Bluewater update No. 14

So soon after posting the last update, Maria Canton at the Sun Times posted a story late Monday that should make every trustee in the province take a second look at how their boards handle in-camera discussions regarding their employees. An Ontario Provincial Police investigation has been launched into the Bluewater District School Board over allegations trustees illegally met behind closed doors and discussed subject matter that should have been considered in an open, public meeting.

The Ontario Education Act permits confidential meetings when they might disclose "intimate, personal or financial information in respect to a member of the board or committee, an employee or prospective employee of the board or a pupil or his or her parents or guardians . . ."
(Peter) Ferguson argues that the board wrongly held all meetings regarding the superintendents involved in the plagiarism case behind closed doors because "the plagiarism activities of the subject employees are part of their professional lives and concern only their conduct while in the employ of the trustees."

What they fail to realize is the board could have also considered the discussions over the superintendents in question to have been negotiations with employees, which are also permitted in-camera. Canton also notes Ferguson is the person who took the plagiarism concerns all the way to the Ontario College of Teachers and was cut off by the board chair at a meeting earlier this fall where he started to speak about what he thought should be done with the superintendents in question.
This is a grey area, despite how black and white the text of the Act appears. When a board deals with disciplining its employees -- particularly given only one employee reports to it directly, the director of education -- there is enough legal space in the act and, I would suspect case law, to say these discussions qualify as "personal" information. While the alleged behaviour may be related to a person's public conduct as an official of the board, the censure as potentially meted out by trustees -- or rather, as board direction to the director of education for implementation -- isn't necessarily so. Most boards treat director of education reviews and evaluations as in-camera items, as these discussions and reviews deal with personal information.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've spent a lot of time this year looking into municipal in-camera meetings (whose rules aren't that different than what's in the Education Act in terms of appropriate subject matter) and there could be enough space here for the investigation to come up empty.
Or, as Ferguson alleges, the board could have gone too far-- and therefor should have done what to my knowledge would be the first board to ever publicly discuss and then censure its own employees. I'll be following the coverage here very closely as I've come to question my own public board's bylaw that allows a closed-door "caucus" meeting to be held at the call of the chair. Despite my routine coverage and ranting every time the board chose to hold these meetings, it garnered no public reaction and created no appetite for change.

Inspiring reporter quote

I was reviewing my notes from the Education Writers Association seminar last week as I frame some additional posts and tripped across this quote from Michael Klonsky of the Small Schools Workshop and Center for Innovative Schools.

"If you become a connoisseur of schools and education, you'll know a good teacher and a good school when you see one."

OK, I may have massaged the quote a little bit from the mess that is my notes from that day, but you get the general idea.

Bluewater update No. 13

A quick update on Bluewater District School Board activities-- as usual, a few days behind the Owen Sound Sun Times' Maria Canton and the folks over at MendEd.
Tuesday could be a good day in the district as the results of surveys with current and former parents, students and staff members are released and reviewed by the board of trustees.

"We haven't seen the survey results yet, but we are looking forward to finding out what the public has had to say," Jan Johnstone, vice-chairwoman of the Bluewater District School Board of trustees, said yesterday.
"I honestly don't think there'll be any surprise, but rather the results will provide us with an opportunity to again move forward. This is something we need to do annually, take the pulse of our community."

I'm curious as well, and will try and make a point of posting Canton's update as soon as the news alert crosses my desk and I have a spare moment. To my knowledge -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- the BDSB is the only one to have conducted this type of survey. It could say a lot, or very little, about perceptions of the board within the communities it serves.

Bottled-water hoo-ha

A frequent if anonymous tipster sent this along earlier today. Avon Maitland DSB is adding its name to the list of school boards moving away from bottled water. There are a number of other boards who've done this over the past several years and a few more who've considered it but not moved to a full ban or cessation on the sale of bottled water from schools.
Advocates for doing this in the school system note boards should be leading by example and that the practice of moving away from bottled water fits hand-in-glove with elements of the environmental education curriculum.
Critics note the sales of bottled water do generate school-based funding for those schools who have them. Bottled waters, juices, flavoured waters and milk products became the only options for vending machine drinks in elementary schools a number of years ago after the sale of pop was banned from these schools.
Here's my issues with stopping the sale of bottled water at schools-- and I say these as someone who never buys bottled water, preferring tap water.
We should be teaching students in the appropriate forums about the impact of bottled liquids. How the production of plastic affects the environment and how the money we all spend on municipal water (or well water available in schools) produces safe, clean, tested, drinkable water.
We should pressure boards to setup recycling programs that match or better the one run by the municipality the school is located in-- currently, within my county children can recycle more at home than they can at school.
However banning bottled water doesn't rid students of responsibility for the things most bottled-water critics hate most. Vendors will simply replace bottled water with flavoured waters (which are tap water with flavour added in most cases), vitamin waters (ditto) or a plethora of other non-pop drinks that still come in plastic containers. By banning bottled water you haven't reinforced the lesson of reduce, reuse, recycle, you've simply replaced one product in the machine with another.
Plus, as a trustee at another board noted when it was debating this issue, isn't it better when we arm our students with information and encourage them to make the right choice?

PFE on school closings

I was out-of-country when People for Education released its annual report on school closings. However, it's a significant report and issue, so here I am catching up to it almost a full week after it was initially released.
First, let me quibble with some of the data. Assembling this information on school closures, accommodation reviews and 'replacement' schools across 72 boards is challenging enough, and ensuring it remains current is also a challenge. There has to be a cutoff or the report would never get published with the constant changes taking place. That said, in a board I'm very familiar with, there are currently five reviews underway (two of which are now before trustees, with a few more not far behind), and these are not encapsulated in PFE's report. The number of replacement schools is also underreported. I also quibble with the chart on page 5 showing 5,000 students are needed to fund an educational assistant. If this is truly the case (I've not gone looking into the funding formula to verify) then how do boards manage to place at least one EA -- if not full-time then part-time -- in every school?
The focus on closures was the greatest foible of the reporting I was able to see on the report as well. Let's all focus on the number of schools closing and not provide the full context as to why, nor the context of what happens to the students in these closed / closing schools. Let's ignore the fact that in some cases, the replacement school -- though larger and perhaps not as local as its predecessors -- provides a vastly improved learning environment. Which is ridiculous, given the report is only 14 pages and actually includes some of this context on page 2.
Now as to the report's actual content?
PFE wants a review of the funding formula -- which was promised by 2010 (now 2011) by the government. It wants that review to re-align those elements of staffing and maintenance (etc.) still dependent on pupil populations reaching a certain threshold. From the report:

Before the review of funding, the Ministry of Education, in co-operation with Ministries such as Children and Youth Services, Health, Health Promotion and Municipal Affairs should:

• examine research on optimal school size;
• investigate the impact of a community hub model on things like overall health promotion, neighbourhood viability, youth violence and poverty reduction; and
• develop policy and funding to support and promote integrated planning and schools as community hubs.

The school size one is interesting given my recent exploits. PFE suggests high schools in the 600-900 range, which per our definitions earlier this week would actually be "medium-sized" high schools. This is also a range where many boards are currently able to make high schools work under the current formula.
PFE is bang on when it says Ontario is falling behind on the development of community hubs in its schools. Where this hasn't occurred naturally due to geography or by intent due to construction in times where childcare or other services were integrated, we've fallen behind. The abandonment of any further expansion of the Best Start program after the federal government pulled its cash out of the initiative to fund measly childcare credits for families has put Ontario behind.
The report also fails to address how the recent "surge" in school closures is directly tied to the moratorium on closures requested by former minister Gerard Kennedy. That request, which virtually every board in Ontario complied with, created a backlog of issues -- school physical condition, population decline, etc. -- across every board that wasn't dealt with from December 2003 until well after the new guidelines were released in October 2006. Many boards also spent a lot of time (and money) subsequent to the release of those guidelines preparing capital plans. Kennedy said he was going to personally review each of these, but moved on to other pastures before most were even submitted. His successors at the ministry backed away from that commitment, making the capital plans working documents subject to continual change and approval from ministry staff members.
The end result was that it was at least another academic year after the guidelines were released before boards had their own internal policies and procedures prepared and aligned to begin tackling a backlog of school accommodation issues.
This as during this time many boards' largest grade cohorts began moving from elementary schools into high schools. The next four years will be even more telling as student population declines begin to stabilize in elementary but hit high schools hard and comparatively fast-- remember the declines had eight to 10 years to move through elementary schools. The impact will be felt in a four- or five-year time frame across high schools.
Is a review of the funding formula needed? Yes. It should be continually reviewed, with major updates every five years or so.
Does the province need a community hub policy and practice? Yes-- desperately.
Should all closures be abandoned until this is figured out? No-- this strategy has led us to where many boards have been in the past two academic years and another moratorium will only create more challenges than the closures it may actually prevent in the long term.

Small high schools -- Lincoln and High Tech High

Here's a slideshow of some of the photos I nabbed at the last two schools we visited in San Diego. I kept the camera in the bag at Kearney for some reason.

Small by design v. small by nature

One of my first awakenings at the Education Writers' Association small-high schools seminar earlier this week was a key difference for us to remember in Ontario. You can be a small school by design, or you can be a small school by nature.
All of the high schools -- a mix of public and public-charter -- we visited during the seminar were small by design. Meaning the district or the charter board purposely planned out the administrative, instructional and in two cases, physical design of the school to be small.
Look at Kearney High Educational Complex-- formerly a composite high school with approximately 2,000 students. It was closed and reorganized into four 'small' schools of 400 or so students. It includes the Construction Tech Academy (this site was loading very slowly...), the School of Digital Media and Design, the School of International Business and the School of Science, Connections and Technology. All schools have project-based (or, "experiential" as we might call it in Ontario) learning, advisories for students and other small-school concepts.
Similarly, at High Tech High, the first school and campus were purposely designed to have no more than 400-500 students, including the project-based learning and administrative and teacher organization to bring small-school concepts into play. These were replicated on the same campus as the first school with the High Tech High International and High Tech High Media Arts schools.
All of these schools are different from many of our small schools in Ontario, which are 'small by nature.' Our schools are small by nature mainly due to two factors:

1. These are schools that, by geographic, financial or other circumstance, were built small. These are the campuses that physically were never meant to accommodate more than 400-600 students from the moment the foundation was poured and the walls started to rise. Other than this physical characteristic, there's nothing else that inherently exists in these schools from the small-school model.
   
2. The other 'small by nature' school is the one that regardless of what physical size it was built to accommodate, has a small population due to the demographic changes of the past decade or so. Population shifts (from established to newer neighbourhoods, or through urban renewal) and our declining birth and fertility rates have created these 'small' schools.

So when, in accommodation reviews I've covered, or ones I've posted about here, advocates trot out the 'small schools' card and throw the small-school movement out as a reason why their 'small by nature' school should continue without changes, we need to be aware they're throwing dust into our eyes. For the most part, the small-school benefits have happened in these schools by circumstance, not through planned implementation. Some of the small-school concepts -- those not in place across district boards or the province (more on this in a subsequent post) -- used in the schools we visited in San Diego don't exist in 'small by nature' schools. Why? They're composite public high schools with small populations, not really 'small schools.'
We need to remain cognizant of that difference -- small by design v. small by nature. Each produces different schools and very different environments.