More Coffee, Please

First, my apologies for missing posts. Thursday night I apparently drank from the Broad Street Pump, and lost the last 48 hours. I’m glad Friday was a workshop day—sitting at my desk writing curriculum was about all I could manage.

Ah well. Better now.

A number of people have responded to my post about teachers visiting their students over the summer as being impractical or impossible at the high school level, where a teacher might serve 200+ students a year. It’s not practical to visit that many.

Quite right. It’s not, and I didn’t mean to imply they should or could. Let me clarify: Each parent should receive a visit from one of their child’s teachers over the summer.

There are roughly 200 kids per grade. Add in the mandatory 4 subjects, and if each teacher divided it up evenly, then it would be roughly 50 kids—still a huge task. But then add in the electives, and then suddenly there’s far fewer. Assuming roughly 800 kids in the high school and 64 teachers, it works out to be about 12.5 kids per teacher.

That’s easily doable.

The point is to make contact, to make sure each parent sees at least one of their kid’s teachers and feels they have a contact in the building. Along the way, it also gets rid of that “teachers don’t do anything over the summer” lie, and goes a long way towards putting to bed the “teachers don’t care” myth. What we do on our own time for our kids (and we all do so much!) is seldom seen because it’s not public.

Well, this would be.

More importantly, according to the original article, the real benefit was in the test scores and performance of the students. The district pays for the program there—and if it works as well there, the district ought to here as well. Student success and a better parent-teacher link—that’s a win-win in my book.

Sure, it’s innovative, scary, and it’s never been done before—perfect reasons to take it seriously.

The Keene Sentinel’s front page article today is probably not going to help anyone in the district.

I’ve uploaded the article, but in short what it says is that a number of SAU 38 employees, (none of them teachers, mind) because there was no budget for any contract raise, were allowed to claim their health insurance as salary, which boosted the money they were allowed to collect in retirement. No charges were filed, or will be filed, but those individuals will need to pay back the extra funds.

Oh. And in the mean-time, we all get a black eye—during our own struggles with raises and contracts.

I’m going to assume positive intentions. I know many of these people, and it could have very easily been good people who were doing what they believed to be perfectly acceptable. I know I don’t pay that much attention to how my insurance and salary is legally set up—I rely on those in the SAU to do so for me, and trust they’re going their jobs well.

But I will point out Mr. Biron’s reasons for doing so, as it’s quite enlightening:

“Unfortunately, the heavy involvement of the Monadnock Taxpayers Association … made it impossible to give me a salary increase because the budget would never pass,” he wrote. “Since I was within two years of retirement, the decision was reached to at least reflect the salary I should have received by paying my health insurance.”

Hmm. Where have I heard the actions of the Monadnock Taxpayers Association pushing the district into bad decisions that end up costing it more money?

But as tempting as it may be to lay this at their doorstep, I’m not going to. I think there’s culture of closed doors in the SAU—a tradition of doing things away from the public eye, with decisions being made without due process or by one or two voices alone, rather than by a group of people who would bring more insight. It might be about hiring, firing, who gets this position, who gets that, who will be in charge, who will not, or a host of others, but things are often done in a way that is not as open and as clear as it ought to be.

We really need to start communicating better, more openly, and with more respect for all the people involved. It’s really hard to show that kind of integrity, but the costs of not doing so are far greater.

I’ve had fun keeping an eye on the Keene Sentinel talkback page, which has been discussing the situation in the district since the teacher walkout.¹

One of the things that amuses me is the accusation of “character assassination” leveled at those who oppose the views of the Monadnock Taxpayers Association. It’s an amusing little example of fuzzy thinking.

Character assassination is not stating the facts. If an individual belongs to an organization with questionable motives, then stating that fact is not character assassination; it’s truth. An individual chooses to belong to organizations, and we can reasonably assume that if someone belongs to an organization then they subscribe to its beliefs and practices.

To call Bill Clinton a lying adulterer is not character assassination, it’s a statement of admitted fact. ²

Statements like “greedy teachers” are character assassination. They cannot be proven, and are not likely to be true. Likewise, statements like “Swanzey tax-and-spenders” are character assassination—they can’t be proven, are not facts. I mean, what should be done with the money raised by taxes? By law, it can’t be saved.

Over all, if everyone involved remembered they were all part of the community and stuck to facts and truth, then we’d get further much faster. Personally, I desperately want solutions much more than I want to lay blame.

1 It’s tragic it took that action to make the paper pay attention to the district, but hey, better late than never. As much as don’t personally agree, the attention has been nice. ↺

2 We can have a long conversation about the appropriateness of such questions, of course—but not on this blog. ↺

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Monadnock Regional School District, Monadnock Taxpayer’s Association, School Change

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