According to Assistant Superintendent for Finance and Operations Paul Woehlke, the asbestos project in the learning center wing has been on the district’s life-safety list for some time now, but its completion wasn’t expected for a few years. Recent water damage to many of the floor and ceiling tiles has compromised the wing, moving the project forward.

The money needed for the project will somewhat be offset (though not directly) by an expected $1 million revenue increase thanks to a bump in the state’s foundation level per pupil.

This year’s budget is already about $1.1 million bigger than last year’s, mainly due to inflation.

Also on the agenda:

• Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction Joel Estes will give a presentation of the district’s sixth-day enrollment numbers, which dropped about 15 students from last year. That puts the district around 4,500 students.
• The board should approve adding Henderson Street as a hazardous transportation area, as students attending Churchill Junior High School have to cross the busy street. They will instead be bused from a central location on one side of Henderson to Churchill.

Monday was the first day for the largest school district around here. Not a whole lot happened, so that’s a plus compared to some districts in the country.

Earlier this week, the Illinois Auditor General released the audit for the Knox County Regional Office of Education. Not a whole lot was wrong with their financial reporting, which is a plus. The Henderson-Mercer-Warren Regional Office, however, had quite a few more issues, some dating back to 2003.

It’s troubling to me that the offices which are responsible for overseeing the education of children can go relatively under the radar, whereas local districts are constantly held up to severe scrutiny.

Here‘s a piece I wrote on those two audits.

The full audits can be found (for Illinois only) at www.auditor.illinois.gov.

Some schools showed massive increases toward Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), others showed significant decreases. Many of these changes were in the double digits.

Schools were even notified of their AYP status — whether the school passed AYP or failed — based on these flawed test scores.

This is just another example, as one area administrator told me, of the federal government forcing standards on states but not giving them the guidance or adequate funding in order to put those standards into action.

There’s no official word yet as to whether schools will be given new AYP designations once the new scores are calculated — which will take several weeks and is meanwhile handicapping districts trying to get ready for the school year — but I was told they will be.

For a more full description of the problem, click here.

Addition: Two years ago, report cards were released incredibly late by the state. Koch promises this won’t happen, but if it’s going to take several weeks just to re-score more than 1 million exams, it stands to reason that report cards aren’t going to be ready to release on Oct. 31.

Illinois’ recently changed its rules to require all students either entering kindergarten or beginning an Illinois school to have an eye exam. Those entering kindergarten and second and sixth grades must also have a dental exam.

If you have any questions, check with your local school district.

I can’t even begin to enumerate the things on the chopping block, which includes funding to programs for neglected children, entirely cutting funding to at least one state park and slashing funds to rape centers from about $5 million to just $500,000.

Sad. Just, plain sad. I can’t imagine what the cuts would look like if education were included, though. What more would our schools have to take away from our children?

Arts programs are all but gone. So are vocational programs. What’s next? Will parents have to pay much more in rental fees for books? How many teachers would we lose?

Too bad the pet projects of the governor weren’t subject to much of the same fiscal scrutiny.

Basically, what it means is that the big-wigs at the Illinois State Board of Education (most of whom haven’t been at the head of a classroom in years, if at all) get to make up some fancy new rules for holding schools accountable.

One state has decided to focus more on principal training. Others are developing their own programs.

Illinois, on the other hand, is relying on tutoring. Under the current federal NCLB rules, schools which fail Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for two years in a row have to offer their students school choice. After three years, schools have to offer tutoring.

This is pretty backwards, because it would stand to reason that tutoring should come BEFORE letting families jump ship. In Illinois, tutoring will now (if a school decides) be available after two years. After three years failing AYP, both school choice and tutoring have to be offered.

While it’s a step forward toward not making NCLB a cookie-cutter approach to education, I wish that the Illinois administrators would take a more proactive and creative approach. Instead of waiting until a school has failed for two years, for example, step into ALL schools and require tutoring based upon certain standards.

For me, it’s too little too late in the dying program that is NCLB. Either it needs to be nixed completely, or it needs some major overhauls.

We’ve had some flooding and a three-day boil order around here, so I spent two entire days out in the sun working on flood stories.

Not a whole lot going on with the education beat recently, either. Summer gets pretty slow, minus construction and upgrade projects.

Back when the program was announced, administrators around here had several concerns. One was, obviously — and especially in a state which can’t pay its bills on time — funding of the program. In talking to the assistant superintendent for finance on Friday, he said that the intent of the program was to be fully-funded, especially if the district sticks with a fairly modest cold lunch, so that’s looking as if it was settled.

Another concern was logistics in feeding both the students at summer school (which serves kids from first through fifth grades who are in danger of not meeting grade equivalency) and members of the general community. Administrators worried about mixing the younger students (and the younger members of the general public) with the older kids, who could get rowdy. So, the solution was to give the summer school students their lunches in the classroom (making it a working lunch so as not to lose instruction time) and give the general public the multi-purpose room. I’ll check up on how this is going in a week or so, once people settle into a routine.

I believe in this program, because kids shouldn’t have to suffer if their parents can’t provide, and anything is better than the McDonald’s processed food they can pick up within walking distance of almost any home in this city. But, I also think it puts an unfair burden on our schools to provide extra services on their already strapped budgets. Luckily, it’s looking as if this will be fully-funded, but that has yet to be seen.

I just hope this can remain under the control of state funding and the state doesn’t dump any more of its financial problems on the districts.

Therefore, the district has received permission from the state to use life-safety funds to re-build the functionality of the building. In other words, since the building was used as a locker room, the district can use its life-safety funding to re-build locker rooms on the middle school campus. As a result, the district can no longer, in any way, shape or form, use the building for any purpose whatsoever. It will just sit there.

Enter regional superintendent. She was asked to write a letter of condemnation to the state board of education allowing the district to use funds to knock down the current building. She stalled and stalled, eventually only sending in a two-line letter saying she wasn’t going to give her permission. She says it’s because the district could have done more to preserve the building in the past.

That all touched off a slight uproar in the community, of people wanting to save the building. That’s all well and good, if the building weren’t about 100 feet from the school building. That means there is NO WAY, from a liability standpoint, that the district can legally share use of the building with the community at large. It’s just too much of a potential problem for them to incur.

While this has been explained over and over again, there is still a small group fighting for this building. Now, I’m all for community activism, but community activism with a potential return. There’s no point in fighting for something if it’s never going to happen.

What’s even worse, though, is the fact that the person spearheading the campaign is employed by a newspaper in a town about 50 miles away. He’s the correspondent for this county to that newspaper. That means he covers school board issues in that newspaper. That creates a conflict of interest, especially when he writes letters to the editor in a local weekly newspaper on this issue and, as he just did, speak at the school board meeting while he’s technically covering it for the newspaper.

Again, I’m all for saving historic buildings and this one’s pretty cool from the outside (the inside’s pretty bad), but not at the cost of compromising journalistic integrity.

UPDATE: One of the board members mentioned — for the umpteenth time since I took over the beat — that this building was slated for demolition nearly 10 years ago and, up until a few months ago, no one had come forward with a workable solution. He referenced window replacements in a 50-year-old junior high building this summer, saying he would much rather see district money put into buildings which are still being used by students than go toward buildings which are not used and cannot be used for their intended purposes.

The board is currently (at 9:27 p.m.) in executive session to discuss real estate sale or purchase. This could (not likely, though) relate to this particular building. I will update this if anything happens.

UPDATE 2 (6/10/08, 7:15 p.m.): The assistant superintendent told me today that the district will form a task force (headed by previously-mentioned correspondent) for the purpose of “finding a use and the financial support for that use” of the old gym. The committee will have six months to come up with a solution, if there’s one out there.

Sure, there’s been the occasional comment slung around about NCLB, but nothing has been gone into in-depth. I hope that, since both major parties have their presumptive nominees, the voters can begin to hear about more than the “major” issues.

Just so you can all educate yourselves, here are the campaign website links for Obama and McCain.

I will discuss them in more detail in later posts, especially as the campaign heats up, but a lack of time at the moment prevents me from doing so.