| On Board Online • November 5, 2012 By Barbara Bradley 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”. |
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| By Eric D. Randall
“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
“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.” |
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“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.” |
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| On Board Online • November 5, 2012 Annual Business Meeting By Barbara Bradley
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. |
| On Board Online • November 5, 2012 By Eric Randall
Nevertheless, NYSSBA had an exceptionally good year of advocacy, Nespeca reported just prior to being re-elected to a second one-year term. His examples:
“We have a reputation as an organization of school boards that is progressive and results-oriented,” Nespeca said. The involvement of rank-and-file school board members in advocacy is vital, he added. |
| On Board Online • November 5, 2012 By Cathy Woodruff
“We’ve got to figure out a way to leverage the BOCES as the true regional leaders they should be,” King said. Schools face a myriad of financial issues, he said. A local property tax levy cap enacted last year and tight restrictions on the growth of state school aid will continue to financially hamstring New York’s school districts, he said. Meanwhile, districts have been struggling with lower property values and diminishing options to cut staff and program spending, he said. “I don’t want to pretend there are new resources coming along. I think the reality is that they are not,” King told one questioner. “The cavalry with new resources is not coming.” Therefore, King said, regionalism and cooperation hold the most promise for districts looking to preserve or improve their programs and build student achievement. He acknowledged that mergers and consolidations are “a difficult, challenging subject,” recalling the murmurs that spread throughout the crowd at last year’s NYSSBA convention when he raised the issue. Nonetheless, he insisted, “If you were starting from scratch, you would not design a system of 700 school districts.” King urged school leaders to more readily embrace joint options such as regional high schools, early college high schools, career and technical programming and health insurance cooperatives as they look ahead. |
| On Board Online • November 5, 2012 By Eric D. Randall
Tina Sciocchetti, who has been SED’s head of Test Security and Educator Integrity since March, entitled her presentation “Learning from Atlanta.” “You do not want to be like Atlanta,” where cheating was found in 44 of 56 schools, said attorney Robert E. Wilson of the Decatur, Ga., law firm of Wilson, Morton & Downs. He described an urban school system where the then-superintendent (Beverly Hall) created a culture of intimidation that placed pressure on principals and teachers to improve scores and meet defined “targets.” The Atlanta saga began when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published articles questioning the validity of Atlanta’s stellar improvement in test scores in 2001. Nine years later, in 2010, Gov. Sonny Perdue ordered an investigation that involved a team of seven lawyers, two law firm investigators and 50 agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Investigators found no evidence of written or oral directives to cheat. But Wilson gave the example of a teacher whose students had low scores and was told she had to sit under a table at a meeting where better performing colleagues sat normally. “They created a culture of fear and silence. Some bucked it and they lost their jobs.” Erasure analysis uncovered unfathomably improbable events, such as patterns in which 85 to 100 percent of changed answers were changed to the right answer. Noting patterns of cheating going back eight years in some schools, a statistical expert said one pattern of improvement was so far from what one would expect statistically that it was like flipping a quarter and having it land on its edge, then flip a second that also lands on its edge – on top of the other one. |
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| On Board Online • November 5, 2012 By Gayle Simidian Improving school climate is “the heart of the intent” of New York’s new Dignity for All Students Act, according to Mary Grenz Jalloh, executive director of the New York State Center for School Safety at Ulster BOCES. She led a session called “The Dignity Act Coordinator: Supporting and Strengthening their Role,” at NYSSBA’s 93rd Annual Convention. Jalloh reviewed the list of 11 protected classes under the Dignity Act and four sections of regulations that cover:
To avoid being accused of violating the law, school personnel need to choose their words carefully when dealing with students, she said. A well-meaning teacher concerned about a thin student’s health might say, “Go get something to eat before class.” Given the fact that the law states that students cannot be discriminated against on the basis of weight, such a statement would be potentially problematic because a student may interpret it as being forced to eat something before they can attend class. Jalloh suggested a better phrasing would be, “The cafeteria is around the corner….” |
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| On Board Online • November 5, 2012 By Paul Heiser
Coloroso has written several books and travelled the country bringing her message to schools about the harmful effects of bullying, how to recognize it, and what to do about it. Coloroso said bullying is not about conflict. It’s about contempt – a powerful feeling of dislike toward someone considered to be worthless, inferior or undeserving of respect. Bullying is a conscious, willful and deliberate hostile activity, intended to harm. It has four signs: an imbalance of power between the bully and the one being bullied; an intent to do harm; a threat of further aggression; and, if it continues unabated, it leads to terror. Coloroso said that any bullying situation has three components: the bully, the person being bullied, and the bystander (or bystanders). Each has his or her own role to play. The bully. Bullies feel a contempt for others that grows out of a sense of entitlement, or the right to control, dominate, subjugate, and abuse another human being. Bullies are intolerant to those who are different. Bullies also feel at liberty to bar, isolate, and segregate a person deemed not worthy of respect or care. The bullied. The one thing that all kids who are bullied have in common is that a bully or a bunch of bullies has targeted them. Each one was singled out to be the object of scorn, and thus the recipient of bullying, merely because he or she was different in some way. |
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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.
Nearly 200 school districts in New York State shut down due to power outages and other disruptions caused by Hurricane Sandy.
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.
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.
Stepping up to the plate as an advocate for public education can be like stepping onto a treadmill, NYSSBA President Thomas Nespeca told delegates at NYSSBA’s Annual Business Meeting. “It seems that as soon as you cross one item off the list, three others have to be added,” he said.
Expanding the role of BOCES could help school districts cut the Gordian Knot of school finance, Commissioner of Education John B. King Jr. said in a dialogue with school board members at NYSSBA’s 93rd Annual Convention.
After listening to a Georgia attorney tell a gripping tale about how a team of investigators broke through denials to uncover a top-to-bottom cheating scandal in Atlanta schools, attendees at the 16th Annual Pre-Convention School Law Seminar heard New York’s test security chief describe the State Education Department’s strategy to discourage and crack down on cheating.
Barbara Coloroso distilled a 30-hour course into a 90-minute session at NYSSBA’s 93rd Annual Convention. The renowned writer and educational consultant presented “The Bully, the Bullied and the Bystander – Breaking the Cycle of Violence,” to attentive listeners at the Saturday morning session, which was repeated in the afternoon.