Teachers Don’t get Raise

… Board of Education instead votes to make Mr and Mrs Jaime Corton of Genesis Parters much richer. Board approves sending in the SBA application to build the school at Charles Pointe. This allows the Cortons to sell land for $1,360,000 to themselves. Reaser makes the motion; Wilson Currey and Sally Cann vote, yes. Mike Queen, who has been spear-heading the effort to get the school at Charles Pointe makes a great chess move and votes No so he’s can pretend he wanted the teachers to get paid first. Board will not have enough money for the pay raise.

Board members claim that there is a shortage of science and math teachers. Do they offer those positions any incentive pay increase? No. With the few remaining dollars they give a 10% plus pay raise to every new teacher, regardless of their position because the Governor once said he’d like to see all teachers make $30,000 a year.

Oh, and where is Board member Doug Gray in all of this? He’s off fiddling in Florida while Rome burns.

If you would rather see other school priorities implemented over Charles Pointe, such as Lumberport, maintenance of existing schools, or re-districting, call the County Commissioner and tell them to rescind the TIF approval for the over-inflated Charles Pointe 40 acres. Let’s see then if the property is still “donated”.

What’s So Hard about a School Re-Districting Plan?

Thursday morning. Mike Queen is on the radio. We enjoy hearing the explanations from this Board of Eduction member. He tells us that it takes months for the school administration to come up with a re-districting plan. So, none of us will be able to see one before January. Listening to Mr Queen’s reasoning on the difficulty of re-districting makes me yearn to listen to bus drivers.

The reason given for the long delay is that school officials have to comb through every student’s name and address and determine where they live and all this is painfully time-consuming. Is someone in the school central office leading Mr Queen astray? Or, is it that if the School Building Authority reviewed a current re-districting plan, that might alter the plans for a new school at Charles Pointe? Creating a variety of re-districting plans should not be difficult at all.

The object of a school re-districting plan is to identify the student population based on the geographical area or neighborhood where the children live. You then variously cluster the groups of children to show their distribution throughout the County. Next develop alternative scenarios that assigns geographical groups of these students to various schools based upon the carrying capacity of the schools using transportation assets as a variable.

This is not hard. It just sounds hard. The better math and science teachers in our high school can figure it out in an afternoon. Give them enough data they will be able to slice and dice the numbers in a variety of choices.

It is just the Board of Education members and the administrators in the county office that seem to have a problem with using arithmetic and a few variables. You can find map packages and statistical software on the web that will do a lot of this work for you. Every school employee with a Master’s Degree in an educational field has been required to take a course in statistics. That’s why they get a salary boost when they receive their Master’s. They know how to do figure it out. But I digress …

Let us back up and dwell on the concept of “re-district” for a moment. This assumes that a “district” plan all ready exists which is currently responsible for today’s school assignments. “Re-District” would mean to change that existing plan. The school board is not starting from a blank slate. One can easily start with the existing plan, update it to reflect changes in student population and use that as a baseline from which one may modify and produce several alternatives.

In this post 911 world, it would be malfeasance not to have re-districting plans on the shelf for every school in the county. Shut your eyes; choose a school; now remember its name. Suppose this weekend it is destroyed by fire; suppose the roof collapses this winter from snow build-up or age and deterioration or because of latent construction defects. The school is now out of commission until rebuilt. Where do you send the children to school while you are waiting for the rebuilding effort? Your answer is called a “Re-districting Plan”. In the world of first responders it is also called such things as a, “disaster preparedness Plan”, “a continuity of operations plan”, or a “contingency plan”, among other names. It serves as a guide on how you can re-allocate a focused student population to the remaining school resources.

It does not take months. All of the student information is in computers. You can sort by addresses, zip codes and many other variables. “What if drills” are done all the time on spread sheets. Ask a good accountant or financial managers. The required data should be a common set of computer information that is available to support public policy. Juggling these numbers cannot be more difficult than registering children for classes in a high school. In fact, you would have fewer variables.

Alternatives can be constructed to show a minimum number of student reassignments; you can show how to minimize travel time by area to and from school.

In fact, forget the computer information just for a moment. Find the guy in charge of the school buses. He can tell you where he picks up what number of kids to take to what school. The bus drivers may all ready know the obvious answers where the student population is out of kilter. They probably have talked among themselves about the easiest way to level the number of children across school district lines. Ask them. Then tell the public.

What is Economic Development and What it is Not

 

Economic development is a sustainable wealth creation process that works within the framework of community parameters to maximize the efficient and effective utilization of community resources for economic gain for the local population. More simply, the process of creating wealth for as many people as possible.

Economic development is NOT a process to promote, stimulate, develop and enhance the prosperity of a very FEW people in Harrison County.

How to Fix Over-Crowding in Bridgeport Schools

Simple! Stop sending children to those schools!

Why is there an assumption by the Board of Education members and the administrative staff at the central office that the children at Charles Pointe must go to the current Bridgeport schools? The state has spent millions of dollars the past few years improving two east to west roads that makes it easier to travel from I-79 over to US Rt19 at Meadowbrook and Shinnston.

Send these children to Shinnston. MeadowBrook Rd and Saltwell Rd are partially 4 lane roads. Do you think it is too far for these children to travel? Look at a county map. The distance from Charles Pointe to Shinnston is less than half the distance we require the children from Rinehart, Wallace, Brown and places in-between to travel to Shinnston. They have been doing it for years since their schools have been closed. And over roads that are much worse. Is there any reason why the wealthy families of Charles Pointe can’t enjoy the same travel benefits afforded to the rest of the county’s youths? And that would also be great motivation to ensure a healthy upper-middle class parental interest in the improvement in the schools across the county.

Let’s stop treating the wealthy differently just because they are wealthy. And let’s stop taxing everyone just to ensure their convenience. If not going to Bridgeport schools makes Charles Pointe a less desirable place to live then let’s talk about the significance that a school contributes in making a neighborhood a more desirable place to live.

Charles Pointe is no more entitled to their own neighborhood school than the multiple communities within the county that have lost their neighborhood schools in the past 15 years in the name of consolidation. Charles Pointe is coming late to the party. Make them go to the back of the line to get our school dollars. Let them go to Shinnston.

If there is “free money” from the state, as Board of Education member, Mike Queen is fond of saying, then let Charles Pointe go to the back of the line in this county. Lumberport needs and deserves a school in Lumberport. Lumberport should get it before a rich developer jumps the line to grab more of the community wealth to be used only to enhance the value of the property he wants to sell.

There are other over-crowding needs. Nutter Fort Grade School has 1200 kids in it. But wait. The School Board introduces a fiction and claims that there are really two schools in one, so neither school is over crowded with 600 kids. Play the same game with Johnson and Simpson. Tell the parents there that you are going to divide the children in two groups, hire an additional principal and voila! You now have two schools and neither are over-crowded. But they will soon figure out that the physical space is the same.

That Loud Sucking Sound You Hear

.…could it be the sound of other economic and community assets in the county being sucked to the northeastern part of Harrison County because of TIFs granted by the Harrison County Commissioners?

Does Charles Pointe Matter to You?

Seriously. Does it affect your community? Your neighborhood? Your future? Your taxes? Your Government?