I've never went to a school board meeting before, but I really wanted to have a question answered so I decided to go. A few weeks ago I was told by a school employee that a project, a remodel of a intermediate school, was $20M over budget. $20M overbudget for a school remodel?? That's why I went. I arrived at 5:30pm, the board meeting was called into session and I was promptly escorted out of the auditorium because there was an executive session and the public wasn't invited. Oh well. I met a lady in the cafeteria and we began to chat. She has three kids in this school district. At 6:30pm we were invited back into the auditorium and the meeting continued. Lots of agenda items, some perked my ears up, some were hohum. A school employee named Steve, I later found out he was the grand poobah of the physical building guru(sorry I don't know his title), stood up and proceeded to explain how the remodel of the intermediate school was progressing. $15M has been spent as to date with a total cost over run of about a million. He explained in detail on why the overruns happened and I fully understood what he was saying.
The meeting lasted about two hours but what really frightened me was the lack of people in the audience. Only myself and the lady with three kids were present. That's it. A school district with about 2000 kids and probably 10K+ residents and only TWO people show up for a school board meeting.
Is this common for other parts of America? If so then I completely understand why our schools are turning out dolts. No parental oversight of the board members. No input. No nothing to keep the school board on a path which most parents want. I plan on seeing the Superintendent of the school system and the guy named Steve. Pick their minds and express my wishes on how to make the school a better place for the kids. Somehow the board wants to spend large quantites of money on buildings but the average percentile this school system has, compared with the entire state, is around 37% for reading comprehension and 43% for Math. Something is not quite right in this district. Maybe I'll figure it out.
If you have suggestions on how to raise the percentile rates please let me know.
Sad truth is the schools main goal is to teach the kids to obey.. not to educate the kids! That was a hard pill for me to swallow. It is our fault , because we allowed it for so many years
A bigger problem is parents not teaching their own.
The "parents" drop their kids off and pick them up. The school's job is to feed and raise their children. Period.
Parents get so annoyed when their kids require their attn I’ve noticed observing my friends
It's sad.
babysitter by other name.
👆Exactly! People dont want to “parent” This generation is a very self centered one. Ive had to say something a few times to my daughter who is juggling everything from working full time to home and raising the kids because her hubs is “to busy”buying toys or doing “his thing” to jump in and help. He has gotten better but Ive stepped on toes for the sake of my grandbabies.
I am glad you did that.
I didn't believe I could handle working and parenting (while doing good with both) so opted for no kids instead.
You would be amazed at what you are capable of. I was a single mother of two. I worked full time, kids were almost straight A students and in sports. You put yourself aside and run with it no matter how tired you are somedays. Just love your babies!! 😉
Sounds like your daughter married my ex-husband.
Lol he is getting better but some days
Care to elaborate? What toys and what thing is so important?
I will just leave it at this……He is a good guy just needs to focus more on the children. Time goes to fast, you look up and have missed a million things you cant get back.
Worse though. Babysitter into porn on crack.
Yeah. Sad. Better take them out or send them to religious school.
Thank you for admitting this. Too many people live in their hubris, and blame the younger generation before they look at themselves.
There is a bright future for all of us, but we have a lot of work to do.
Yes Im not perfect by any means and totally lacked any parenting skills, but I loved my kids and did everything I could for them as a single mother. I would change a million things if I could go back.
I had a single mom too. Nothing wrong with that. Showing love is very important.
Yup. Their control is largely due to our lack of involvement at the local level. Local actions = national impact.
This 100%
The good news is that school board members, like any other politicians, tend to not like hostile attention. You just showing up is enough to start getting under their skin.
Keep on being a thing at these meetings and cracks will start to show.
Since the lady with three children and I were the only folks in the audience I found it a little strange that some of the board members actually walked over to me and introduced themselves when the meeting ended. I was only expecting the meeting to end and everyone head to the doors. But they were actually interested that I was present. Not me as as an inquisitive taxpayer, but rather a live body who wanted to sit and watch. I got the vibe that nobody ever attends these meeting and the board members who shook my hand were grateful a citizen took the time to come to a meeting. It was interesting to see how the Board president, the School Superintendent and the Building/Grounds Construction guy were willing to chat with me. It was almost they were proud to say," hey, come over to the school any time and we will show off this great school to you". They seemed proud of the buildings. The building costs was what drew me to the meeting but after seeing the percentiles the children are not learning at a comfortable level for me to see the justification of huge building expenditures. I don't like the idea of kids being taught in a mansion and then having the knowledge and ability to work at a McDonalds because of the lack of education.
See if they are pushing CRT or SEL (social emotional learning, same as CRT), Common core math is also a scam.
Add to that the radical sexxx Ed.
But you do pay taxes.....correct?????
I'm curious. When you were able to address the school board, did they take your recommendations and begin to utilize them? Or did you feel like they brushed you off just to get you out of their hair? I think that if a person were to stand up in front of the school board, beat his fist on the podium and demand the board do what he says, the board wouldn't listen. How do you make the board listen and act on your ideas? Or, since they were voted in by the populace then they just make their decision based on their own "feelings"? How do you think they arrive at their decisions?
That’s interesting considering there are a lot of school boards with people on them who don’t have any kids either! Makes you go hmmmmm!
Excellent point!!
You need to ask them to provide a copy of the law that states that school board meetings are not open to the public. It does not exist. It does not matter that you do not have a child in the school district; you help fund the school with your taxes and if it is a public school, you have every legal right to attend any and every school board meeting that is opened to the public.
How would they even know that? You should talk to a lawyer. That sounds very illegal.
I would challenge their argument. The fact that you pay taxes to that district automatically allows you to attend the meeting.
Public participation is abysmal. I think this is because we have been demoralized and convinced that there is no point in participating, but also because we have been distracted by items of self gratification and in many cases distracted because just survival is taking our full attention.
Please do get involved. Join a parent council. Run to be a trustee on the school board.
None of this gets better until we stop shirking our responsibilities and start getting involved. Evil has done what it has done because good people abandoned the field and let them have their way.
Can you elaborate on this? I am just curious on what self-gratification items are really distracting the public and what items of survival is also distracting us. Just trying to help brainstorm a solution.
The demoralization is plain to see. Ask people if their vote makes any difference. Ask if they think any of the candidates are worthy of their support. Then ask that fuckin slacker what they have been doing to be involved in our political processes.
What I have found is that people think their vote is meaningless, all the candidates are useless/controlled/corrupt and they have almost no participation in the political process other than to bitch and complain while blissfully ignorant of how any of it works or what role they as a citizen play.
The demoralization is complete and effective. People who are supposed to be the check and balance are asleep at the switch and failing to fulfill their role all the while complaining that someone else is to blame.
Because the electorate is demoralized, our enemies are able to easily elect candidates that are going to subvert the foundations of our society.
Survival items are just treading water to keep you and your family afloat.
I remember seeing the results of a study that looked at public civic participation. If you work a regular full time job and your commute to / from work is greater than 1 he per direction, then your participation in civic society drops to almost zero.
You just do not have the energy to take care of kids, do the laundry and shopping and work and perhaps a bit of leisure time AND any form of volunteering. This included volunteering at church or any other institution of civil society.
People who are so burdened (full time work + long commute) just don’t have the energy left.
Now look at it from a globalist perspective, how easy is it to stress populations like this so they don’t have the energy left to oppose the globalist objectives?
Would convincing people to be materialistic and take on a “consumer” identity help in bring both parents out of the home and into the workplace? Rather than getting a home that is affordable convince people that a big home far from their work is worthwhile?
Read a brave new world by Huxley.
Youth are sexualized and this serves to focus their minds on issues of self gratification. Whether that be sexual gratification, materialistic interested or consumption of foods and drugs that “feel good”. This is deliberate, because if the youth are not hyper sexualized at a young age then there is significant risk that they will be focused on higher order issues like liberty, truth, fairness, honesty, accountability, etc.
Yes
Unfortunately. People are too busy to care, and for many parents the public school is just free daycare (perhaps with free food).
Every so often the parents might get riled up over one issue or another, and then someone gets voted in or out, but mostly it's non-involvement.
My 4 children will likely never go back to public school and the school board can go fuck themselves. Our neighbor is on the board and said "children are resilient" in regards to masking. Fuck them.
I feel the same way. I hope you told this neighbor off. I’m still angry about it.
I’m a teacher in a small district. You are right. Only a few parents and staff members show up for board meetings. Stuff happens that you wouldn’t believe. Get involved. It’s horrible, but we need people to stand up for the district. Students and staff suffer from the lack of interest!
Consider this, it's entirely possible the majority of the kids in your area are now being homeschooled and/or being sent to private or Christian schools. This is what happened in my little po-dunk middle of nowhere county. I'm not joking when I say that I now see school buses of the morning and evening heading off from the schoolhouse that only have 5 or 6 kids on the entire bus now. This is from a school that a year or two before had 400-600 students depending on which of the three schools (primary, middle, and high) you were talking about.
So I wouldn't freak out TOO much. Do a bit more research and see what's going on in the area. It could be like what's happening around me and many other areas. Seriously, there are areas where the public school systems are no so lacking in terms of students, that entire school systems are shutting down.
If I remember right, the worst ones at the moment are Chicago, Boston, and Seattle. They're literally on the verge of collapse because they've lost so many students, that they no longer qualify for the grants needed to just pay the utilities on all the schools in the systems so they're having to consolidate and bus kids 3 or 4 hours away through heavy urban traffic just to make things economically feasible.
That may be, but we should still care about and monitor the public schools and the unfortunate children who have to attend public school.
Dismantle the public schools
Difficult to get parents involved when they're both working overtime to make ends meat
I sometimes wonder how much they can really cut back to gain more free time...
Follow the money. I’m sure you will find what’s up.
This is the hard part - we've analyzed budgets, they are seemingly all accounted for. But the OP is right, school boards tend to spend WAY more money than they should on projects. I've got no evidence but it seems very likely that there may be MASSIVE kickbacks for things like:
New building/expansion budgets going way over on spend
COVID 19 policies
Trans/Racial policies/curricula
Why do I say this? Because it's happening in the majority of the Country, all at once. That is not a coincidence.
I think they are fleecing us in many of these school boards - but under the direction and coordination of whom?
How do we find that out? How do we analyze the budgets and where it was SPENT! Not how it was allocated originally. Who is pulling the strings? Putting together FOIAs is one thing (easy), but what do you ask for?
I used to work for an architect that only did schools and other public works projects. The amount of red tape needed for public works projects drives up the cost considerably. Also, at least around here, only union contractors were allowed to bid jobs. Prices for stuff reliably ran 50-100% more than private sector.
Add to that if anything comes up that was unexpected in the project then the contractor gets to charge another 75% markup for having to change their bid. I once heard about a toilet that needed to be moved about 5 ft. After plans had been bid but before ground had been broken. This change cost the school district $25,000.
Yes, and the battling egos of the administration also affect this. I work for a school district and we recently had a new building put up. Everything was agreed upon and then one of the Directors did a tour and threw a fit about where the outlets were. She made the electricians/architects relocate all of them - it cost a fortune in change orders.
But there's always some big wig who wants a larger window/bigger office/etc to appease their over-inflated sense of self worth.
I was a teacher. My students never had less than 96% passing and those who failed just would not come to school. You have to listen to good teachers and give them what they need. You have to get rid of bad teachers and administrators.
Leadforward helped my district become an A rated district in Texas. We are a rural Title 1 school. Look at Leadforward.com.
https://lead4ward.com/
It's got a 4 in it.
Home. School. The government system was designed from its very beginning to turn out compliant workers for the inevitable consolidation with communism- their words. Also to replace family and church with government and state. It has worked as designed.
Home. School. For their souls.
public schooling and the DOE need to to go. No more school taxes. Let everyone do home schooling or private schools. All those school taxes can go towards a kids tuition instead. let the parents pay for their own damn kids.
I would say yes. I went to school board meetings in the 90s and there were not a lot of parents at that time either. We were fighting OBE, outcome based education. I guess they succeeded in dumbing down a whole generation.
Well, now I guess you know why our schools are all fucked.
Don't know what to say about it. I certainly hope your experience is an outlier. From what I'm ready the motivation for parents to attend what use to be called PTA meetings is on the rise.
When you see Steve, the Superintendent of the school system, tell him how wrong it is for parents without kids in public schools having to support public schools. Tell him education starts in the home. If Steve is a walking and talking coherent individual tell him he's an outstanding proof of that fact.
I like this. Last year there was a local tax increase referendum to support the schools. I was vehemently opposed to any kind of tax increase but I'm a small frey in a large pond. I wish I could have afforded a billboard to state that there should be no tax increase until the percentiles began to increase. But....as always the parents who vote want the biggest and best brand new buildings, so the measure passed and now I'm having to pay a tax increase. Such is our voting system. Too bad the parents of the kids in school do not understand what a tax increase means. Everybody who owns a house in my county gets hit with a tax. Just galls me that even the most educated parents only think about their kids until they graduate, instead of a lifetime of taxes because of an emotional decision. And why does it take $15M to renovate a school? Heck, for that amount a brand new school can be built. Also the board stated that there will be new tennis courts, a frisbee course, and a cross-country running track that will have a viewing platform so the parents can see their children run the course. Ugh. Enough of needless spending on activities. Spend the money on increased salaries for qualified teachers and if the percentiles don't increase STOP spending completely on athletics until they begin to improve. Teach the kids to read, write and do math profficiently and then the other activities are icing on the cake.
As a former hs core subject teacher, I struggled to get some kids to learn. Athletics helped. Coaches would step in and have tutorials. They would punish kids who misbehaved in my class. They helped kids become successful adults. Teen boys need to burn off that excess energy. I get it. Some public education is bad, but not all. There is no private school near my home and we are in a working class community. What imaginary person is going to homeschool the kids? They work.
Classes tend to move at a rate dictated by the lower performing half of the class. Disguising this fact is by partitioning the class in groups of advanced, middle, and lagging chairs. It doesn't change the rate of learning when the very structure of school is compartmentalized by age and not by intellect development. The physical maturity factor tends to distort, if not erase, the intellectual development of children.
The kids are bored shitless because of the ‘leave no kid behind” bullshit. What happened to getting kids brought up to a higher level rather than dumbing down to the lower level? If you’re sitting in a room of people and you’re the smartest one in the room, change rooms! We learn from those smarter than us!
That tax crap passes here because the schools pay to put it on a special ballot, like in April, then the teachers union threatens all of the teachers to go out and vote for the increase, so they do. Not enough normies go vote. So it passes.
Kids need to run around. Have you seen how many kids are between chubby to obese? They need to get away from bright screens, run around, and eat nutritious food instead of the bullshit shoved in our faces.
It varies in my county, depending upon the topic. When people started fighting back against Covid restrictions the attendance increased. Any topic that directly impacts kids, like redistricting or CRT (stands for Culturally Responsive Teaching in these parts, the sneaky bastards), then you'll see a larger crowd. Budgetary matters like your example don't draw the crowds because it's not sexy enough. There should be as much concern about our taxpayer dollars being wasted, but sadly most don't care. It's especially bad here in Maryland where everyone expects good money to be thrown after bad to solve problems, regardless of their political leanings. You can certainly blame public schools for fostering this apathy.
The only way to improve percentile is 1 of 2 ways. Parents spend more time with their kids to make sure they are learning not just attending. Or get really good teachers and a custom curriculum tailored for each student.
Given the absense of parents at the meeting combined with the numbers Id say the parents are just making sure their kids are the attending type.
You never went until you had a reason, I'm guessing it's the same for others, if you're a parent, start or get involved in a parents group and bring attendance up
Grand poobah? Lol hexic?
Our medium-sized city’s school board attendance always varies depending on subject matter. Hot topic issues like CRT, pornographic books/materials, LGBTQ agenda, and school security have garnered the most participation. We have a local group here in my city that is extreme far left, and whose ideologies are trying to flood our city and schools. We are trying to fight back, but I do wish we had started sooner. Our goal right now is to reclaim control of our school board in November. We have two conservatives on the board now, and we need two more for a majority. It’s a tough uphill battle we are fighting on the daily through block walking, social media and word of mouth. My recommendation is to reach out to other concerned parents in your city and neighborhood through local conservative clubs and social media pages.
I second this fact. Just recently, it was discovered that sexually explicit pornographic books/materials was discovered in ELEMENTARTY school libraries. People are pissed off to no end and the local Anti-CRT group was having lots of fun fanning the flames and hyping up the crowd (it helps that the group has a local radio personality who knows how to get people up and moving).
The next school board meeting in a few weeks will be quite interesting.
At my city’s school board meetings too, usually 5-10 parents show up for a school pop of about 10,000 kids. Sad
I wanted my kid to know math and reading. So before he ever went to kindergarten, I taught him. His reading ability still often surprises me.
I haven't been to one in some time, we used to have good crowds and we'd usually all have the same concerns so that even if 'you' couldn't speak your concerns were aired some.
Went to my first one in 1969 with my Mother when the Feds instituted busing.
Is it possible to classify this as a local win?
Because finding out that there is so little oversight and so little participation by the community of parents is an important step for you, and you might be the factor that triggers the awakening in this area.
If there is a local loss, its that no doubt this has been the situation for some time. It didn't just happened yesterday.
What happened yesterday is that a freedom warrior and an awakened individual (and an anon pede) found out the truth. That's a win in my book.
Kudos to you T. Perhaps you might take this knowledge and raise a few good parents to start doing something together? They will be out there. You just gotta bump into them.
That's the thing with politicians: their sole goal in life is coasting by and soaking as much resources and possible with doing as little work as possible.
Every unhappy man or woman that shows up to the board with a chip on their shoulder is a threat to that goal, and they will utilize all resources to get rid of you.
Keep being a pain in their ass, and then maybe they'll do what you say.
No wonder they feel like they can get away with anything, there’s no oversight!!!
Sadly it's totally common and worse, a lot of people view people like you and I that show up for school board meetings or write to our congressman as "crazies".
I hate normies.
Sounds like you need to organize your community yourself. Could be sucky to do it but if you want a better future...
I understand your sentiments. There are several towns/communities that utilize this school system. Lots of square miles with endless roads meandering up and around the hills. It's kind of hard to organize folks when they are so spread out. Sure, I could do the internet thing, but I like to keep my annonymity on the interwebs. Plus the community I live within has an average age of 70. Not too many old folks want to go treking down to the local school at 6:30 at night. The kids' parents generally live north of where I do so ........... Look, I understand change begins with one person. Maybe I'm that one person, or maybe not. I'm just disappointed with this community to not want to know what is being discussed within a school district meeting. The older folks do go out and vote on political issues and they narrowly passed the latest school bond issue. Surprising that old home owners want their assesments raised. But, I guess the vote is "for the children". Yea, we should keep water off the kids heads while they are trying to read, but do they really need state of the art gymnasiums with hard back seats? Or a football field that has endless metal bench seats with skyboxes? The athletic facilities are first rate but at the expense of taxes being raised and a lot of money being spent to get the best facilities for the kids. When do the kids utilize the facilities to begin reading better? While they are playing football will their math scores increase? These are the types of questions that pop into my mind, yet I don't know how to solve them.
Agreed 100% - this is happening in our district too. Very limited involvement, lots of corruption, tons of virtue signaling based policies, all being adopted simultaneously across the country.
We've analyzed budgets, they are seemingly all accounted for. But the OP is right, school boards seem to spend WAY more money than they should on projects. I've got no evidence but it seems very likely that there may be MASSIVE kickbacks for things like:
New building/expansion budgets going way over on spend
COVID 19 policies
Trans/Racial policies/curricula
Why do I say this? Because it's happening in the majority of the Country, all at once. That is not a coincidence.
I think they are fleecing us in many of these school boards - but under the direction and coordination of whom?
How do we find that out? How do we analyze the budgets and where it was SPENT! Not how it was allocated originally. Who is pulling the strings? Putting together FOIAs is one thing (easy), but what do you ask for?
Thank you for the insight here! In our situation, they not only carved out the budget, but the licensing and zoning was DENIED for the district. There is no planned recourse as of yet. They just burned millions for a new school that seemingly can't/won't be approved in the town they pre-purchased the land for on the assumption it would be. Add to this, they also purchased a random 20 acre plot of land for 4x it's market value "just in case we need it". Zero oversight and no public discourse. Just steamrolling it all through.
Our town has almost 200k people; the school district is composed of 38 schools totaling close to 25k students. The school board meetings MAYBE get a max of 8 people... on a good day. A major problem is that the meetings are NOT advertised, people are not made aware of what will be discussed to determine if it is a meeting they should want to attend, and any issue you bring up at the board meetings during open comment times, well, you don't get a response during the meeting anyway as allegedly they are not allowed to respond to any concerns/questions during the same meeting. It's absurd.
HOME SCHOOL.
Abandon the old system and start a new one!
the system has parents weary from overwork and unable to sacrifice rest time to take care of these important duties.
imo technology was supposed to make things easier and save time, and all that's happened has been the opposite. It's to the point where people turn to off grid and homesteading because it's easier and frees up time for family. go modernity /s
A school district for a city i lived in oreviousky was by far the best at wastibg taxpayer dollars. Underperformed in all the categories that mattered, and spent money like it grew on trees. One situation that comes to mind was when they leased millions of dollars for apple Ipads due to having a grant for it. Theb the grabt fell through the following year and the school had to pay a hefty early termination fee on the leases.
Good on you for making it to a board meeting. Ive been meaning to make it to my towns Trustees meeting but working an off shift makes it hard.