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Our story on the rally ran last night. Organizers plan a larger rally for 4 p.m. Wednesday (May 22), starting at South Kitsap High School, with a march to the district office. Students in charge are Gabrielle Wagner, ASB president, and Vincent Bachteler, a “passionate Wolf.”
C. Henry, reporter
Some students at South Kitsap High School had planned a walk-out protest of the district’s plans to eliminate 68 positions, including 61 teachers’ jobs, Principal Jerry Holsten said Monday.
Holsten’s comments confirmed some chatter the Kitsap Sun heard via its Facebook page earlier in the day.
“Yes, we heard about something this morning,” Holsten said. “We addressed it with staff and with some students, and there was no activity.”
Morale at the high school (and throughout the district) is low, given the school board’s decision last week to make plans for its most sweeping layoffs in recent memory. The students had apparently planned a sympathy strike by walking out on classes.
“We respect and admire our students’ opinions and values, and their interest in having a voice,” Holsten said. “We simply encourage them to present their voice in a different fashion that’s less disruptive to their schools.”
Although the state Legislature plans to pump additional funding into the K-12 education system, the budget is far from finalized. Whether or not some or all of the jobs will be saved is a big unknown.
The board is required by law to notify teachers who will be RIF’d, giving them adequate time to seek other jobs before the next school year. The board on May 8 elected to stick with the regular May 15 deadline (that’s Wednesday), instead of going with an extension to June 15, approved by the Legislature at the end of the regular session. One board member said it was a courtesy to teachers possibly facing layoffs, since June 15 would give them little planning time.
A total of 25 staff members have said they will retire or resign at the end of this year, so the number of proposed layoffs is 43.
The
RIF list includes 3.3 administrative FTEs: 1.3 at the district
office, an assistant principal at the high school and one
elementary school assistant principal.
Also slated for elimination are:
25.5 elementary level teaching positions
22.9 secondary teaching positions
3.0 special educational teachers
8.5 career and technical education teachers
An instructional specialist, part of a school nurse position and
4.088 classified or non-teaching support positions make up the rest
of cuts.
To add to the stress, documentation is due this week on the state’s new method of evaluating teachers and principals, called TPEP, for Teacher/Principal Evaluation Project.
“This is tough time for everybody, staff, students, administrators, parents,” Holsten said. “It’s a stressful time when we have to talk about staff reductions. It’s a somber mood, however our staff are great professionals, and they’re making sure it doesn’t affect our students’ education.”
Five performances by Kitsap musicians earned high honors in a statewide competition Friday and Saturday, including two performances that took top prizes.
Nick Stahl from Bainbridge High School took first in the solo soprano-alto saxophone category, outperforming four other competitors.
Shannon O’Brien from Bremerton High School won a solo competition in the vocal-bass category.
Second place winners included a small percussion group from Central Kitsap High School and small vocal group from North Kitsap High School. Kelly Lanzafame from North Kitsap High School took third in the vocal-alto category.
The annual competition happens on the last Friday and Saturday of April and Central Washington University in Ellensburg hosts the event. Contestants from across the state first competed in 22 separate regional contests to qualify for the showcase.
This is, according to one educator, the musical equivalent to athletes taking state.
South Kitsap School District employees were notified on April 12 of impending layoffs in the district. The Kitsap Sun covered last night’s Q&A with the school board about the district’s budget situation. These are preliminary “worst case” numbers. Retirements, which you will see the district is looking to identify, will help reduce the number of layoffs. Regardless, this is likely to be the biggest RIF for South Kitsap in recent memory.
Here is a (below) is a copy of the letter Interim Superintendent Bev Cheney sent to employees.
Chris Henry, reporter
Begin Cheney letter:
April 12, 2013
MEMORANDUM
TO: All District Staff
FR: Bev Cheney, Interim Superintendent
RE: 2012-13 and 2013-14 Budget Situation
As you may be aware, the District is currently facing some
financial challenges including:
· Decreasing enrollment over the past 10+ years
· The ending fund balance for 2011-12 coming in below projection
($634,000 impact)
· The enrollment shortfall for 2012-13 of 80-100 students ($435,000
– $511,600 impact)
· Projected enrollment decline of 2.5% for most schools for
2013-14
· The exhaustion of local funds we have used to build the “rafts”
to sustain programs and positions previously funded by state funds
in order to continue to provide high levels of hope and learning
for every student.
· Impact of sequestration on federal funds and the local
economy
· Increased cost of the provision of special education services
beyond what the state funds
· Higher than anticipated fuel and utility costs
· The need to restore the Board’s reserve back to 3% by August 2014
(approx. $436,000)
· The negotiation of five contracts this year
The Board has approved the reduction of its reserve from 3% to 2.5% in order to cover the real and projected expenditures for this year. Because of the ending fund balance for 2011-12 coming in below projection and the enrollment shortfall for 2012-13, we cannot guarantee that even with the reduction of the Board’s reserve to 2.5% that we will be able to cover all of our expenditures and provide 100% building carryover into the 2013-14 school year.
Our budget situation is serious. While we knew that we would be reducing staff due to declining enrollment for 2013-14, we also can no longer continue to fund those positions previously supported by state funds with local funds that have enabled us to achieve great gains in student achievement over these past few years. We have exhausted our ability to create the financial rafts that we have created in the past to support those programs and positions no longer funded by the state and that many districts have already reduced or eliminated. Without these financial rafts, we are now in the situation that other districts faced four years ago.
Consequently, due to the budget issues (between $1.6 and $2.5 million and possibly more depending on the outcome of negotiations and sequestration), we will be staffing classroom positions at all elementary and secondary schools at the preferred level. We will also be eliminating 26.5 FTE previously state funded certificated positions that we have been locally funding. In addition, there will be reductions based on enrollment decline.
However, you must also know that staffing at the preferred level and eliminating the previously state funded 26.5 certificated positions will not meet our goal of reducing our budget by $2.5+ million. Consequently, we will also be reducing classified staff in addition to the classified reductions resulting from enrollment decline.
Your new superintendent, Michelle Reid, upon learning of the budget challenges facing the district, revised the District Office organizational structure in order to realize some budget savings. She has chosen not to fill two administrative (Director of School and Family Support and The Director of Special Programs) and one classified position (Executive Assistant for School and Family Support) at the district office. These positions were vacated due to retirements and a person returning to a previous position.
These reductions in staff still do not solve our budget problem. Consequently, a Leadership Budget Team has been working to identify recommendations for additional reductions to our budget. The work of this group is critical. Unfortunately, we have already used all of the non-personnel options, and so the Leadership Budget Team had to look at positions as they developed their recommendations for addressing the $1.6 to $2.5+ million dollar gap. They have completed their work, and now with input from cabinet I will finalize my recommendations to the Board for $2.5+ million in cuts in order to have a balanced budget for 2013-14.
Since we have exhausted non-personnel options, we will be instituting a Reduction in Force (RIF) this year. In addition to reductions in certificated and classified positions caused by declining enrollment, the positions eliminated in the revised District Office organizational structure, and the reduction of the 26.5 certificated FTE previously mentioned, I will be identifying other certificated and classified positions that may need to be reduced. Consequently, I strongly encourage those who are planning to retire or resign this year to submit their letters/forms to HR by no later than April 30, 2013.
I feel bad being the bearer of this news. It is unfortunate that we can no longer support the great programs that state and federal funds enabled us to implement on behalf of student achievement. I wish I had better news as we have great things happening in this district.
While I tried to include as much information in this email as possible to explain our current budget situation, I know that you may still have many questions. Consequently, I want to invite you to attend a Board Work Study session on the topic of our budget at 6:00pm on Wednesday, April 24, 2013 in the theater at the high school. The Board and I will present information on the budget and then answer questions.
Sincerely,
Bev Cheney
This weekend I should have a story about two students who have achieved a lot, but the award they are up for they first became candidates for because of how well they did on the ACT and SAT tests. Those two tests have been around forever. (By “forever” I mean longer than I have been a student.) Students now, and this is not news to any parent or educator, spend so much more of their year taking tests than their parents did, that the cry that testing is counterproductive is getting louder.
Consider the piece written by Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon. Among the many cases she makes is that testing might not only be hurting overall education efforts, it might even be designed to do just that.
And it’s a system that, as Core Standards are being implemented around the country, seems built to fail. “All the passing ratings are going to go down about 30 percent this year; that’s what they’re predicting,” says author, advocate and education historian Diane Ravitch. “The dark view is that they want everybody to fail and they want people to say the public schools stink, so they can push for more vouchers and more charters. I can’t describe what’s going on without thinking that we’re in the process of destroying American public education.”
On Wednesday at the
Central Kitsap School District meeting there was a presentation on
the state’s method for teacher evaluation, which will be
implemented in 2014. As you can see from the slide on the right,
testing will at least be part of what helps measure educators.
Then again, we all know parents use school and district test scores to drive real estate values up or down in an area. Parents try to move to areas where test scores are better. They aren’t a guarantee every child will succeed, but what parent doesn’t hope that peer pressure will influence their children to study harder?
Williams’ suggested solution is to go more local.
Absolutely, there are broken schools and faulty teachers who are failing our children every day. But building a better system of public education – an education to which every child in this country is entitled — takes creative and innovative approaches, tailored to individual communities.
How local? would seem to be the important question. While testing, the editorial asserts, hasn’t closed any learning gaps, how can a state know how well each district is doing if it can’t measure one against another? What are your ideas?
Wayne Lindberg, director of finance and operations for Bremerton School District, said Friday the news that Superintendent Flip Herndon was applying for superintendent of the Renton School District did not come as a surprise to him or other top BSD administrators. Herndon had earlier informed his “cabinet” of his intentions, since part of the application process involves interviewing a candidate’s current school district.
Lindberg furthermore wasn’t surprised that Herndon — who in 2012 applied for superintendent of the Puyallup School District — was continuing his search for a position in a larger, more urban district closer to Seattle. Herndon bought a home in Bremerton after he was hired in 2009, but his family lives in Seattle.
“It wasn’t a surprise, because we knew he wanted to get back on the other side of the water to be close to his family,” Lindberg said.
Asked how he feels about the prospect of losing Herndon, 43, to another district, Lindberg said. “It’s unfortunate, but a young upwardly mobile person, it’s not unexpected.”
Lindberg said Herndon has contributed to the district’s financial stability by encouraging a move toward paperless record-keeping. He also pushed for a science-math focused program at what is now West Hill STEM Academy.
I visited a class of Hawkins Middle School students in March to find out what they thought of SHB 1397, that would add information on statutory rape to sex education classes.
The bill requires public schools that offer sexual health education “to include age-appropriate information about the legal elements of sexual offenses where a minor is a victim and the consequences upon conviction.”
(Scroll down to see a video of some of the Hawkins students’ comments about the sex education bill.)
The 13- and 14-year-olds in Julie Sullivan’s humanities class already were immersed in improving information that gets out to their peers and students at the high school. They had conducted a survey at the high school that found only 20 percent of respondents knew the legal age of consent in this state.
The class is participating in Project Citizen, a national civics competition, with the goal of reducing teen pregnancy. The students are pushing to replace the old sack of flour exercise with use of realistic baby mannequins programmed to make demands on their “parents” just like a real infant.
Given that level of activism, I wasn’t surprised to hear that three students from the class recently testified on SHB 1397 before the Senate Early Learning and K-12 Education Committee. The students — Sophia Daley, Adin Welander and Morgan Young — showed poise and persuasiveness in their statements. All three are in favor of the bill.
Their testimony at the March 22 hearing can be viewed at 46:55 minutes into the taping, which included other bills.
“I strongly believe in this bill, because it will change so many people’s lives,” said Sophia Daley.
Daley knows a 14-year-old who was involved with a 17-year-old. The older teen is now branded “a sex offender for life.”
State law protects individuals under 18 years old by prohibiting sexual contact and sexual intercourse with partners who are significantly older. The designated age gap varies from five years or more for second degree sexual misconduct with a minor victim who is at least 16 but under 18, to the far more serious crime of first degree rape of a child, which applies when the victim is under 12 years old and the perpetrator is at least two years older.
“In reality, no one really wants to hire a sex offender,” Welander said. “It could have just been one mistake, but it’s kind of a really bad label, and they could’ve avoided that really easily.”
Young also focused on the long-term consequences. “What boss is going to hire a sex offender, and if they’re labeled a sex offender, their career is going to go down the toilet,” she said.
Christyn Daley, Sophia’s mother, has an 18-year-old son who is dating a 15-year-old girl. They’ve talked openly about what’s acceptable and potential consequences, but that’s probably not happening in every family, she told the commission. Daley is also a registered nurse concerned about the trend of younger students becoming sexually active.
Michael Young, Morgan’s dad, said, “As parents, we want to protect our children. We want to pretend things aren’t happening, but they are.”
Students these days are worldly but not not always well-informed, Young said. “We need to get out of the snow globe. We need to teach our children what’s going on so they can recognize and take power over their lives.”
The students later took a tour of the state Capitol and posed with Gov. Jay Inslee, as you can see from this photo sent in by Michael Young.
Gov. Jay Inslee and Morgan Young
NOTE: OSPI later told North Mason officials that North Mason’s inclusion in the awards was incorrect. North Mason qualified for this honor a year ago, but not for the more recent reporting period. Since this chart is somewhat laborious to recreate, we’ll just tell you here rather than correct the chart.
Among the 381 schools honored as high achievers by the state in a release issued today are 15 from Kitsap County and one from Belfair.
The Washington Achievement Awards honor performance in seven categories, including overall excellence and high progress, a category that marks improvement. The state’s criteria measures two-year achievement on test scores and takes into account how small the gap is between low-income students and racial minorities and the rest of their classmates. The state’s press release follows the graph.
A group of parents from Breidablik Elementary School is exploring what it would take to start a charter school in North Kitsap, possibly at Breidablik, which is slated for closure next year.
Jim Spady, president of the Washington Charter Resource Center (a pro-charter organization), will meet with the group and anyone else interested in charter schools at 7:30 p.m. at Breidablik, 25142 Waghorn Road NW.
“Overall what we want to achieve with this meeting is to be able to ask questions about charter schools, learn more about them, and decide if we would like to pursue the option of a charter school in our district,” said Robin Francom, who has children at Breidablik.
Washington voters in November approved a charter school initiative, allowing for the formation of up to 40 charter schools in the state over the next five years. Charter schools are publicly funded independent schools governed by regulations established at the state level.
Kitsap’s approval rate of the pro-charter Initiative 1240 was 51.97 percent, slightly higher than the statewide approval rate of 50.69 percent.
The state Board of Education recently formed a charter school commission, to which interested charter groups can apply. School districts also can become charter authorizing agents, giving groups another avenue to form charter schools.
The deadline for districts to express interest is March 31, which does not require a district to follow through with application to become a charter authorizing agent.
Francom has sent a letter to the NKSD board of directors urging them to consider becoming a charter authorizer.
“At this point, the board has not had a discussion to review the viability of the this option,” NKSD Superintendent Patrice Page said Tuesday. “I believe it would take considerable research to weigh all intended and unintended consequences of such a decision.”
On Saturday school children from throughout the peninsula met at Klahowya Secondary School to participate and, in some cases, compete in Destination Imagination. The kids have been practicing in teams since the beginning of the school year, and in one case that I met for eight years.
Like almost all things involving school children exploring their passions, the event is high energy, which is saying something when much of the work involves science.
The organizers escorted me to three different kinds of performances. The first involved groups telling a story, without any words, with required elements being superheroes, transformation and disguises. The second grouping required groups to put on a skit and test the strength of a seven-inch structure. Elements of the structure had to be part of the skit going on next to the strength test. The third element I saw was in improv competition called “Change in Realitee.” The group was given a situation, in the case I saw it was the sudden absence of helicopters. The group had to use three nouns (“meal,” “coach” and “game” were my show’s nouns) to create a slogan used in the skit. And they had to use T-shirts in some way.
Part of the high energy also comes from the volunteers, and there are a ton of them. It’s no wonder parents and others who work with kids feel devoted to the event. The skills the students get from participating can be translated well beyond performing skits. While waiting for one of the events I interviewed six members of Phanny Paks, a group that has a history together. Some of them have been competing together as a team for eight years. The benefits of the program, assuming the program created what I witnessed, were on display in the poise, confidence and joy I saw in this group of students from CK High, every last one of them.
Below you can watch a brief video showing highlights from a couple of the events. The first group is made up of seventh and eighth graders at Klahowya. The second has students from Silver Ridge Elementary. You might not get the full idea from the video, but it gives you some idea what students did on Saturday.
Groups moving on to the April 6 state competition in Wenatchee in the different groupings are:
“In the Zone”
Elementary — Emerald Heights (Silverdale)
Middle — Sequim Independent (Sequim)
“Wind Visible”
Elementary — Belfair (Belfair)
Secondary — Central Kitsap High School (Silverdale)
“In Disguise”
Elementary — Silverdale (Silverdale)
Middle — Mullenix Ridge (Port Orchard)
Secondary — Bainbridge Independent (Bainbridge Island
“Change in Realitee”
Elementary — Sand Hill (Belfair)
Middle — CK Jr. High (Silverdale)
Secondary — Bainbridge Independent (Bainbridge Island)
“Twist-O-Rama”
Elementary — Sand Hill (Belfair)
Middle — Klahowya (Silverdale)
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