Thomas Talks on Citrus Today

I had the pleasure of joining Rotarian Doug Lobel on CITRUS TODAY on WYKE on TV channel 16 or 47 on Friday, January 31, 2014 to share about Citrus County School Board.

To watch the segment follow this link www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Gsc-itH_M or click on video below.

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“I read this article recently and appreciated it and wanted to share it with you all. Greg was kind enough to give me permission to repost it.” ~Thomas

Forget tests, Focus on the love of learning

By Greg Biance
I have always been a follower of (Citrus County Chronicle Publisher) Gerry Mulligan’s writing. I don’t know if it is the common Catholic school influence on our view of life or he just has an interesting perspective on the world. I am sure it is both. It touched me when he wrote about a childhood experience as a young paperboy who took a little time to listen to a Holocaust survivor. Mrs. Larson, Gerry’s customer, was marked by a degrading series of numbers tattooed on her wrist, put there when she entered the Auschwitz camp. No human should ever be a number, and it obviously moved him to this day.

This scarring by numbers still goes on today — not to minimize the horrific event that targeted Jews. I loathe the current business model driving education today. It marks humans without a soul and without depth of other giftedness. It is one-dimensional and tragically linear in thought.

On the same day Gerry’s column was published, Nat Hentoff wrote about a 70-year-old retired educator named Carmen Farina. The mayor asked her to return and help reform New York’s education system. Her vision is about bringing “joy” back into the classroom. It is about inspiring children to learn and grow.

As the politically right have continued to push accountability through excess testing in Florida, the classroom has suffered. Yes, our end-of-course scores can go up, but it is the lifelong learning where my greatest concern has heightened. The trick is not in moving numbers, but moving people to want to learn. I am disillusioned by Florida’s political forces that place monetary value to human value. If that is the case, I have little value as an educator. The rich businessman, ballplayer, actor only have real value. Numbers do not lead to superiority, just more money or a bigger paycheck. A few kids get bragging rights and others walk away marked as not good enough to learn in school. This negative correlation can metastasize into every fiber of a human.

I see zombies walking blindly encouraging this practice. How can one obtain passion, when it appears that the big test becomes the center of this new universe? The misinterpretation of two to three poorly written test questions on our past Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test scores or the evolution of the new end-of-course testing can affect the students’ ranking, stigmatize schools and affect our district’s ranking and funding. The demographics of local regions, a collective effort of the majority of parents’ minimized involvement with teens working towards educational achievement. Local hardships and disconnected parental control have not been factored into education’s business model. It is the area we do not discuss in society because it is culturally biased and makes people nervous. Unfortunately, real estate’s term of “location, location, location” is real.

The number is all that is seen these days. It removes the face of the child, it masks the modern emotional impact that is evident of our confused culture. I feel they compare areas that are not apples with apples. That is what a spreadsheet does in business when the bottom line is a number. The complexity of each human and their unique strengths outside of the test are lost. This should never be a reality, yet it crept in and now is embedded deeply in Florida’s dialogue in teacher training and professional development. The contradiction is when these two somewhat opposing forces push and pull on the educators to chase the data on the sheet. Teachers are expected to juggle both the data and a conflicting demand to engage our youth with interesting ideas and intellectual thought.

More engaging teacher prep is essential as conceptual ideas are noted, but questioning to support concepts is left to others. Now others write these test questions, which are supposed to be from objectives or standards, yet they integrate some confusing reasoning skills that require assemblage. They create a high-stakes test. College-bound students would have seen these questions in entrance exams, but now the total student body is driven by possible vagueness, with less sophisticated reading comprehensions skills and abilities. Yes, there is giftedness in some test takers. Are they really smarter?

I believe I can write a pretty challenging test in biology, but my variety of assessment and teaching style is of much better use of time while developing lessons. The money holders control these enterprises. Something has to give, and many need to start speaking up to counter the biased number. The state is stepping up the testing across the academic arena. Kids will be tested to death, with a number deciding their destiny. How many graduating classes of students will have to succumb to this myopic methodology? This business model has brought us to this unfortunate stage in education. Ask a well-experienced politician to pass the very test they implemented and you will be surprised by the data spreadsheet. Elections and moving ideas to the center might alter the future.

So when I read another human story, it stirred my passion to combat any program that limits individuals to a number. We are more than this. We are better than this. Giftedness comes in so many packages.

Greg Biance is a teacher in Citrus County and is a former Teacher of the Year.

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Tuesday’s Budget Workshop 2014-2015

“We can have anything we want, but we can’t have everything we want.”

At Tuesday’s board workshop the funding forecast presentation for the 2014-2015 School Budget reminded me of the saying, “We can have anything we want, but we can’t have everything we want.”

It is important to understand some important aspects of the school budget.  First the Base Student Allocation that is used to operate our schools and educate our students is largely funded by the local Citrus county tax payer.  Both the Base Student Allocation and the Required Local Effort (local property tax millage rate) are set not by the local school board but by the Florida Legislator.  This is done so all students in Florida received equitable school funding. Otherwise, counties that have higher property values would have better schools and funding than counties that do not.

The current Base Student Allocation for the 2013-2014 budget year is $3,752.30 per student. The most recent all-time high Base Student Allocation was $4,079.74 in 2007-2008.  When I first took office three years ago the Base Student Allocation was $3,630.62 per student, in 2011-2012 that went to an all-time low of $3,479.22.

This year Governor Scott has recommended $3,854.00 for the Base Student Allocation for the 2014-2015 budget. While that is better than the 2013-2014 budget, that is still down -5.7% less in Base Student Allocation then in 2007-2008, and then average reduced funding  of -8.95% less during 2007-2013.

Like our own home budgets, the school system has had to manage doing more with less funds while at the same time the cost of education has continued to increase. Those increases largely are out of the control of local school boards as they are controlled by Florida Department of Educational requirements or legislative mandates.

As a school board we have been managing these difficult times by using our savings which is better known as Unrestricted Fund Balances.  From 2004 through 2010 the school board built a savings from approximately $7.5 million to $15.5 million.  In addition to making many cost reductions we also used the savings/unrestricted fund balances to fund teachers and programs while at the same time trying to avoid negatively affecting the classroom as much as possible. This has come at a great cost to our unrestricted fund balances which have now gone from a high of $15.5 million down to $3.7 million.  Our hope and belief was that economic recovery would be in full swing by now and we would no longer need to use our built up fund balances but rather we could begin refunding them.  Unfortunately economic recovery along with increase cost of educating students has not allowed for this to happen yet. If we continue to use the district’s Unrestricted Fund Balances it means that as a school district we may likely violate our own self-imposed district policy of having, “a fund balance unreserved, which is at least 3.5% of the recurring revenues budget.” (Policy 7.10 – ‘School Budget System’) and also the state required amount in our Unrestricted Fund Balances.

The answers as to what options to consider is not easy.  As I have shared in the past Citrus has continued to be an academic leader in the state of Florida and the state of Florida continues to be a educational leader in the country. (See www.ThomasTalks.com 1/10/2014 blog post: “Florida Education 7th in Nation”)   What is challenging is helping people understand that funding public education in Florida is required by the State Constitution but is also an investment in our state and county’s future.  Each year Citrus sends approximately 700 out of 1,100 (or 65+%) graduating seniors on to a four year college or university, far above the state’s and nation’s average.

Citrus Schools knows how to educate students but the mandates and requirements are adding an unreasonable layer of cost to educating our students.  For many years businesses have told government leaders that deregulation, removing the bureaucracy and making it easier to do business makes businesses more successful.  It is time that this same approach is given to public schools.  It is time for school districts to be provided the flexibility and autonomy to operate more cost effectively and with less government intrusion. The current system has school districts being told what to teach, when to teach it, how much to teach, what to test and  how to evaluate teachers and students with the threat of penalization of any district that does not comply. For schools districts to truly reduce costs and still be effective it is time that our state leaders understand that intrusion does not only come from the federal level.

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