I-SS Committee of the Whole Meeting

The next Committee of the Whole Meeting is scheduled for this Tuesday, Sept. 8th, at 5:00 p.m. in the ADR Education Center. At this meeting the School Board will start the search for the new superintendent by having a representative of the NC School Boards Association give a presentation regarding the obligations of the Board as they carry out the process of selecting a new superintendent. I think it would be very beneficial for anyone interested in the selection process to attend this meeting. Remember that the new superintendent will be directing I-SS and many of us don't want I-SS to repeat the mistakes that have occurred under the direction of the previous superintendent. I think that most I-SS stakeholders would agree that the new superintendent must set a new course for the school system. One that, as was mentioned at the meeting with Mr. Johnson, will bring back the humanistic character of education to our schools.

There are a number of other items on the agenda as well. Some of these other items are the School Improvement Plans, Recommended Changes to the I-SS Strategic Plan, and the BOE Improvement Plan. Remember that most of the work of the School Board is done at the Committee of the Whole meeting. To access the full agenda for the meeting click on the link below.

Agenda

Report on the Committee of the Whole Meeting

I attended the Committee of the Whole meeting this evening. Even though Dr. Holliday had previously stated that he would be at the meeting he was not. I guess he left the building right after the reception in his honor. Mr. Johnson was there to take over the duties of the superintendent. The meeting started with a presentation from a couple of students who participated in the AIG Summer Camp. They showed a video they made while at the camp. This was followed with a presentation by the principals of each of the middle schools. They each spoke of some of the student successes that occurred during the last year. There were a number of positive achievements at each school.

There was some talk about this year’s budget but without a finalized budget from the State there was still a lot to be resolved. Please see my previous post about the NC budget.

The rest of the meeting dealt with a number of routine matters such as updates on current and upcoming building projects. Dale Ellis gave his personnel report. He mentioned there were some transfers and retirements but mostly referred to the information that was given to the Board members and did not mention specifics. Mr. Johnson talked about a proposed change to the school policy relating to the destruction of EC records stating that it would make it clearer how such records were to be handled. He also spoke of a proposed change to the school’s attendance policy that would allow parents to submit a child’s absence excuse on line using the school’s web site. It all ended with the Board going into a closed session.

Mark Your Calendar

My wife, who is an I-SS teacher, received the following e-mail from Dawn Creason today.

Subject: Reception Honoring Dr. Terry Holliday

The board of education and the administration of Iredell-Statesville Schools will be hosting a drop-in reception honoring Dr. Terry Holliday on Monday, August 3 from 4:00 p.m. until 5:30 p.m. in ADR's staff development room #2. Please join us as we thank Dr. Holliday for his service to I-SS and wish him well as he begins this next chapter of his career. Kindly click either 'accept' or 'decline' above so that we might have an accurate head count.

Dawn Creason is the I-SS Director of Public Relations. I assume that all I-SS employees have been invited to the reception. My wife respectfully declined the invitation. I checked the I-SS web site and saw no mention of the reception so it looks like the general public is not invited.

One interesting note is that the I-SS Committee of the Whole meeting is scheduled to start at 5:00 p.m. on the same evening and Dr. Holliday has said that he will be at that meeting. I wonder what they plan to do about the half-hour overlap. The Committee of the Whole meeting is also in the ADR Education Center.

I do encourage all concerned citizens to attend the Committee of the Whole Meeting. This will probably be the last chance to see Dr. Holliday carry out the duties of superintendent. Then we can all go out and celebrate. But, seriously, I do think that we need a good turn out at this meeting and at the regular Board meeting. Remember that much of the real work of the Board is done at the Committee of the Whole meeting. If we want the Board members to consider our suggestions we have to show them that we are sincere in our convictions.

Committee of the Whole Meeting

I attended the I-SS Committee of the Whole meeting last night. As you might suspect much of the time was spent talking about the budget for next year. The Statesville Record and Landmark has much of the information in today's print edition and posted on-line. There was a lot of bad news but I did get the impression that the Board and Dr. Holliday were sincere in their desire to retain all employees and especially teachers. The biggest concern seemed to be with respect to the teacher assistants. The state is considering no longer funding teacher assistants for the third grade. Of course this would mean that it would be difficult to retain all of the teacher assistants. It would also impact the running of the school buses since many of the teacher assistants are also bus drivers. They did say I-SS might be able to hire some of the fired teacher assistants as part-time bus drivers. I am sure that is not much consolation for those teacher assistants. There was also talk about changing assistant principals from 12 month contracts to 11 or 11.5 month contracts but no one suggested reducing the number of Central Office administrators. In my opinion, and in the opinion of others, I-SS has too many administrators and that I-SS could save some money by eliminating a few of them. Dr. Holliday did mention that if they did away with the Instructional Facilitators, those individuals would go back into the classroom and then I-SS would probably have to fire some non-tenured teachers since the Facilitators are tenured and have seniority. I think I-SS could keep those teachers if they did eliminate a few of those Central Office administrators. Dr. Holliday also stated that the Instructional Facilitator model is funded through Title I, Title II, and IDEA funds. Considering that the current implementation of the Instructional Facilitators is to enforce the Baldrige plan, is that really the proper use of those funds? Speaking of the Baldrige plan, another issue mentioned last night was that the fact that teachers were going to be asked to do more work for less pay. Wouldn't this be a great time to tell teachers that if they wanted to continue doing all the Baldrige paperwork in their classes they could do so, but that it would also be quite acceptable to use a different teaching method in their classrooms.

This post was written by Paul Klaene.