Board of Ed for March: college access

 Johnston: to increase college access and affordability

trends of college enrollment slowly increasing in the state after a decade of declining enrollment
huge increases in community college enrollment (preliminarily 24%); many taking advantage of tuition and fee free community college

Joint Committee on Ways and Means hearing on education and local aid

 

sign from Amherst Regional

Coming to you live today from the Joint Committee on Ways and Means hearing at UMass Amherst. A number of the surrounding districts are here--Quabbin Regional brought a bus; Amherst Regional walked over--and I just hope someone told all these people that they don't take public testimony. If you're here and need power, by the way, I have a power strip at one of the outlets, so come over if you need it.

I'll post as we go. Note that they have us in what is the airplane hanger of an auditorium on the first floor of the Campus Center, so I can barely see the committee members; I'm making no promises on being able to identify speakers.

They'll start with intros then have the Secretary with the three Commissioners.

Halving the Department of Education

 Reductions in force are established processes for cutting positions in a workforce. The federal government has a series of regulations that oversee how this happens. 

Those have yet to be followed for the cuts last night at the Department of Education; thus, while the press release calls it a "reduction in force," it isn't clear that it is. While I have yet to see legal action, I'd expect it. 

You can read about the cuts in The Hill; K-12 Dive; NPR; EdWeek; New York Times.

Besides many, many people who care a lot about public education, and in many cases, have been doing their jobs for years, losing their jobs (which, to be clear, is bad enough!*), what does this mean?

Someone from the Department shared a list of who had been cut last night on Bluesky, and James Murphy of Ed Reform Now posted an analysis of who is gone. While the largest number of employees have been cut from FAFSA (insert the hollow laugh of the parent of a college student), by percentages of total employees compared to 2024, the big hits are the Office of Civil Rights and the Institute of Education Sciences: 

from James Murphy's post here 

I think just "FAFSA" alone is concerning, but note that some of that office's duties are ensuring that funding for higher education through student aid is used in ethical ways.

The Office of Civil Rights is of course what ensures schools protect and preserve students' civil rights; that's race, gender, special education, language, and more. While we've already seen signs of the office being weaponized (as I warned about in November), they have a VERY legitimate function. With an even smaller office, the prioritization of the ideological use of the office, one assumes, will take priority over families who need the OCR to work to ensure their students are appropriately treated by their schools.

IES is one of the quiet functions that few know exists, but many have used. If you've seen (or said) anything comparing one state to another on educational outcomes, or cited state education spending, or any of many, many other data points, you used IES. The New York Times has a useful piece on this, as well as the research funded by the Department, today. The lack of accountability--for states! for the country!--is not good here. 

Program Administration also worries me. While school districts have the big grants for the current year now, those granting systems don't run themselves, and that, plus a lot of other Department functions take people doing things. It's that sort of thing--the dribbles of "wait, no one is doing that??" that I will say I dread.

Now we have half as many people doing this work. And I have to say that I have little confidence that the cut was done in any way that ensures the functions we need are served. 

______________________

*If you lost your job yesterday, I am sorry. Your work is valuable and valued.

Just to offer: MASC did a Learning Lunch in January on what the U.S. Department of Education does (and what it means for districts) and you can find the video here. 

The Board of Ed April meeting: opening comments

Seal of Wellesley Public Schools as a mosaic on the floor of the high school

 

Two further FAFSA issues

 You may or may not have been following the ongoing issues with the new FAFSA (some of us have to live in this world alas), but the new form, which is finally out, but which is going to delay when colleges get information and thus can get back to families had two other issues highlighted recent I thought of interest:

• If you have or will have two kids in college, what had been the rule that the colleges split what the calculation thinks you can afford in half is no longer the case. (Gift link to the NY Times there) It's not yet clear how colleges are going to handle this--there's some hope that they'll make up the difference rather than have families decide that they simply cannot afford it--and only time will tell. 
  
  
• What all the changes didn't fix was the requirement that the parents have Social Security numbers to fill out the form. Children whose parents are immigrants thus cannot fill it out.

If this isn't you this year, cross your fingers they work it out! 

What happened at the first April Worcester School Committee meeting?

 with apologies for this taking until now; I got to enjoy a really lovely weekend in Chicago, and am playing catch-up. As always, this is from me as a member of the Committee. 

The agenda is here; the video of the meeting can be viewed here.

I should note that the meeting started with two hours of executive session, including deliberations on the contracts with our bus drivers, our paraprofessionals, and units A & B, which are teachers and assistant principals. It's against the ground rules agreed to by both the EAW and the Worcester School Committee at the beginning of negotiations for me to say any more than that.

The Grafton Street chorus not only sang the National Anthem, but "This Land is Your Land."

Note that among the items on the consent agenda were several relating to recent athletic successes, and some generosity that has gotten the Burncoat High orchestra to Washington, D.C. this week.
(The consent agenda puts a group of items of which approve is reasonably expected, and has us take them with a single vote. Any member can pull an item off the consent agenda for separate approval with a 2/3rd approval.)

I was swamped enough that I didn't get a chance to put up a blog post to explain reconsideration, but if you search the blog, you can find earlier explanations. Both Laura Clancey and I filed for reconsideration on the Governance report, she to send the dress code back to standing committee for further discussion, me to take up the process of the strategic plan now with the report from Hanover Research (contracted to support the work) in hand. 
Reconsideration cannot be deliberated, but the member filing is required to file an explanation as to why with the request for reconsideration. In this case, both reconsiderations passed unanimously, so the dress code is not yet amended  (this is why nothing is done until it passes full committee!) and goes back to standing committee, and the process described by Dr. Monárrez for the strategic plan (let me give you a separate post on that) goes forward. 

We had also held two items (which also get to go first): the Human Resources position description, which, with a few additional edits, we approved; and Sue Mailman withdrew the bill she'd requested endorsement of on vocational school buildings.

The report of the superintendent was on social emotional learning and student mental health supports. Let me note here that we on the Committee have received emails from a number of staff members about planned reorganization of the social emotional learning department; we did hear a bit about that on Thursday in response to questions, and I am confident that we'll hear more.

The report came about 20 minutes into the meeting (if you'd like to review on the video), and included a substantial number of statistics, some of our students specifically, some national, regarding their mental health and resiliency. 

The presentation was about twenty minutes, and it was followed by at least that of questions, so I'd say there's a significant amount of Committee attention to what is being done here and what is still to come.

We approved one prior year payment and three grants, including one for a new meat slicer at Claremont Academy; one for summer work with English learners; and one to fund work with refugee families from Brazil, Central America, and Haiti (the area from which we get the largest number of people currently) in ensuring they are well connected to the school district.

You may have heard we unanimously passed a boycott of Old Sturbridge Village. I wrote about why over here. 

We sent items on the use of AirPods to administration; on vaping detectors to F&O; on signs for North High basketball to the City Council; on suspension of the voluntary uniform policy until there's a way out to Governance; on moving dance teams under athletics to administration.

Administration will be bringing forward a recommendation for a new reading curriculum to Teaching, Learning, and Student Supports subcommittee this coming week after a pilot this year. They've been collating the feedback that they have received from staff; that will go through subcommittee to the full committee. You can find what we know so far here.

We passed a description for the Physical Security Systems Technician (this was in the FY23 budget; it had just never been brought forward); this is the person who runs the "stuff" (like cameras) of our security systems. 

We did some updating on policies, something which you'll see in a number of upcoming meetings; I had noticed a few worrying things in our policies, so over February break, I did a full review of our current WPS policies compared to the state model policies. I'll be putting them on the agenda in batches. The first batch we updated ensured that we are following federal and civil rights legislation in our list of protected classes. This is a substantial list, and it also includes the note on the Crown Act, passed last year. 

We also updated the policy on school calendar (which I thought was a little bit funny); in spring of 2020, the Commissioner dropped 10 school days for the calendar for professional development (due to the pandemic). Worcester changed our policy...and never changed it back. It still said we were going 170 school days. We cannot, of course--our policy doesn't change state regulation!--so we changed it back to 180 days.

Dr. Monárrez will bring back the descriptions of the Director of Nursing and the Director of Climate and Culture positions with the budget, so we can see how they fit. 

We sent a proposed revised Wellness Policy to Governance for consideration.

We sent a proposed Unifed PE to TLSS for consideration.

A proposal from Jermoh Kamara that we endorse S.340/H.583 “An Act enabling all students to thrive: protecting a high quality, diverse educator workforce” which would remove seniority as considered in layoffs, was withdrawn.

A proposal that we endorse H.1367 "An Act to facilitate additional financial student assistance," which would require students to complete the FAFSA in order to graduate (unless they had a signed waiver), was voted down, as was the item accompanying it, to request financial assistance for implementation. 

And that was the meeting! Note that our next regular meeting is Thursday, April 27.