Episode Details

Happy Friday!

Thank you for all you have done this week to help us accomplish our district goals! Of course, with school being closed four days last week, not much changed. But, we are glad to have had another full week of school for the spring semester and take further steps toward a great outcome for the year. On the bright side of last week’s closure, our absenteeism went down another two-tenths of a percent.

In this week’s Wrap-up, I will write about the LEARNS initiative, address a new student discipline initiative aimed at our district goal, and talk a little about emerging technology that we need to prepare our students for.

LEARNS

The biggest news of this week was the unveiling of our Governor’s educational reform plan called LEARNS. We have been introduced to the basic vision of the plan before and I shared that in every Wrap-up since its release in combination with a Thought Exchange for your thoughts and questions. I have shared your thoughts and the rankings with the legislators for our district and I am sure you have more thoughts and questions since the latest new information has come out. If you did not watch the press conference where the plan was announced and explained, you can watch it here.

The plan does appear very ambitious and promising if all initiatives can be carried out but, as the cliche goes, “the devil is in the details”. The bill has not been released to explain how each goal will be accomplished so all there is now is speculation. There are a lot of rumors flying around but I am waiting on the bill before trying to explain in a context such as this Wrap-up how the plan might impact our current system. I will say that the math does not work out in order to pay a base salary of $50,000 and keep the current salary structure. In Sanders’ press conference, I believe she quoted new spending to be $173M, which would not cover an increase of $14,000 to educators’ base salary that is currently in law. In the Week 18 Wrap-up, I wrote that ‘our cheese will be moved’, and the $50,000 number strongly suggests that.

At this time, the whole plan has to be researched by the Bureau of Legislative Research (BLR) to cross-reference current laws to determine how each one of the goals may be accomplished either through repeal or revision of the laws we work under. This will take some time so we should reserve judgment and opinion until the bill is released.

All educational reform is controversial. There is promising language in this plan but we do not know how it can be accomplished without major changes in the system we are used to. We all want things to be better but we do not want things to change and that is why reform is a struggle. We should all be patient in this process and politely ask questions to our legislators as this progresses. I also want to add that I and other superintendents are bringing awareness to our leaders that school support staff deserve the same attention in the effort to improve educator pay. With that said, I want to highlight the loan forgiveness part of the plan. That is a great incentive for classified staff to earn a degree and become an educator.

The Renew and Restore Project

A couple of Wrap-ups ago, I wrote that we were working on another initiative related to student discipline. The details have