap; educating staff on the needs to make responsible, yet painful cuts is key to obtaining employee buy-in and concessions at the bargaining table. An important message is that the risks of a defeated budget can be far more damaging than the proposed cuts.
• Get out the vote. While it is important to avoid even the appearance of advocacy or electioneering, districts can and should heavily promote the vote, along with details about the budget. Use the district website social media and traditional media to achieve this.
• Conduct an exit survey! This simple step can provide the district with a wealth of information, such as feedback on the effectiveness of communications efforts, trends in voter sentiment, and useful data to inform the next year’s budget development. If your budget is defeated, you will really wish you had conducted a survey, as you can use voter insights to get the second vote right. Knowing why the budget was defeated is far better than guessing the reasons.
• Mobilize going forward for better solutions. Energize your base, demand better legislation from elected leaders, and work with NYSSBA to try to achieve adequate, predictable and fair state aid funding in additional to meaningful mandate relief.

On Board Online EXTRA • November 5, 2012

By Barbara Bradley

What if school districts could customize learning for individual students the same way Amazon.com suggests books for its customers?

They can, with a system called mass customized learning, according to Bea McGarvey, an educational consultant and author, who spoke to a full house at NYSSBA’s 93rd Annual Convention & Education Expo on Oct. 26.

Just as Amazon.com tailors book selections to individual customers based on their purchasing profiles, schools can tailor instruction to individual students based on their needs, interests and abilities – and enable them to learn anywhere, any time.

Mass customized learning is now possible with today’s technology – it wasn’t necessarily possible 10 years ago, she explained.  We’ve gone from the Industrial Age to the Information Age in everything but education, she said.

McGarvey co-authored the book “Inevitable – Mass Customized Learning – Learning in the Age of Empowerment.” It is a vision for education, she said, and it takes strong leadership to bring it about.

The secret for changing the current system is to borrow (“or steal”) an idea from another market or industry for your market or industry, she explained.

Students learn in different ways and on different timeframes, according to Garvey. Mass customized learning embraces this and shifts the focus from graded, time-driven system used by most schools to a customized system with a balance of teacher-facilitated and online learning based on individual student needs.

Students are assessed on a series of learning outcomes derived from the courses, or seminars, in their individualized learning schedule. They must demonstrate mastery of the outcome before they can move on to a new seminar.

McGarvey introduced Lori, a 14-year-old high school student, in a YouTube video, to demonstrate how high school students create and follow their individualized learning schedules: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdCHvLSR_Iw&feature=plcp. Examples of high school learning seminars include “Lewis and Clark and Westward Expansion,” “Democracy and the History of the United States,” and “Career Options that Fit Me.”

Mass customized learning focuses on learning goals rather than activities and assignments, she said.

For more on mass customized learning, read a chapter on transformational technologies from McGarvey’s book, co-authored with Chuck Schwahn, at http://masscustomizedlearning.com/docs/InevitableChapter2.pdf

On Board Online EXTRA • November 5, 2012

By Gayle Simidian

Google Apps – sweet! That was the general consensus from the education session, “Google Apps for Education: Free Tools for a Safer Web Experience,” at NYSSBA’s 93rd Annual Convention & Education Expo on Oct. 27.

The presenter was Carol LaRow, a teacher in the Niskayuna Central School District and Apple Distinguished Educator. She discussed online Google tools including Google Docs, Forms, Maps, and Presentations.

LaRow described how Google’s online educational tools allow secure collaboration in “real time.” According to LaRow, all you need is your web browser. There are no hidden costs.

Google Docs is a tool, somewhat like a wiki, that, in education, can be used to have students read and comment on their peers’ writing. Also, teachers can use it to review a paper, see where students are commenting on the paper and identify who is reviewing the paper and when it was reviewed. There is even a “Research Tool” inside Google Docs that allows users to access images, facts, and web search results for projects they are working on (with citations provided).

Google Forms is another tool which allows teachers to give quick surveys and quizzes to their classes and get the responses back immediately. The tool allows teachers to “customize” their replies to students.

To show how these tools can change how teachers teach, LaRow suggested a lesson on the poem, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” that uses Google Maps. Students can customize the format of a project by adding text, links, and pictures to an interactive map to enhance such a history project.

School board members and administrators can use Google apps too, LaRow said. Google Presentation is a tool similar to Microsoft’s PowerPoint that board members can use for board presentations.

Google apps for education are budget-friendly, “not platform dependent,” secure, and rather effortless to implement in the classroom, she said. And, most of all, students like using the online tools, so they’ll be motivated to learn and do well in school.

On Board Online • November 5, 2012

By Barbara Bradley
Staff Writer

During NYSSBA’s 93rd Annual Convention, board members and the commissioner of education conducted a running commentary of their Convention experiences on Twitter.

It was the third year that NYSSBA created a conversation thread dedicated to the convention, but the first year that dozens of participants chimed in.

For the uninitiated, Twitter is a 140-character microblogging social media platform. Messages are called “tweets.”

Members were able to contribute to the same thread by ending their messages by typing a code called a hashtag. The Convention hashtag was “#nyssba12.”

Under the name @nyschoolboards, NYSSBA staff got the conversation going with announcements of upcoming convention events, observations and links to photos. One example: “Anti-bullying expert Barbara Coloroso tells a full house kids should have a healthy regard for themselves & language matters #nyssba12”. 

By Eric D. Randall
Editor-in-Chief

When journalist Juan Williams visited a Minneapolis high school and asked to meet with student leaders as well as top scholars and athletes, two-thirds of the students had something in common: They were all girls.

“Young women set the pace for achievement in school,” Wiliams said, noting that women outnumber men in all graduate programs except physics and engineering.

In fact, a college admissions officer told him that boys seem more in need of an affirmative action-style edge in admissions than minorities.

That’s just one example of many changes that deserve the attention – and thoughtful response – of school district leaders, Williams told attendees in the keynote speech at NYSSBA’s 93rd Annual Convention and Education Expo in Rochester.

“It’s unbelievable what’s happening in education,” Williams said. “There is constant change impacting our society,” and every societal shift has some effect on public education.

By Eric D. Randall
Editor-in-Chief

Nearly 200 school districts in New York State shut down due to power outages and other disruptions caused by Hurricane Sandy.

“It’s way too early to get any kind of accurate count on the number of schools damaged,” Jonathan Burman, a spokesman for the State Education Department, said as On Board went to press Oct. 31. “We’ve received a half dozen reports so far,  but it’s obviously going to be many, many more than that.”  

In today’s economy, schools must prepare students for jobs that don’t even exist yet, NYSSBA Executive Director Timothy G. Kremer told delegates at NYSSBA’s Annual Business Meeting.

“Just ask Beth LaPierre, who became Kodak’s first ever ‘Chief Listening Officer’ in 2010,” Kremer said. Before moving on to another job, LaPierre monitored more than 300,000 daily mentions of Kodak on Facebook, Twitter, message forums, YouTube, blogs, and elsewhere on the Web each day. 

“Other graduates will become app developers, data miners, social media managers, eldercare consultants, sustainability experts and user experience designers.  None of these well-paying careers existed 10 years ago.”

On Board Online • November 5, 2012

Annual Business Meeting

By Barbara Bradley
Staff Writer

Delegates to NYSSBA’s Annual Business Meeting overwhelmingly voted down a resolution that would have created a committee to study whether charter schools should become members of the Association.

While acknowledging charter schools’ status as public schools, delegates argued there are important distinctions.

Public schools exist to educate all children, regardless of their abilities, unlike charter schools, which are able to choose their students, delegates said. They added that charter schools are not subject to the same mandates as public schools, which contributes to different political priorities.

While charter school personnel and board members might benefit from attending NYSSBA training events, delegates pointed out they can do so by taking advantage of NYSSBA’s nonmember attendance rates (typically twice the amount charged to member districts). 

“This Association is an advocate for public schools, schools that provide for the brightest of our students and for those that need and require the most,” said Pat Burk, a board member from Batavia. “At this crucial time it is even more imperative that we advocate and represent public, all inclusive schools and not recognize charter schools that can discriminate with regards to a student’s ability and remove resources from our budgets.”

Delegates reinforced their charter schools stance by passing a resolution that directs NYSSBA to oppose a potential parent trigger law for converting a failing public school into a charter school. Delegates also voted to have NYSSBA and its governmental relations department oppose legislation to include virtual charter schools in the state’s charter school law.

In other action, they passed resolutions directing NYSSBA to seek legislative help in revamping the delivery of education. Among those were resolutions to have the state give local boards of education incentives to create regional high schools and give local school boards authority to determine how much “seat time” is required for students to earn course credit or meet graduation requirements. Another resolution seeks more digital learning opportunities for students.