tern wrote:
Terrible that the Teacher's Union gets to dictate how the school system is run, but me and most of the other parents in Jersey City weren't there tonight, and 150 teachers were, until enough of us make it a priority to oppose them, they get to run the show.

Robin.

JPhurst wrote:
They don't. But those stories make good copy and are ripe for playacting during public comment.

JPhurst wrote:
Rampant misfeasance and malfeasance in central office is not "inside baseball."

If you don't want to be informed about the issues, that's fine. But then don't pontificate about what the "real problem" is and think that by pulling a few random stats out of your butt that you understand what's going on in the district.

brewster wrote:
Quote:

JPhurst wrote:
There have been plenty of issues of policy and accountability. There was Lyles's funnelling of resources to outside vendors for "professional development", the creation of a "leadership academy" with vague accountability, the loss of the entire reserve fund, toxic labor relations and poor morale, flaunting of civil service requirements that meant the board was painted as being "dysfunctional" when they finally said "enough" and refused to renew the appointments, chicanery on the health insurance switch.

Sorry, but to someone uninterested in the "inside baseball", back office nonsense, that all looks like bullshit. I take a "black box" view, I'm interested in what goes in, and what comes out of the BOE sausage factory. We see extraordinary sums go in, and continued failure and dysfunction come out.

Now, I'm not Monroe, who's only interested in cutting the budget and uses poor outcomes as justification, but letting business as usual continue just because it always has, and the employees are in favor of it, is madness.

How can one justify our ranking of 11 of 98 in extracurricular budgeting per pupil and 97 of 98 in "Salaries and Benefits for Operations and Maintenance". The message there is the schools are run for the benefit of the staff not the students. It's well known that extracurriculars like sports, music, and drama help students who might otherwise be disaffected with school become engaged. Http://www.ascd.org/publications/educ ... d-Student-Motivation.aspx

So why do we put such a low priority on them vs paying staff the most in the whole state? Isn't it clear this is what we get when the unions control the BOE?

JPhurst wrote:
There have been plenty of issues of policy and accountability. There was Lyles's funnelling of resources to outside vendors for "professional development", the creation of a "leadership academy" with vague accountability, the loss of the entire reserve fund, toxic labor relations and poor morale, flaunting of civil service requirements that meant the board was painted as being "dysfunctional" when they finally said "enough" and refused to renew the appointments, chicanery on the health insurance switch.

bodhipooh wrote:
Quote:

brewster wrote:
What's amazing about the whole Lyles thing, and I can't tell if it's bad reporting or murky conflict, is there's no policy being debated, just personal hurts. If the teachers are resistant to change in a failing system, maybe "us vs them" is necessary.

We have serious misallocations of resources in our system, we pay more to our staffs than almost anybody and provide less extracurriculars than almost anybody. There's no afterschool music in the entire district yet we pay our Janitors more than 98% of other comparable districts. WTF? Why is this taken as normal??????

District budget data
https://www.state.nj.us/cgi-bin/education/csg/18/csg.pl

I can only hope the next Superintendent is chosen for their vision and strength, not for hitting the right identity buttons.

I think you zeroed in one of the biggest issues: there is an entrenched resistance to ANY change. Every time this topic comes up for discussion, it seems to derail into a back and forth between people clamoring for change, and fiscal accountability, and those who cross their arms and say "this is the way it is" or "we work hard for our money" or "you don't know what it is like so you don't get an opinion".

I don't think people really take it as normal. I think there is a general sense of apathy because the truth is that we barely shoulder the cost of our local BOE. I know you get annoyed when Monroe brings up the matter of the state paying for the majority of our budget, but it is something that is important to this debate. Imagine what would happen if instead of paying for just 1/6 of our local BOE budget, JC residents had to shoulder 1/3 of it. Overnight, our school taxes would double and our property tax rate would go by 25% to about 1.9%. That's still low by NJ standards, but people woulds definitely find it appalling (as borne out by the reaction to the recent reval) and that's just 1/3 of the budget. If we had to pay for half our BOE budget, our school taxes would triple, and our property tax rate would go up by 50% to about 2.2%.

If people felt the pain of having to fund the wasteful ways of our BOE, they would be clamoring for reform and cost cutting measures.

brewster wrote:
What's amazing about the whole Lyles thing, and I can't tell if it's bad reporting or murky conflict, is there's no policy being debated, just personal hurts. If the teachers are resistant to change in a failing system, maybe "us vs them" is necessary.

We have serious misallocations of resources in our system, we pay more to our staffs than almost anybody and provide less extracurriculars than almost anybody. There's no afterschool music in the entire district yet we pay our Janitors more than 98% of other comparable districts. WTF? Why is this taken as normal??????

District budget data
https://www.state.nj.us/cgi-bin/education/csg/18/csg.pl

I can only hope the next Superintendent is chosen for their vision and strength, not for hitting the right identity buttons.