Heavy Hitters!

Both Pete Thaw and I raised holy hell over the spending of over a million dollars of your tax money for another voodoo program that some California quacks called "TEACH FIRST". It was just another stupid social experiment at YOUR expense. Yet, the rest of the Kanawha County School Board ate it up like the wannabees they are. County taxpayers don't want a school board with good taste, they want a school board that tastes good. And this leaves a bad taste in everybody's mouth. Who had connections in this farce? Who got the kickbacks and made the money in this travesty? The teachers hated it and thought it was a JOKE, and except for those who managed to make some money from it by "teaching other teachers"... it WAS! Remember, many teachers took off for two weeks of "instructional days" to learn this crap. That meant that substitute teachers had to be paid to fill those slots. Also, one of the top people in the school system Leonard Allen, actually pushed this garbage on the Board... then "retired" to take a high paying position with the now bankrupt company! The jokes write themselves!
Awww hell... it's just ANOTHER million dollars! Peanuts!


A company that has received more than $1.1 million to train Kanawha County teachers over the past two years filed for bankruptcy last week.


CHARLESTON, W.Va. - A company that has received more than $1.1 million to train Kanawha County teachers over the past two years filed for bankruptcy last week.

Officials with TeachFirst Inc. filed the documents last week in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Washington state. Several calls to the Seattle-based company went unanswered Wednesday.

In April 2007, Kanawha school board members voted 4-1 to enter a two-year contract with TeachFirst. Board member Pete Thaw, who has since argued about the program's cost and benefit, voted against it.

Since then, the school system has paid more than $1.1 million to TeachFirst, according to Tim Easterday, the school system's purchasing director. That's about 25 percent of the company's total income over the past two years, according to bankruptcy court filings.

TeachFirst was used at more sites in Kanawha County than in any other school district in the country, according to a list of unexpired contracts reported in court filings. The next-highest, a school district in Chula Vista, Calif., used TeachFirst at 38 buildings.

In Kanawha County, the program helped lay the groundwork for "professional learning communities," or occasional workshops where teachers join together to discuss ways to improve student achievement.

TeachFirst also provided a full-time consultant - Leonard Allen, a former Kanawha County assistant superintendent - and access to an online video library with teaching strategies.

Some teachers, who asked not to be identified, criticized TeachFirst in recent months as a waste of time and money. This fall, one veteran educator with nearly 40 years' experience was particularly critical.

"This is the single worst example of any type of training they've been trying to cram down our throats," said the teacher, who feared retaliation and asked to remain anonymous. "There is absolutely no redeeming thing to this. It's juvenile even the way it's designed."

Some workshop exercises, like videos the teachers watched, insulted their intelligence and were just plain common sense, the teacher said.

Other teachers have seen both good and bad.

Jennifer Rogers, a former algebra teacher at Elkview Middle School, said last summer she liked that teachers took control of the training workshops. Still, Rogers organized a group of teachers at the school who met in the workshop sessions. Quite often, that added responsibility kept her out of the classroom.

Rogers figured she spent 20 days outside her classroom during last school year. She attributed most of her absences to TeachFirst and organizing the workshops.

The county has two remaining TeachFirst workshop sessions in January and March, and those will not be affected by the company's bankruptcy, Kanawha schools Superintendent Ron Duerring said.

MORE....
http://www.wvgazette.com/News/200812170 ... uild=cache

Maybe we are looking at this all wrong. Evidently all one has to do is come up with some crack pot idea and the school system will pay big bucks for it. Here's a wonderful opportunity for the enterprising among us.

Criteria for getting funding would include: getting teachers out of the classroom, labeling folks with things which lead to justifications for NOT teaching, encourage continued talking about problems, offer no solutions to anything, be inclusive, have no measurable data, and replicate programs which have failed other places. These criteria should not be directly identified but under gird any use of school funds. If we can make an application which includes these items without specifying them in simple terms, we should be able to get millions for our study, training, or fact-finding workshops...

I know Jennifer Rogers mentioned in this article - she is an excellent teacher but yes, she was out of the classroom an inordinate amount of time due to the training that was required by the Teach First program. Our "workshops" consisted of reading an article and then summarizing it as a group. Who hoo! The videos are horrible!

One video that I particularly laughed at was set at chest high on a teacher's desk - shooting out towards the students. Every time the teacher would walk in front of it ---- her boobs went right across the screen. I got to where I was so distracted that I was making tally marks every time I saw them. I have no idea what the "real message" was on that particular video.

the white jeep was in front of my house .'reappraising' my house yesterday..

lets see.. house sales and prices are down..
that means my tax ticket will be less next year .. right ????


LOL

Not according to the Accessor in the Courthouse! He sent all a Bill for $300 last Jan for no other reason than he said the State was under appraising our area. Like hell! Values have been dripping here too! Still are! Bit we're stuck with that extra $300 come hell or high water!

I am of the opion that the school board needs more money to help the poor underpaided teachers and to help off set the court cost of the drugtesting lawsuit.

As for taxes going down. Are ye mad? Even if/when values drop the taxing bodies (shool board) will just up the levi rate so we pay the same dollar amount.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- From the start of school in August through the second week in December, more than 23,500 requests were made for a substitute teacher in Kanawha County schools, computer records at the school board's central office show.

That's about 7 percent higher than the number of requests for the same period in the previous two school years.

There were 73 instructional days in that period, which translates into an average of 322 requests for a substitute per day.

The county has been unable to fill about 100 teaching positions. That accounted for about 10,500 of the requests for a substitute during the first semester.

Teachers taking personal, family or sick leave resulted in about 6,500 calls for a substitute.

And another 6,500 requests stemmed from teachers being called away to training sessions.

Board of education member Pete Thaw said that isn't acceptable.

"We better start spending some time in the classroom teaching the children (instead of) spending all this money on crazy workshops," Thaw said. "The teachers don't want to do it."

On 1,900 occasions in the first semester, schools had a teacher absence they could not fill with a substitute, according to an analysis of county records. Teachers and administrators often deal with those situations by moving students into other classrooms.

The period of time that schools had to do without has been as much as a whole day or as little as a class or two.

Officials say some substitutes are unwilling to teach just half a day and others find it not worthwhile to travel from one end of the county to the other to fill in. Also, officials say there's a shortage of substitutes to call on in the first place.

Overall, the number of substitutes that the county needed in the first semester of the 2008-09 school year was up from 22,000 requests in the same period in both the 2007-08 and 2006-07 school years.

Elk Elementary Center in Charleston requested substitutes 717 times between August and early December. On 200 occasions, the school's request for subs went unfilled, according to county records.

One program adopted by the county to provide "professional learning communities" for teachers cost the county at least $1.1 million over two years. The company behind the program, TeachFirst, filed for bankruptcy last year.

Thaw opposes both unfunded, state-mandated training sessions and programs like TeachFirst, which he called a "disaster."

"Who pays? You pay," he said.

Messinger said some of the teacher training is efficiently organized. One teacher is trained to come back and train other teachers so that all the school's teachers don't have to leave separately.

Holz Elementary Principal Karen Simon said staff development sessions scheduled throughout the county - sometimes on the same day - pull teachers out of schools. This can leave some schools strapped for staff.

"There are so many staff developments that it takes a lot of substitutes to fill those vacancies," she said.

http://www.dailymail.com/News/Kanawha/200901270472

I was noticing this for thursday (tomorrow) - I have to be absent for professional leave and was told I probably wouldn't have a substitute because there are already 2 other workshops with 5-6 teachers going to be out for those. And that doesn't even count the normal absences of teacher sick days.

The county scheduled the Beginner Teacher AND the Leadership Academy trainings on the same day - tomorrow - most schools will have anywhere from 1-3 teachers in both academies any given year. How silly is this? And they are full day trainings - not even 1/2 day where the subs could be shared.