School board boosts staffing with new funds

The Daily Post quotes Skelly: “Not an attempt to ‘spin'”.

What the #$%^& does any public relations person do but “spin” his client’s situation to make it look a favorable as possible.

If the District were in need of such a person–where is the job justification documentation? No large organziation that is professionally managed just hires people without a need. Strange that right on the back of a situation that probably should have resulted in a vote of confidence by the Board to determine the continued employment of this Superintendent–a $150+K person is hired. What else will she be doing by “spinning” Skelly’s future mistakes.

This is one more example of what happens whan an incompetent oligarchy ends up running local governments. Hacks leading hacks.

Sadly, too many of the district’s voters will probably not remember much of this come the next election.

I just noticed that the $5 million will be “set aside for a three- to five-year professional development project for district staff” All on district staff? district staff?

How many people are there at Churchill to spend $5 million in professional development? Is this remedial professional development? Does it include the Board?

I would first get rid of the people who cannot do their job, hire more competent ones, and possibly save millions on this item, that could go to the classrooms.

@Ken,
“The district doesn’t have a PR problem, you have a reality problem,” said Ken Dauber, cofounder of community group We Can Do Better Palo Alto and an unsuccessful candidate for the board last November.

They are hiring the communications officer to deal with your groups high-volume of requests. Were you even listening? The only other way to read your response is “If the board did what I wanted, I wouldn’t make the huge volume of requests so you wouldn’t need a communications officer”. You had your answer to that last November.

read,

Skelly attributed the “mistakes made by the district” to communication, to the missing PR person. The Board is accepting his excuse for hiding the OCR violation. What more spin do you want?

> It clearly states: “Members said the position is needed
> to provide “timely information and transparency” to
> a public making a high volume of information
> requests to an overwhelmed staff.”

Well .. let’s start with what constitutes a “high volume of information requests”? Are we talking ten a month, ten a week, ten a day? At the very minimum, making claims that there are “high volumes” without producing any documentation to that effect, would be an example of “spin”—if not a down-right lie!

Oh, and how would any Board Member know what the monthly requests for information might be if there were not some kind of report provided by the Superintendent? Can you produce such a report? Can Skelly produce such a report?

Sadly, anyone who would ask this sort of question, has no idea what information structures in large organizations should look like. Oh, and by the way—if the District kept its information on reasonably well-designed databases, retrieving this information would be a lot easier than it might be in the paper-based mode that the District seems to favor.

read,

The high volume of requests would not exist if there was no reason to doubt Skelly. Unfortunately, he hid stuff from the board and the community, and likely did so to mislead the public to fudge with the election you keep bringing up.

I think a communications person might be a good idea. Since the district stopped snail mailing important things out to us I have seen a steady decline in the amount of information I receive. The website for the district and the schools are hard to navigate and important information is well hidden. Emails are either duplicated or don’t cover the information well and the newslinks are full of irrelevant information.

There are plenty of feel good emails and too few emails with relevant information.

Additionally, I would like to get more information from the schools about police activity type problems, I would rather hear this from the school than the local news tv.

Palo Verde parent,

“I am glad that our teachers are having the opportunity to pursue development to stay on top of the latest technologies and research.”

Since you are in the know, can you share what new technologies? And what new research is changing the classrooms?

Weekly,

If you consider doing a story on this very large item in the budget, it would be interesting to know what technologies and research the teachers are using in the classrooms associated with this very pricey professional development.

Example, students and parents have asked for teachers to use Infinite Campus, and many teachers refuse to use it.

And how much professional development is actually required by ed code?

Of course professional development is important, but how is it being used exactly in the district. What are the areas of focus and priorities?

> No value to Dauber’s Information Requests.

And you have read every one of the documents/datasets provided in the District’s responses? Unless you have, and can, under penalty-of-perjury, make that statement in a court-of-law, you should perhaps offer the rest of the PAUSD parents and taxpayers a little respect, and say: “In my opinion, ..”

By the way, this web-site actually seems to document the number of Information requests seems to be for a roughly two-month period in 2012:

http://pausd.org/community/PublicRecordsRequest/

There are just under 50 responses. What is missing in the District’s web-page is how many employee-hours were required (even a rough estimate would be helpful) in fulfilling these requests.

There are no requests posted for 2013, so presumably there might be a couple more not yet posted. (By the way, there is no reason that a simple App should not be written which updates this web-page, that would allow the person in charge of fulfilling these requests to easily update the status of this page.)

Fifty requests for information a year is hardly “high volume”.

I blame the Weekly. A free press only goes so far. If the press is going to do all these requests for information from the district lawyer or write editorials against our leaders then that should be stopped. It’s annoying. Press freedom isn’t a excuse to just ask for information from our hardworking leaders. We have to put limits on the press freedom.

@read the article

> There has been no value in any exposure by Ken in his PPRs. Nothing, nil, nada has come of those request.

That’s only your opinion. And there are plenty of people who disagree with you. What has come of those requests is that the Board and the District Administration is much more aware of their accountability to the public. Skelly is now aware that two-faced behavior or concealment is not going to work. And the board is now painfully aware of the fact that when Skelly’s lips are moving, they need to look more closely for the facts.

Very tangible benefits.

So you are absolutely, 100% incorrect!

three elementary schools have more than 500 kids and NO assistant principal. These are:
Escondido
Ohlone
Walter Hays.

All other children in the district – elementary, middle and high, all have 300 kids per administrator. These principals have asked for assistant principals… the District claims they are out of $$$$

It’s time for PAUSD to support elementary schools!!! over 500 kids and one principal, and 1.5 people in the front office is RIDICULOUS!!!!!

> You have no argument ..

And you have no idea what you are talking about. You have demonstrated no understanding of the basic American system of government that is based on checks-and-balances. You also seem to have absolutely no idea about everyone’s rights in California, under the Public Records Act:

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=gov&group=06001-07000&file=6250-6270

http://www.thefirstamendment.org/publicrecordsact.pdf

> The District stopped updating their Public Information page
> because there were too many requests.

Says who? It’s clear that there were not that many requests, at least in 2012. While the time to compile this information has not been offered up by the District in a credible way, even a rough estimate would have been helpful.

The code to update a the Distric’s web-page is about four lines of HTML code. Attempts to demonstrate that code in this post have been defeated by the Weekly’s anti-spam code, so it’s not possible to conveniently demonstate how ridiculously simple it is to add an entry to this file. However, all it takes is adding the name of the requestor, and the file location for the response.
Any one should be able to make these updates.

There is no reason that a Junior, or Senior, who can program, could not whip out a small App to do this updating. (Of course, that leaves us with the basic question—what is the IT department doing?)

Back to the Public Records Act. People have a RIGHT to request information/data from any/ANY public agency—including the PAUSD. They do not have to beg, or somehow justify their requests to the Agency. The Agency has an obligation to respond, one way or another. Failure to respond can result in legal action.

The more we see of this guy Skelly, the less impressive he becomes.

And out of curiosity, how many other districts – let’s say “top districts” have a PR flack they pay 150K/year? How about some real benchmarking. I am tired of the district crying “poor” when meantime they add to the bureaucracy for a totally unnecessary reason.
I assume we will have to give special housing benefits and clothing benefits to a PR flack as that will be expected. (No, I hope not, but based on past experience with PR types, I’m sure s/he will advocate for such. Just outrageous.)

We Can Do Better Palo Alto has not made any PRA requests of the district since June 2012 as reflected on the district website. The district stopped updating the website at that time, suggesting that the entire purpose of that website was solely to shame We Can Do Better and the Weekly for making those requests in the first place. Kevin and some members of the Board particularly Barbara Mitchell made a very explicit argument at the time that these requests cost the district money, including announcing publicly and repeatedly how much they felt it cost to respond to the requests, in order to deter future requests.

It is regrettable that the district does not update the site and continue to post the board and “cabinet” correspondence that it delivers to Bill Johnson every week, as there is a lot of interesting information in there that the public should see in but which it is not receiving unless the Weekly happens to write about it. For example, in the 2/15 packet, Kevin illegally redacted the name of the donor for the gym out of the packet in violation of the PRA and issued correspondence showing that he chastised other community members not to email Mr. Peery’s name to him. This only matters if you think that the law applies to everyone even billionaires and the end doesn’t justify the means.

“The PRAs last spring from the Weekly and WCDBPA revealed Brown Act violations (including the Barron Park Spanish immersion case) and that”
And the final result from the lawyers was that there was no Brown Act violation.
#1 waste of money.

“Dr. Skelly told Gunn not to follow the school board’s instructions about counseling. They also showed the resistance at Gunn to the board’s direction, also encouraged by Skelly. That’s what led to Barbara Klausner’s complaint to Skelly in June that he was ignoring the board. It also led to putting on the web the weekly memos from Skelly to the board.”
And the final result was for the board to agree with Gunn Kids, Teachers and parents at the school and not WCDBPA.
#2 waste of money.

@newsflash “And the final result was for the board to agree with Gunn Kids, Teachers and parents at the school and not WCDBPA.”

The final result was actually that the school board insisted on comparable services, created a committee (the GAC) and on that committee all but one of the parents voted for an advisory-type model, and all the staff voted for a traditional model, meaning that the commitee stalemated on selecting a model and instead recommended a package of reforms that amount to adding an advisory (Titan 202, 303, 404) type period, as well as other things (mandatory tutorial, curriculum delivered by “coaches”). Now we know the answer to my question above.

The teachers are trying to survive with the very little raise they got, wich was way lower than Skelly’s. Couple of weeks ago the teacher went to the board meeting to ask for a raise, they had already ask but they were told that there was no money. One of the teachers who spoke at the meeting, asked them to find the money. So I guess, after all there was money to give a higher raise. How can we believe Skelly when he lies, and lies. Where is the salary of this PR going to come out, of course of the students services, they will get less, and the teachers will take longer in getting a raise. Teacher, no you know there is money, but you are not worth it to use it on you. We have to use it to cover Skelly’s mistakes.

err, news flash
the superintendent and the board are two different things
the superintendent of the PAUSD – Mr. Skelley
the BoE (board of education) of the PAUSD – the elected board

@public is not the problem,
Wow, that’s an interesting take. Where is this voting information published?

@Disappointed-In-The-PAUSD-Board
I don’t see anyone claiming PPRs should be stopped. The question on the table is the value that has been received from the PPRs.
Just ask yourself if you can justify the cost to the district for this PPR http://pausd.org/community/PublicRecordsRequest/downloads/Dauber-PRA-052212.pdf

The number I heard at the time was $15,000. That is $1,500 for the above request. Is this really a good use of district money?

You think that cost $1500? Who filled the request Laurie Reynolds for 5 hours? Jeez you are just desperate.

The vote was 5/6 parents for an advisory system (I believe this was proposal 2 3 both of which were basically advisory) versus all staff plus one parent for proposal 4 (Counselors in the Lead). The deadlock could not be broken, therefore the GAC did not recommend a model. Instead it recommended a package of reforms that when implemented will approximate a form of advisory as well as many other support improvements.

We Can Do Better provided the impetus for this GAC study and report, which would never have happened without their persistent and consistent calls for studying advisory models and making Gunn comparable to Paly. Instead of criticizing them, you should understand that these changes would never have been made without the pressure they applied for the GAC to be formed and to study advisory in the first place. And it was Gunn parents in WCDB who were in the lead including the Daubers, the Haussers, Kathy Sharp, and Rajiv Bhataja. All of these WCDB leaders are experienced Gunn parents and all of them worked hard despite a lot of opposition from the district to bring these improvements to Gunn. Thank you WCDB. It’s too bad people don’t understand the importance of standing up for what you believe and persisting in the face of resistance. Future generations of Gunn students will benefit.

Just like future generations of disabled students will benefit from the work you are doing now to bring to light the problem of disability bullying and ensure that the policies to address it comply with the law. We clearly need watchdogs and activists with all this dishonesty and spin.

The parents on the committee performed a valuable and time-consuming public service and they worked collaboratively with the staff to formulate a list of proposals that had consensus. That list includes many of the aspects of advisory. Compromise is a virtue once all avenues have been explored. No one ever gets everything they want. There is much in here to like. I commend them.

I guess a PR person needs to be hired because there is something to hide. Maybe looking at private schools makes more sense unless there are some changes in the leadership.

It would be great if they spent some of the money on leadership training versus PR….

data please — I can’t tell if you are serious or sarcastic but I will tell you what I think. The result was foreordained by the makeup of the committee (with staff outnumbering parents) and by which staff were selected — most were drawn from the most aggressively anti-TA members of the staff, who had gone into open (well, open after exposed by those PRAs) rebellion against the school board and refused to even consider it. As soon as the committee was named it was not going to be possible to get TA. Parents I am sure wanted to get along, compromise, and get whatever improvements to the system they could. And they got a lot of agreement on recommendations — a stunning amount given the opposition of the staff to any comparison with Paly.

In fact, the district and school staff still refused to consider the board’s key directive which was to deliver a plan that would bring Gunn’s counseling program up to providing comparable services with Paly’s. If one thing that the board wanted was clear, that was it. Recall that WCDB felt that we had enough evidence to justify moving to advisory last year, and the board decided instead that Gunn had to become comparable to Paly but that the GAC could recommend how to do that, including timetables, metrics, and a defined plan.

Well, that didn’t happen because district staff refused to submit that question to any consideration. There was never any discussion of it. Search the minutes in vain for that one. It never happened.

The devil is going to be in the details. If this plan is fully implemented and if metrics for comparability are put into place, this could be what students at Gunn need. Gunn parents invested their good will in compromise and hopefully the district will now invest its in implementation and metrics.

Lisa,

Thanks for pointing out that we have huge elementary schools that lack administrative support–not only are Escondido and Ohlone huge, both of them administer two types of programs.

Why is having a flack more important to the district than providing the basic support needed to run our elementary schools?

As far the bickering about We-Can-Do-Better–frankly, it’s a distraction. Enough with the blame game folks. This is actually all pretty clear-cut. The PAUSD is publicly funded so, yes, we DO have a right to know what’s going on with our kids and our tax dollars. You may not like how some people requested information, but from my perspective the divisions arose because our board is weak and our district bureaucracy has an us v. them mentality that predates Skelley–Callan was awful that way.

Or let me put it this way, does anyone not agree with Lisa that any extra district funds for employees would be better spent adequately staffing our elementary schools than providing the district with a public-relations officer?

Which will be of a greater benefit to more students? Vice principals who can help administer dual programs at schools with more than 500 kids or someone to handle PR for the district bureaucracy?

What’s better for our kids? It should *always* come back to that.

The district and the board need to focus on that and so do we.

Were there any student votes for TA?

@parent who called Charles Young, “slick and petty”, have you ever actually met the man? If yes, I’m guessing you may not have gotten what you asked for. They can’t actually grant every request as the budget is not unlimited.

Village Fool, you have really found a nugget there. The quote you have found from Febrary 2011 is Kevin Skelly’s “confidential” report to the School Board following the disastrous meeting at St. Mark’s Church about the suicide cluster in February 2011. It shows that it was that event that catalyzed the decision to hire a “Communications” director (otherwise known as a PR person:

“..The discussion at St. Marks Church was unpleasant, and I don’t think productive. In hindsight, I can see some things we could or should have done better, but I think the deck was stacked against us. I am going to sit down soon with Tim Dyson, a CEO of a PR company, to seek his wisdom on how we can better address the clear frustration some people have with our work.”

This is a shocking correspondence on many levels. The meeting was one in which the community was reeling from the loss of 5 children by suicide. Parents were hungry for answers about what action the district was taking to address core problems in the schools and keep the children safe. The district’s presentation was jargon-filled, often rambling and incoherent, and very disappointing. At one point a parent interrupted a slide show listing all the programs at every school, most of which were pre-existing programs, to ask “what was new,” that is, what was being done to address the crisis. Parents wanted to do something about stress, homework, bullying, and other issues that did not seem to be on the district’s radar at all.

You can read for yourself Kevin’s “confidential” unguarded and unedited view of that situation. He felt that “the deck was stacked” against him, and that the solution was not to try to address the community’s legitimate concerns but to consult a “PR company” about how to manage the community’s frustration. So you see what we have come to and why. The Superintendent should have responded to that meeting not with defensiveness and anger but by hearing the longstanding and deep concerns in the community about important issues of stress, bullying and workload.

It was this defensive reaction to this meeting that precipitated the formation of We Can Do Better Palo Alto because it was this reaction by the Superintendent that persuaded some members of the community that board advocacy would be needed in order to move the needle on these issues.

For those of you who have leveled the charge, some with great venom, that parents who advocated for change should work “within the system” to cooperate, read Dr. Skelly’s really nasty somewhat paranoid email to the board — written about a MINISTER and some nice north PA Episcopal parish ladies and ask yourself how likely it seems that without political pressure of some kind any change would have been possible?

Would we have finals before break, a homework policy with time limits, a new anti-bullying policy that might eventually comply with the law, or advisory-type system at Gunn without that agitation? Has this situation improved at all since the time more than 2 years ago when Dr. Skelly wrote this sent this defensive note? Since this time we have seen deep resistance to members of the community who have advocated for these changes, demonization of those who wanted TA at Gunn, withholding of information fromt he public, knowing misstatements by district counsel, and an increase in litigation.

All of this can really be traced back to that meeting, and to Kevin’s defensive reaction to it. Rather than hear the community’s concern and adapt to it, he stiff-armed people who had genuine concern about stress, suicide, bullying and other issues and viewed it as a problem of messaging and PR.

The board is now weaker than it was in 2011 with the replacement of Barbara Klausner with Heidi Emberling who seems far out of her depth and naive beyond all imagining. Her quote of the Dali Lama on the importance of transparency while voting to hire a PR man due to the fact that she does not undertand that “communications director” means PR man was sad and surreal.

Watch the video of that meeting: http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_photo.php?main_id=20063&type=v&media_id=&section_id=1

Story:http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=20063

The calendar is another issue where Kevin’s inherent defensiveness and the board’s ineptitude and failed management have alienated a segment of the community. WCDB advocated for finals before break (along with Stanford’s Denise Pope, another anti-stress advocate who has been demonized unfairly). The Board and Kevin mishandled how they brought that about and that is not the community’s fault. I am sure that somewhere in the bowels of district IT there are many emails about how the calendar issue was also one of PR and “messaging” in which the “deck was stacked” against him.

Kevin Skelly’s comments betray him. If he is not attempting to spin the “situation”, why the timing? Why hire a spin doctor? Why be so defensive? If the board really wants all this brouhaha to stop, put an end to it by firing the inept superintendent.

Listen to the people you were elected to serve!

The district informed the GAC that money would not be a problem. I wonder if “paly parent” could tell us why she is so concerned about Gunn parents’ choices and school budgeting process. I am sure that we in the Gunn community can work that out for ourselves.

@member of public,
School districts in this state are almost entirely autonomous for the purpose of local control. Not for the purpose of small-minded, insular bureaucrats to serve themselves. The system is working when parent groups like WCDBPA have input, because that’s local parent control the system was set up for.

parent,

“Interesting you would speculate about budget on this thread about the topic of the board and district spending lavishly on things that are by all rights non-priorities for a school district. “

Not to mention, the sky is the limit – when there is a crunch, there is PIE, PTA, “Anonymous donors.” Oh and bond measures.

The “we have no money” is a standard excuse, not a real answer.

Ohlone Par,

“does anyone not agree with Lisa that any extra district funds for employees would be better spent adequately staffing our elementary schools than providing the district with a public-relations officer?”

I agree with Lisa that extra district funds are better spent in staffing schools. It’s also time to scrutinize items like professional development where millions (millions!) are going and we have not a clue what it’s about.

Not one dollar of professional development averted a civil rights violation.

There are things that can be done for much less money, and certainly much less complication.

The budget needs to be scrutinized, and by the way, the board already approved the PR person. We may as well get this person to have a better view of the budget online, and start tracking what they say to what they spend on.

> I agree with Lisa that extra district funds
> are better spent in staffing schools

Every penny should be spent in the classrooms has been a long time mantra of the PAUSD and its supporters—which turns out to be little more than code for higher salaries, shorter hours, and less accountability for teachers and staff.

Before one more penny is spent on the PAUSD, a complete audit should be performed to determine if other budgeting models would reduce costs, and produce better academic performance. As it were, since the PAUSD scores very well on standardized tests, it’s very difficult to expect too much more from the students at the top. There is some reason to perhaps rethink how money is spent on kids at the bottom.

Making the budget more meaningful, such as providing breakouts for expenditures—such as legal fees, and consultants—would be a very meaningful start. The current approach masks far too many expenditures—requiring Public Information Requests in order to find out how the District is spending its money.

The District is current spending over $13,000 per student. Increasing that amount by paying teachers/staff more is neither a good idea, nor a good use of public money.

If you look carefully at the elementary schools you will see that they are vastly underfunded – elementary school is a time when children learn how to behave and earn how to be good citizens. This is a time when the love of learning should be fostered.

One principal for 500+ students at Esconidido, Ohlone and Walter Hays (and I gather 400+ at El Carmelo) is not sufficient.

Our principal (one of the big schools) works non stop – is in meetings non-stop. Spends weekends working at school, spend hours and hours and hours all times of day trying to foster an environment that works for all children. It’s impossible.

The District needs to spend more $$$ on Elementary schools so we can identify kids in need – both academically and socially – and get them on the right path BEFORE they get to middle school. Many, many parents volunteer constantly in the classrooms, and that helps, but we need an assistant principal who can handle some of the day to day stuff so that our principal is freed up to design and implement the sort of programs that will benefit ALL cihldren.

Instead we have a PR person!!! Are you kdding me!!!! Most elementary school parents are exhausted from their little ones and many have toddlers and babies and are in the world of diaper changes…. PAUSD counts on elementary school parents being too physically tired to get to a school board meeting – and so they leave us in the dust.

PAUSD is failing our elementary schools and the results are showing up in the middle schools.

Some of you veteran parents – ADVICE PLEASE!!!!

I find it very interesting, after reading the article and scanning through all of these responses, that not a single person mentioned the 50% boost in per-student discretionary spending. That could have just as easily been the headline or co-headline point of the article.

Controversy sells in P.A.

wow Ohlonepar those are fantastic and thoughtful comments. Maybe you should run for BoE. Seriously. Just a few quick thoughts in response: one of the moms of a child who died by suicide was very vocal that he was a special education student who had experienced bullying. In terms of counseling reform, many Gunn parents believe that adopting an advisory model will put more eyes on students by leveraging more staff at the school to spend time with them and by developing non-evaluative relationship with adults through Titan Time or whatever they choose to call it. More adult contact is better given the workloads of the 7 counselors. Homework and stress reduction are about improving social-emotional health of all students, which will benefit kids with depression and otherwise vulnerable kids. No suicide has “one” cause. But no one said it did. That was a straw man floated by Kevin, or maybe just a case of not hearing correctly what was being said. All parents at St. Marks and WCDB have ever said is we need to have better metrics, information and strategies for reducing stress and promoting health. It’s hard to feel relaxed when you are up until 1:00am doing homework. I take it that since you are an Ohlone parent you probably do like SEL based-strategies but I am very interested in your take on that. But let me be totally clear — no one has ever said that these specific kids died due to stress. What was said was that these schools are too stressful and we need to reduce that academic stress and pressure to improve our kids emotional health across the board. For kids who are already depressed all that stress can be very dangerous. But it’s good for no one.

the public is not the problem,

“Would we have finals before break…or advisory-type system at Gunn without that agitation?”

1. The verdict on the wisdom of finals before break: NOT GOOD from what I’ve heard. Thanks to the anti-stress folks who successfully pushed to move finals to before break and the board members who hoped that they were right, finals before break was h*ll for many seniors who were under so much stress that their semester grades tanked, they weren’t able to finish the semester on time, and they did not complete college applications on time either.

2. That TA at Gunn is a good thing is not apparent either. Paly was not spared a spate of tragedies a few years before under its long-running WCDB hailed TA system and I recall a few months ago 2/3s of Paly students would not check a survey box indicating that TA was a valuable use of their time.

There are plenty who care a lot about student stress and think that those 2 much-ballyhooed “anti-stress” efforts made things exponentially worse for their kids.

“It is regrettable that the district does not update the site and continue to post the board and “cabinet” correspondence that it delivers to Bill Johnson every week, as there is a lot of interesting information in there that the public should see”

How is it that you know what the documents the district sends to the Weekly contain?

Gucci – Regarding the discretionary fund, from the article “The largest chunk — $425,000 — will go toward boosting principals’ discretionary funds from $70 per student to $105 per student. The funds go toward classroom support, supplies, support staff and new programs.” The principal (I think with the Site Council) gets to decide how to spend the money.

Public is not the problem – you wondered why a Paly Parent cared about Gunn – I have a number of friends with kids there and my children have friends there too. Its ok to care about kids from other schools… There is a lot of capable staff, wonderful students and parents at Gunn, I’m sure they will figure things out, but the results of the Guidance study was pretty much lots of pages of no decisions.

@wondering — Um, by the stories he writes based on them, and the links he provides to them. Plus through the messages I can get in my teeth if I forget to wear my tin foil hat.

the public is not the problem,

Putting your snide comment aside, you posted “there is a lot of interesting information in there that the public should see in but which it is not receiving” and then mentioned a few: “redacted the name of the donor” “issued correspondence showing that he chastised other community members not to email” the name.

Perhaps I missed it but I didn’t read anything about that in the articles I saw.

It sounds like you are privy to what is disclosed through the Weekly.

whoops I meant to type “@wondering” but I made a mistake. Anyway you are quite right in the case of the unlawful redaction of the donor’s name off the PDF I requested to see that one; I think that if the public didn’t have to make the request but it was just posted to the website as before it would be far better. The public should know what the board knows when the board knows it. In this case, the public should know Mr. Peery’s name and it shouldn’t be redacted and the Weekly should’t redact it out of this post. Transparency should apply to billionaires who are trying to change the district’s construction bidding process to no-bid.

Gucci – I think that PiE has just been maintain the level of aides at schools, kind-of backfilling for other budget cuts. A lot of what PiE has done recently has insulated us from issues that other district have had (like no music or art classes). There was also an article in the Merc News by a San Jose high school student that said her high school didn’t have any science labs, so they could only learn theoretically. We’re pretty lucky as a district as far as the rest of the state, but I think California is now 49th in per pupil spending.

paly parent,

Do you know if PIE knows by how much it backfills every year?

Kind of odd that the amount of backfill is exactly the same number of aides over a decade.

Funny how, after all the complaints about no money and all the begging letters sent twice a year to parents, $425,000 “suddenly” becomes available in the midst of a scandal! And $150,000 will be spent on a PR person who Skelly says has nothing to spin. Sure sounds like cheesy damage control to me.

Skelly should pay the PR salary with his own money. He is the one who needs it, oh and his other officials who turned the other way when the victim of bullying asked them for help. That money can be used to hire more reading specialists. Some of them work par-time, when there are so many students who are not reading at grade level, and are already in 4th, 5th and + grade.

@ data please, those numbers are not quite right. there was a student there.

Here are the minutes when the vote was counted. GAC members present are listed at the top: http://www.gunngac.org/Gunn%20GAC%20Minutes%202-12-13.pdf

At the top of these minutes:
GAC Members Present: Amy Balsom (Parent), Kristy Blackburn (Teacher), Kathleen Blanchard (Parent), Myesha Compton (Counselor), Alexis
Green (Parent), Diane Ichikawa (Teacher), Tom Jacoubowsky (Assistant Principal), Jovi Johnston (Counselor), Lori Krolik (Parent), Linda Lingg (Parent), Lynne Navarro (Teacher), Jyoti Sahdev (Parent), Lettie Weinmann (Teacher)

Lisa

I think you have opened a can of worms which needs to be opened.

I am with you on this one. I have been in elementary schools here and they are changing as well as growing.

First, start a new thread here specifically devoted to elementary school funding for assistant principal, reading specialist and whatever else you see as needed.

See if you can get someone who feels the same at each of the elementary schools, perhaps by asking those who comment who are in elementary schools to identify their school.

If you are on facebook, try and start a group of like minded people. We Can Do Better Palo Alto and Time to Thrive Palo Alto were both started, or at least used Facebook to get going.

Talk to the PTA at your school and see if anyone there is willing to put effort into this.

I know BoE meetings are long winded but if you can possibly get there and speak at the open forum then do so. If as I can understand it is difficult for you with younger children, find someone who can do it for you, even by mentioning you by name.

Email all the board members individually and Skelly also.

Be polite and courteous when you speak and in your emails, but use the same fervour you have used here.

Good Luck.

I can’t believe public not the problem finally hit on what the few members in my circle have noted: white males everywhere. Skelly touts his experience working with Latino shoeshine boys and that is exactly how he treats us.

Charles Young? Just watch the board meetings. Absence of even the most basic talent, such as acting on a formal complaint.

Skelly’s tenure is in a tailspin and he is taking the district down with him. Thank goodness we have ponied up the parcel tax or the county or state folks would take over. We need to be taken over. The board is not listening. They are simply the worst board ever.

Good job voting for them. I did vote for Heidi, I must admit, but she has no idea whatsoever what she is doing.

Thank you Weekly for exposing these debacles. Each article you post gets at least 100 posts before you close them. I have seen no other Palo Alto get more.

If you were the superintendent would you spend your time on. . .

A. Shredding everything you can find from OCR;
B. accidentally handing over privileged communications from your lawyer to the media;
C. Keeping your boss in the dark about serious legal trouble;
D. Deleting emails from parents with subject line “complaint about bullying”;
E. Surfing the web comparing PAUSD SAT and AP score to other schools scores and chuckling to yourself;
F. Reading “7 secrets of highly successful people.
G. Riding bike around saying “hi” to random people;
H. Deleting emails from teachers begging for a measley raise;
I. All of the above.

Is it all starting to become clear now?