Cobb County School District Budget

Warning:  This is a rant.

Yesterday, the Cobb County School Board passes the budget for the 2012 - 2013 school year, and to be quite honest the entire budget process rests upon the belief that we should NEVER raise the property taxes in the county.

Why?

What is so wrong with paying a little more money to provide for better education?  Are we so greedy and self-centered that we begrudge the school district a mere $50 more per household?  Is the future of our society too "distant" for us to at least attempt to plan for it?

Children are our future.  Period.  End of discussion. Cats and dogs, while wonderful pets, cannot maintain society after we are too old to work.  Flowers and perfectly cut green lawns are really only decorations.  HDTVs will eventually break down.  Computers and the Internet provide a modicum of companionship, but no face-to-face, hand-holding comfort.

But in our greed and arrogance, we refuse to acknowledge that children need help, need money to get a decent education so that they, the children, have a chance at a decent future as well.

I live in East Cobb, where people have money.  To compensate for the lack of funds from the school district, the parents in most of the local elementary school form school foundations.  These foundations not only raise money for the school, but several of them have professional grant writers as parents.  These parents write grants, thereby securing even more funds for the local schools to use.

But what about the rest of the entire county?  Why should East Cobb students have such a monetary advantage?

Our Founding Fathers did not fight the British to avoid paying taxes.  They understood that we need to pay taxes to maintain a healthy, growing society.  They simply wanted a say in what money was collected, and where that money was spent.

Where did that bit of common sense go?

Teach for America in Cobb County? A Mistake!

Earlier this week, I heard that the superintendent of Cobb County Schools, Michael Hinojosa, wanted to hire 50 teachers from the Teach for America program.  The school board was supposed to vote on the issue at tonight's meeting.  I felt shocked, to say the least.

When I graduated from Vanderbilt, I seriously considered applying to Teach for America.  It is a wonderful program that sends recent college graduates to school systems where no one wants to teach - mainly poor, inner city schools and poor, extremely rural schools.  Notice the common factor of  "poor".  By sending teachers to these areas, Teach for America helps students who might not get an education otherwise.

But we have teachers here in Cobb County.  In fact, I recently read that we had thousands of applicants last year - thousands of people who are qualified teachers looking for a job.  And Cobb County is one of the richest counties in metro Atlanta (I daresay in Georgia, but I don't know the facts for the rest of the state so I cannot make that statement with enough certainty.)  So why is our superintendent looking to hire from Teach for America?

To make matters worse, the Cobb County School Board announced at the last meeting that they would be removing teaching jobs due to budget cuts. (To read in between the lines here, they are firing teachers.)

So how could anyone justify bringing in outside teachers to a county with enough money to hire teachers and a plethora of teacher applicants?

And which poor school system will suffer even more because they won't have enough teachers?

Happily, Superintendent Hinojosa pulled the vote for hiring teachers from Teach for America off this evening's agenda.  I hope that the issue stays off the agenda, because no good can come from this course of action.

ECP: Call to Arms

Maybe I should have said a call to keyboards and cell phones.  

Yesterday, the Cobb County School Board voted to include a new calendar option on the agenda for the next meeting.  This means that we, the community, have a new chance to let the school board representatives know how we feel.

Now, I believe in Albert Einsteins’ definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  So, if nothing had changed in the school board since February, I would not be writing this at all.

But several things have changed since February.  School board members have been called in front of the grand jury to explain their actions.  SACS asked for a review, then told them to get training.  So the school board has gone through training, to help them not only learn their own policies better, but to help them learn how to function as a school board.

What does this mean to us?

It means we have a chance to work with the school board to get a calendar acceptable to everyone.  It means that maybe, just maybe, the school board members will decide to represent the voters of Cobb County.  But only if they know what the voters of Cobb County think.

So, please, I beg of you,  contact your school board member and let him or her know what you think about the new calendar option.  You can call.  You can email.  You can send a letter through snail mail; use semaphore, telegraph, smoke signals.  Just contact your representative with your opinion.  After all, it is your right and responsibility to let your representative know your opinion on this matter.

To make it easier, here are the email addresses and phone numbers for all the school board members:

• Post 1 - Lynnda Eage, lcrowder-eagle.boardmember@cobbk12.org, 404-697-9562
• Post 2 - Tim Stulz, tstulz.boardmember@cobbk12.org,  678-773-1877
• Post 3 - David Morgan, dmorgan.boardmember@cobbk12.org, 404-702-1857
• Post 4 - Kathleen Angelucci, kangelucci.boardmember@cobbk12.org, 678-896-6399
• Post 5 - David Banks, dbanks.boardmember@cobbk12.org, 404-725-3394
• Post 6 - Scott Sweeney, ssweeney.boardmember@cobbk12.org, 678-646-2470
• Post 7 - Alison Bartlett, abartlett.boardmember@cobbk12.org, 404-702-9291

For snail mail, semaphore, telegraphs, and smoke signals,  use the district office:

514 Glover Street
Marietta, GA 30060

ECP: Cobb County School Board's Web of Distrust

As the entire process of hiring a new superintendent played out over the past month, I became aware that from the start I did not trust the candidate, Dr. Michael Hinojosa.  Before reading anything about the man, before his meet and greet sessions, and through no fault of his own, I simply did not trust the man.

Why then, did I have such an immediate, strong reaction?

Because the Cobb County School Board recommended him.

Under the covers, Internet security runs on webs of trust.  In layman’s terms, this concept means if I want to talk to you but I’m not certain if I can trust you, a mutual friend authenticates you as a trustworthy individual.  Then I trust you, and I confer my own trustworthiness to you when I introduce you to new people.  This is not a new concept - society itself runs on webs of trust.  When a friend recommends an article for you to read, that recommendation is a strand on your personal web of trust.  When a door-to-door salesman wants you to change garbage companies, he tells you that he sold your neighbors, to try and cash in on the neighborhood web of trust.

Usually, a local school board would be at the center of a web of trust within a community.  Instead, the Cobb County School Board managed to create something opposite of that - they created a web of distrust.

This web of distrust works exactly like a web of trust, only in reverse.  So, if the school board makes a decision, the community reacts skeptically, initially disliking the decision unless there are overriding reasons to like it.  When the school board initially picked Dr. Hinojosa, the man walked into a situation where the majority of the community would not trust him, simply because the school board did.  The ramifications of this distrust mean that the man gets no benefit of the doubt on statements, he gets no leeway from the community, and he works under scrutiny until he proves he does not need such scrutiny.

In case this seems unfair to you, remember that trust, or distrust, is contagious.  That’s how the web works.  If the school board wants for the distrust to change, they will have to make some changes internally and externally.

First, the school board needs to act in a normal manner.  By “normal”, I mean act in a manner that is appropriate to the situation.  Taking Dr. Hinojosa as an example, the school board approached the man and offered him the job for secret reasons.  I know that they, the board, probably followed the letter of the law with this appointment, but it feels like they ignored the spirit of the law by having only one candidate.   (As an aside, one candidate does not a candidate pool make.)  Considering the closed door sessions on this topic, the allegations of misconduct from last fall, and the lack of public reasons for picking this particular man over anyone in either Cobb County or Georgia, the school boad’s behavior feels off to those of us on the outside.  The fact that Dr. Hinojosa is from Texas, the place where some of the school board members already have shady connections, also adds to the feeling of unease.  The entire situation leaves me feeling that there are backdoor deals being made, deals which are probably not for the benefit of the students or parents of Cobb County.

The school board needs to stop this sort of behavior.  They need to be completely above board with their actions, and be even more that perfect about following both the spirit and letter of the law in their actions if they want to restore the trust.  And they should want to restore the trust, considering “Utilize community in decision making” is one of their own priorities, and that priority does not happen in an environment of distrust.  They need to follow their own rules, specifically from Treatment of Consumers, SD-3:

B COMMUNICATION:

1. Consumers should be clearly informed of matters relevant to their association with the Cobb County School District (District). District communications should be courteous and responsive.
2. Responses to telephonic requests should be made within 48 hours except for weekends and holidays.
3. Responses to electronic requests should be given in a timely manner.
4. All information collected, reviewed, stored or transmitted should be accomplished in a way that properly protects the privacy of the information.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I have called several school board members, but the only one to return my phone calls was David Banks.  In fact, for several months you could not even leave a phone message for Kathleen Angelucci.  The same applies to emails.

As for the school calendar, school board representatives need to represent their own constituents, and vote accordingly.  If this means going back to the balanced calendar, so be it.  But switching back to the balanced calendar will not restore the trust on its own, it is merely a step that needs to be taken.

I hope the Cobb County School Board realizes there own mistakes, and begins to make changes.  Otherwise, like the Police sing, “Every breathe you take, every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take, <we’ll> be watching you...”

ECP: Some Cobb County School Board Members Lied to us AGAIN!!

Yesterday, I sat at my computer, perusing the local news and catching up on local activities, when an article caught my attention - “Wake-Up Call:  Cobb County School Board Vote to Change School Calendar Reveals Stealthy Political Forces at Work”  As a parent of two children in Cobb County, I read the article with a sense of dread.  After all, so far I have not seen anything reassuring from the new school board members; so I sat thinking, “Now what?”

“What?” is a elegantly crafted article exposing that our new board members have ties to Georgians Need Summers, which is supported and potentially sponsored by a Texas special interest group.  Texas???  I thought these people represented East Cobb???  

No, they don’t represent us - they represent Tina Bruno and her desire to have shorter school years and longer summers.  They represent a minority, special interest group from another state, and they do not care what their own constituents think.  They lied during their campaigns, they lied during the school board meetings, and they lied to the Grand Jury.   They called us names, act rude to the people of Cobb County, and refuse to answer simple questions.

All four board members made promises to listen to us.  If you look at Scott Sweeney, Tim Stulz, and Kathleen Angelucci’s current websites, they all say that they will collaborate with the public, form a partnership with the community to help make Cobb schools better, spend our money wisely, and promote accountability and transparency within the school board.

And all of these promises, these statements of intent, are lies.

Nowhere on these websites do any of them mention changing the current school calendar.  Nowhere that I found do they say they want to get rid of the balanced calendar, or that they support the traditional calendar. I wonder, did these people purposely without their views from the Internet, to limit opposition on that point?

As for accountability, none of them has a single factual reason to support the traditional calendar.  It costs more money to run a traditional calendar.  It promotes student and teacher absenteeism.  It lowers scores on standardized testing.  It reduces student and teacher morale.  So why are we using the traditional calendar?  

The public opinion poll in February turned out to be a lie.  Stulz and Sweeney insisted that we have a public opinion poll on the choice of school calendar - they insisted over the objections of David Banks and Lynnda Crowder-Eagle.  But when the poll showed support for the balanced calendar, Stulz called the poll “flawed”.  Does he really  think we don’t know what’s going on?  It was never about getting the community’s opinion - it was about them trying to justify a decision that they already made.  

But what bothers me the most is that Allison Bartlett, Sweeney, Angelucci, and Stulz have all come out with supposed “reasons” that they voted for the traditional calendar.  It’s better for the students. It’s better for the economy.  It’s better for Six Flags and White Water.  It’s cheaper.  It raises test scores.  It’s too expensive to cool the schools in August.  The kids will dehydrate on the bus ride home.

But all of those reasons were also lies.

So what do we do now?  I don’t know.

Bartlett will be out this fall, but we are stuck with Sweeney, Angelucci, and Stulz for the next three years.  I know that it is theoretically possible to recall a board member.  I looked into the process.  You only need 100 signatures to start a recall, but you need one third of the people who voted for a candidate to sign a recall petition.  For Bartlett, that puts the recall number over 10,000 people.  The recall process sets the bar quite high, and there has never been a successful recall.  

Until then, we need to spread the word to other counties in the area, and hopefully prevent another school board turning into a long-distance, special interest political empire.