Comments on: Parents form Educacy, set goal for 2012

By: shirly barnaj

shirly barnaj — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 03:17:12 +0000

I am a mother of a three year old turning 4, I as well as my daughter are so excited she will be starting kindergarten next year! we talk about it constantly and we are both looking forward to it! I heard that the board might change the cut off dates from december to september, I hope NOT, I strongly disagree with changing the dates! Parents who believe their child is not ready they hold them back! What about the children who are ready! Its not fair! i also disagree to make this sudden change, the board should change it for kids that are born after a certain year so parents are aware so they can plan ahead! Please pass this message to the board!

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By: John Fensterwald

John Fensterwald — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 07:36:25 +0000

Thanks for asking. I meant to include the e-mail address: info@educacy.org.

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By: Matthew Chartier

Matthew Chartier — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:18:00 +0000

Hi,

How do I get involded?

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By: Rebecca Robinson

Rebecca Robinson — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:42:09 +0000

I would like to be part of your organization. Please let me know how I can participate!
Thanks,
Rebecca Robinson
Los Gatos, CA

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By: Stephen

Stephen — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 17:52:39 +0000

I so very much support your efforts to keep teachers in the classroom. Please keep me posted on your efforts.

Here is my take on the matter. My daughter is an elementary school teacher in a great school with some challenging demographics. She has 34 children packed into her classroom and no teaching assistant. The kids are an eclectic bunch with high/low readers, ESL students, kids with special needs and some with learning difficulties including ADD. In other words … your typical CA classroom. She is a great teacher and the school climate is supportive of their teachers and creates a positive learning environment for the students.

This past school year more than half of the teachers at this school received lay-off notices.

In contrast the State Department of Education (SDE) and the County Offices of Education (COE’s) always seem to have enough operating capital. These monuments to educational excess often house a vast reservoir of educational paraphernalia, departments, and personnel whose value to California students, teachers or schools is of questionable merit. The “economy of scale savings” argument may have been a factor decades ago but in this technological age school administrators and teachers are just as capable of finding bargains, setting their own priorities and managing their own budgets. COE’s have become employment centers for adults and self-perpetuating bureaucracies. Take a walk through a COE. You will see that they are very large operations. i.e. Assistant Superintendents, Directors (I, II, III…), certificated managers, classified managers, assistant managers, executive secretaries, secretaries… the list goes on and on and the COE’s keep growing… on into the thousands of employees. The COE’s have created a powerful political niche for themselves that is of dubious value to education here in California.

Every school and every school child pays dearly for this COE bureaucracy. My take on this is that the classroom should be the last place to take the financial hit, not the first.

I am looking to connect with other folks who are comfortable examining the possibility of a future without COE’s.

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By: KSC

KSC — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 22:48:05 +0000

Just curious, why is yet another organization necessary? Couldn’t these folks have joined up with SVEF? Or their regional PTA? There’s a danger in diluting our voices by forming new organizations.

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By: Paul Muench

Paul Muench — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:43:08 +0000

It will be interesting to see if the focus becomes trying to get more local control of school funding or increasing funding for schools statewide. Particularly if it’s the latter, I hope they read or have read “Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses….” by Hanushek and Lindseth. This offers the most direct treatment of school finance issues in book form that I know of.

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By: CarolineSF

CarolineSF — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:25:31 +0000

That’s not an accurate account of PTA’s mission, though it’s certainly true that PTA has largely become a fundraising organization. PTA is an advocacy organization with volunteer lobbyists in every state capital and D.C. PTA’s official guideline urges school-level PTAs to limit their fundraising events — the guideline is a limit of one out of three events. But PTA is highly activist. While liberal parents in the Bay Area think of it as stodgy — yes, there are tubby church ladies with helmet hair and pantsuits from conservative rural areas in the organization; that’s the nature of a big tent — people in less enlightened parts of the country think of it as radical.

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