As tonight, the municipal contribution study group is taking public testimony here in Worcester, perhaps we can offer this from a Worcester school teacher:
The Whole People must take upon themselvs the Education of the Whole People and must be willing to bear the expences of it. There should not be a district of one Mile Square without a school in it, not founded by a Charitable individual but maintained at the expence of the People themselvs they must be taught to reverence themselvs instead of adoreing their servants their Generals Admirals Bishops and Statesmen.
asking for the Board to waive the requirement that charter schools submit single audit by November 1 prior to the government shutdown those single audit requirements were not updated only for those that spend more than $750,000 of federal funding other districts are not governed by a state statutory date; other districts are due nine months after the close of the fiscal year (so March) November 1 is in regulation; January 1 is in state law Curtin: Board doesn't have the authority to waive the statute regulatory deadline of November 1 can be waived by Board
Both of these are taking "competency determination" out of the language: in the Seal of Biliteracy and in student records. The request today is to send the proposed regulation changes out for public comment through December 5, with this back before the Board at their January meeting.
Seal of Biliteracy remove CD; clarify and streamline procedures for notification; transcripts, and terminology; pathways to demonstrate English proficiency; support equitable access
seeing numbers of students completing Seal of Biliteracy growing
Here are some tabs I have open that I'd recommend reading:
When we do facilities in the college class I teach, one thing my students most often remark on is the disparities among play space outdoors: who has a playground? who has access to grass? UC Davis is doing some interesting work measuring heat in school playyards, which particularly an issue for urban schools, where often the only play space is a patch of asphalt, and in a warming world.
You may have caught headlines about Alpha Schools, the chain that claims kids can spend just two hours a day with their generative AI "tutoring" overseen by adults who are not teachers. I urge you to read Wired's extensive piece on the actual experience of families, who are now pulling their kids out due to how their children were treated. This particularly matters as the chain is expanding across the country, funded in many places by vouchers.
With the school year now fully underway, I’ve been dismayed to see how the default position on generative AI throughout the educational landscape has been to ask how we might use it ethically, without considering that the answer to the question might be: “We can’t.”
I’m seeing this at my kid’s high school and at the University of Minnesota (where I work), from my professional organization and from the Minnesota Department of Education. It seems to be the norm pretty much everywhere. But what if we just didn’t accept that these programs must infiltrate every part of our lives? Or at least not the products currently being sold to us, literally sold to us so megacorporations can make more money, but also metaphorically sold to us as inevitable.
We can stop. We can pause. We can demand something better. And we must. Because there is a body count.
More than a decade ago, Springfield and state entered into an agreement to place some of the city’s most troubled schools under the control of the Springfield Empowerment Zone Partnership, a collaborative effort of the Springfield Public Schools, the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Springfield Education Association, with assistance from some business partners.
In November, officials agreed that Duggan Academy, Van Sickle Academy, Chestnut Accelerated Middle School, Discovery Poly Tech and four schools within High School of Commerce have reached achievement goals and are ready to return to the control of the Springfield district.
The state initially set the transition to take place this summer, but school officials successfully put off that move for a year to give educators enough time to plan for a smooth transition, said Superintendent Sonia Dinnall. The plan was discussed this past week at a School Committee meeting.
I'd missed that there had been a discussion already last year--did that get any coverage at all?--but this is in keeping with Massachusetts moving away from not having democratically-elected local control of its schools, with Holyoke now out of receivership and Southbridge moving there.
Here in Worcester, I'd urge you to send MONEY (money is always better than food donations to food banks; they can get more with it than you can!) to the Worcester County Food Bank. I am also a donor to the Worcester free fridges, where you can bring food or you can donate money; see their website for more information on both. For information on more local resources, as well as how to give, please see FoodHelpWorcester.
Also, this makes the school nutrition efforts that much more important. Here in Massachusetts, remember that we have universal free lunch; if you know of hungry families, please ensure their families are taking advantage of that.
After a two-hour proceeding, Judge Jason Braun ruled the boy can stay in the United States for now, but he must remain at the juvenile detention center in Winchester, Virginia until his case is heard again Nov. 5.
Lattarulo said the teen, who he said appeared very sad throughout the hearing, told the court he misses his mother in Everett.
“He’s probably maturing at a pace I wouldn’t like because it’s such a wake-up call to a child to be in that facility,” Lattarulo said. “I don’t think he’s good. He’s as good as he can be. When I talked to him, I could tell he’s trying to find strength in his voice, but you still hear the 13-year-old child.”
“ICE’s targeting of not only adults without criminal convictions, but also children and families, negates the administration’s stated policy of going after the ‘worst of the worst’ for deportation proceedings,” they note in an Oct. 3 letter signed by eight other New York Democratic U.S. representatives, including Ritchie Torres and Jerrold Nadler.
They demanded to know the total number of students — from kindergarten to college-age — arrested by the Department of Homeland Security since President Donald Trump took office in January. They want to learn how many remain in ICE custody, their average length of stay and what percentage were or are being held alongside their families.
They further asked how the U.S. government is meeting its legal obligation to educate these children and, more specifically, about the quality and language proficiency of the teaching staff.
“The Department of Education has the responsibility under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution to ensure that all students have equal access to education,” they wrote. “Please provide copies of curricula, sample lesson plans, and rubrics currently in use at ICE detention facilities, processing sites, and Office of Refugee Resettlement shelters.”
Sorry, I know the first of these public sessions already happened this week. This fall is somehow feeling particularly slammed for me...remember, they also will take electronic submission of testimony at C70PublicComment@mass.gov. Also, yes, again, this is me posting as me and not in any other capacity.
When I last wrote on this for you, I shared what isn't going to come up in the study commission because it isn't things with which they are charged.
Note that those are all things about which we should be talking, too! We really cannot ignore how harsh not having SOA increases is going to be on the districts that have been using them to ensure they can maintain services, because inflation isn't keeping up with costs, much as so many other districts have been pushing local increases for the same reason.
In other words:
INFLATION INFLATION INFLATION
However, again, this study is specifically to study the "municipality's target local contribution and required local contribution" so it's looking at what I think of as the SECOND part of the question: once we have decided what a "minimum adequate per pupil budget" is, where does the money come from?
Here are some things that I expect to come up, some of which are written right into the study language itself:
I'm at the ASBO conference this week in Fort Worth--ASBO is the Association of School Business Officials--and one of the "must attends" for me is always the federal policy update jointly done by ASBO and AASA (that would be the superintendents). This stems from that presentation yesterday.1
Setting aside for a moment:
that we do not currently have an operating federal government
because we do not have a federal budget or continuing resolution
and that some of the proposals for the federal budget have been alarming
I want to talk here about something that is actually going to happen because it is actually law and appears to not be in what is being planned for, at least from what I have seen in Massachusetts.
...and so here we are, with an announcement last week that the required hearings for this study are starting on the 23rd. This seems rather last minute as an announcement, even as one understands that they need to get going in order to have the report back, as required, by June 20 of next year.
Note that is this is very specifically a study "to improve the adequacy and equitability of the formula to determine a municipality's target local contribution and required local contribution." Thus much in the way the Foundation Budget Review Commission was only about the foundation budget--the "how much does it cost to educate a child" question--this is very much only about local contribution.
Because this started to get long, I'm going to break this into two parts: first what they won't talk about, then what they will or should, given the scope of the committee. You can find part two here.
As we were warned, the Trump administration is using the federal shutdown as an excuse to issue layoff notices--including a little 'oops' moment at the CDC, which they're now blaming on a coding issue--leading many of us to wonder just how much of the U.S. Department of Education will exist as of Tuesday after the holiday weekend.
Amid the smoke bombs and screams that ricocheted throughout a South Shore building last month during a massive military-style immigration raid, one man heard a knock on his door.
On the other side was a mom and her 7-year-old daughter, pleading for his help.
“I wasn’t planning on letting her stay, but I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” the man said of his Venezuelan migrant neighbors. But he quickly relented. The little girl was inconsolable and hid under his bed.
“I didn’t want them to take her,” said the man, who didn’t want to be named because he fears he’ll be targeted by federal authorities for his actions.
“I gave her my bedroom, and I just told her, ‘Just stay there. Don’t open, don’t, shh, just stay quiet,’” he recalled telling the mom and daughter as he choked back tears.
Adults and children alike were pulled from their Chicago apartments, crying and screaming, during a large overnight raid that has left tenants and neighbors shaken.
“I’ve been on military bases for a good portion of my life,” said Darrell Ballard, who lives in the building next door. “And the activity I saw – it was an invasion.”
Ballard recalled seeing residents detained outside the building for hours, after seeing a Black Hawk helicopter flying over the five-story building in the city’s South Shore neighborhood and military-sized vehicles and agents filling the parking lot early Tuesday morning.
Leominster family says ICE agents held their daughter outside their home so they would turn themselves over
Agents ask the parents to come out of their house multiple times as their 5-year-old sits in the driveway surrounded by federal immigration officers, video shows
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett after an interaction with members of the Everett Police Department and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia, according to his mother and immigration lawyer Andrew Lattarulo.
The boy’s mother, Josiele Berto, was called to pick her son up from the Everett Police Department on Thursday, the day he was arrested. After waiting for about an hour and a half, she was told her son was taken by ICE, Berto told the Globe in a phone interview.
I could go on and on and on...the horror of what our federal government is continuing to do to families, to do to CHILDREN has no end of monstrousness. This is terror being done in our name as Americans.
The longer I have been a parent, the more I have come to realize that one of the starkest dividing lines among us is if we can see ourselves in another person's position. I shudder at the position we put parents in, at the horrific way we are treating families and children.
We know that one of the ways that genocide are successfully (which is a terrible adverb to use) executed is through making it common not to see those against whom it is being perpetrated as not human, as other, as less than. One recounting of the Chicago raid includes:
One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘fuck them kids.’
How great is the clever title? A building foundation...the foundation budget?
The upshot is that if Shrewsbury has nine schools, and Worcester has fifty schools, and each can build one new school at a time, when we get to the end of any set of time, Shrewsbury can rebuild all of its schools before Worcester has rebuilt a fifth of theirs.
Many of you are no doubt under the impression that this money goes, as is intended by state law, to the school districts themselves. This is, however, is the case only for regional school districts. For municipal school districts, because charter school tuition reimbursement isn't designated as going to schools "without additional appropriation," the money goes to the city or town general fund.
Cities and towns have long since passed their budgets. Unless someone takes additional action, these funds you intend for schools will not go to schools.
Were it possible for you to pass these funds with language so designating them, that would be most useful.
If not, perhaps you could ensure that the Department of Revenue generates updated cherry sheets, and you could ensure the cities and towns in your districts are aware of where the money should go?
With very sincere thanks,
Someone who wants to ensure the Worcester Public Schools gets their $2M
1As a reminder, here are all the amounts over $1M:
...which is pretty depressing. A few things to read:
Chris Geidner over at Law Dork, who observes that it hasn't really been a summer that is SCOTUS-free, given the shadow docket land we live in
Elie Mystal, writing in The Nation, who gives us five of the worst cases before the court. Observe how many of them directly impact our students and their futures.
I did want to call to your attention this recently released report from the Center on Poverty and Inequality from Georgetown Law which analyzes the impact on state budgets of federal legislation:
OBBBA introduced a new state matching requirement for benefits and increased the state share of administrative costs. Under OBBBA, states must cover part of the benefit costs for the first time, and their share of administrative costs will rise from 50 percent to 75 percent.
Click through to see the map on which you can hover; I share this because this is the result for Massachusetts:
The text reads:
MASSACHUSETTS
State Cost Share Pre-OBBBA:$91,939,795
State Cost Share Post-OBBBA:$530,559,697
Increase in SNAP Share of State Budget477%
I am fairly certain that no one in Massachusetts is budgeting for that, or even is able to.
