Woodstock CT Café

from Michelle Woz (“my opinion and not that of the PTO”)

I left the Woodstock Board of Finance Meeting on March 29th, disgusted by our local town politics and almost at a loss for words. My outrage stems from the manner in which the proposed budget was presented and discussed by the Board of Finance members. Despite requests, written information on the proposed budget scenarios was not shared with the public attending the meeting. The budget was held close to the vest and was so manipulated and vaguely discussed that I believe many Board of Finance members did not realize the impact of the vote on the school budget until after the vote was over.

The result: A proposed budget that represents the opinion of a few members of the Board of Finance will be put forth for comment at the Public Hearing scheduled for April 12th.

The Board of Finance budget requires approximately $483,000 in cuts to the proposed education budget for our K through 8 students. The Board of Education must now revisit the budget and most likely will be required to cut staff positions and programs. As a parent of a third grader, I find this an unacceptable alternative. The current third and fourth grade classes already have 24 to 27 students per classroom. Woodstock currently spends fifth to last in cost per pupil spending in the State of Connecticut. This demonstrates that we receive a great value for our education dollar, but there is a limit to how far these dollars can go.

My above-stated opinion cannot be heard in a referendum vote. If I and other like-minded individuals succeed in defeating the Board of Finance’s proposed budget at referendum, it is unrealistic to assume that the Board of Finance is going to revisit the budget with an increase. Our individual vote is being limited by the Board’s actions well before Referendum Day. Read the rest of this entry »

from A Student

Newcomer, I went to O.T. at the ES for handwriting issues. I was having trouble handwriting and was extremely uncomfortable doing so (I am even now, and it’s still atrocious to look at). We tried different strategies to help me such as using slant boards (one teacher observed that I was better at writing on the chalk board than on paper, which is still true), pencil grips, re-learning how to write, etc.

In 3rd grade, it came time to learn cursive, I struggled with the regular method and, after shedding some tears (pun intended), I and another classmate switched to Handwriting Without Tears; on O.T. days we’d learn that and on days that we were in the classroom, the teacher would find assignments in our book that kept us up to pace with the rest of the class. I found HWT much simpler to learn. Even though our cursive looked funny compared to everyone else’s, we learned it in a way that worked for us.

The next year, in 4th grade, I started typing a year ahead of everyone else. I took a certain amount of time out of class every day and sat at the computer and used a program only used by O.T. that I don’t recall the name of, but I do remember it being highly entertaining and, lo and behold, it got the job done. In middle school, when we switched to using UltraKey for computer class, I was miserable because it was so dull, plus we used these horrendous silicone covers on the keyboards (so we couldn’t see the keys) that made the keys hard to push down. I don’t like resistance for my hands — that’s why I prefer laptop keyboards (hooray ThinkPads) and using pens instead of pencils. I think my problem is that I tense my wrist muscles excessively when I hand-write, and I get very tired after tests, and to handwrite an essay is torture. But when I write on the board in big letters, my whole arm/shoulders get used and the stress isn’t all in the wrist.

Anyhow, I agree with you in that alternative, more engaging methods of education are worth looking into. I also like doing hands-on, real-world activities to enforce things we’d learned in the classroom. I struggled with math in K-8, but in the Academy a math class consists simply of the teacher walking through problems on a PowerPoint presentation from the very start. Emphasis is placed on the skill and procedure and alternative methods are given while not worrying about vocabulary and whatnot. I’ve been lucky to have three excellent math teachers so far (Mr. Jordan, Mr. Young, and Mr. Tyler), and they all teach the same way with the same class routine.

from Dean

Mark, what happens when the parents don’t have the education or the ability to have a parent stay at home to educate their kids?

Also, why do we have to ask the parents to teach their own kids when for the last 200 years in this town, the kids could get a public education.

I am only reacting to this because solutions such as this are proposed and the extreme elements latch onto them as a real solution but in reality they do not work.

Last point, property taxes in Woodstock are the lowest in Northeast CT and probably the entire state (especially when I compare tax bills with friends and relatives). Why is there a need to force parents to teach their children at home to reduce property taxes further? Somehow, the rest of the state believes that public education should be better funded than what we do here.

and More from Dean

Granny, do you even know what our town employees earn? Because you are way off base. What does our First Selectman make? $50,000 or so? We are lucky that we have someone like Alan Walker working here for that salary.

What do you get for your tax dollars?

1) An educated public that can get good jobs and keep paying the bills. If you dont understand the value of that, well…

2) Streets that you can get to where you want.

3) Plowed roads in the winter.

4) A building inspector that makes sure that your and your neighbors houses are built safely

5) A fire department that provides fire protection

And what you get from my taxes:

1) Medicare (if you qualify, I am assuming here)

2) Social Security checks

I could go on and on and keep going but I have made my point.

I will be honest, I get a little tired of people who dont want to give the same things that they got so they can keep more for themselves and then start to say dumb things to justify that like “what does the rest of the population of taxpayers get for there money”.

I am only reacting to this because solutions such as these are proposed and the extreme elements latch onto them as a real solution but in reality they do not work.

Last point, property taxes in Woodstock are the lowest in Northeast CT and probably the entire state (especially when I compare tax bills with friends and relatives). Why is there a need to force parents to teach their children at home to reduce property taxes further? Somehow, the rest of the state believes that public education should be better funded than what we do here.

I’ve looked into charter schools and the idea is similar. The problem comes in what happens to the original public school if it is done in an unrestricted manner. Unlike our high schools, the per-student cost is just an average of the PK-8 costs. The upshot of this is that if one student leaves, the PK-8 costs likely do not go down by $8k. Most of our internal costs are incremental in nature, which means that enough students in a particular grade would have to leave to make us able to remove a teaching position and preserve class sizes. Of course for every student that leaves that leaves you less able to fund programs outside of the basics (sports, SPICE, instrumental music, etc.) and spread around SPED costs. So if we have 20 students go on voucher, spread evenly from K-8, it is easy to envision a scenario where we can’t really remove any positions to support the remaining children and the only budget impact is the additional cost of subsidizing their tuition to another school.

At some point one additional student at a particular grade level moves the class sizes large enough where we start thinking, well now we have to bring in an extra teacher to maintain class sizes. For that one student the marginal costs are very high because you are now hiring a new teacher. This is what happened with St Marys. It is also important to understand that the next student you bring in at that grade level is likely to have very low marginal costs because you just need to add in some instructional supplies. This works in both directions, adding and removing students.

What I’m describing is the exact same type of capacity planning that most organizations do. Let’s just say we are a small operation that builds widgets using a piece of machinery. That piece of machinery can produce a maximum 1000 widgets a month (that’s its capacity). As our sales increase the marginal cost to produce and sell one more widget is the cost of materials because we already have the piece of machinery and are paying an operator (I’m ignoring wear and tear, other overhead and overtime factors for the sake of simplicity). At some point we do a projection and see we can sell 1001 widgets a month but we can only produce 1000. The marginal cost of that 1001st widget is very high because now we have to buy another piece of machinery and hire another operator to run it. The marginal cost to produce the 1002nd widget, on the other hand is much lower because you already have everything you need except for the raw materials. So companies forecasting growth have to be very cognizant of their capacity breaks because it can have a huge impact on their cost structure and cash flow. They have the added advantage of being able to decide not to take orders about 1000 because they may not have the cash flow/projected growth to make it attractive. Read the rest of this entry »

from ProEd Funding

Thank you George for your honest heartfelt statement! This is vastly more than we ever get from any other BOF member.

In the end, everyone must vote for what is in their best personal interest. I understand and respect that, which is why I will vote for what is in my families best interest which is to not support a budget that further decimates the school system.

I am willing and able to pay more in taxes if it means preserving the integrity of our school system. In fact, I am willing to pay even more if it means that we go beyond preserving and actually work toward improving our school system. Wouldn’t that be nice for a change? While I deeply respect your decision and the decision of those who cannot afford further taxation, I am not going to vote on your or their behalf. I hope you pay me the same respect. Further, I am not going to let you or anyone else frame the argument that we, as a community, cannot afford to better fund our schools.

As far as shared sacrifice, the middle class taxpayer, which represents the majority of Woodstock families, have already paid their share of sacrifice in this economic downturn. They have sacrificed home values, job security and wages, retirement investments, affordable healthcare, and costly bailout dollars for those who created this economic downturn. If it were up to the Republican party, we would be sacrificing social security, medicare, and the right to unionize as well.

Now we are asked to sacrifice our children’s education? I don’t think so. For me, the buck ends here. When I start seeing Wall St. firms, corporations, politicians, and those who made their wealth off of the exploitation of others, begin to sacrifice, then I will accept the Republican gimmick of having a “shared” sacrifice. Until then, I will vote for what is in my best interest and this includes properly funding our school systems and voting against anyone who does not share my values.

I hope that other parents will join in a slow but steady campaign toward voting out the anti-education funding members the BOF who fail to give voice to the entire community, but rather, work only toward protecting the self-interests of those who are narrowly like-minded. We must take the leadership away from those who seek to rise only to the lowest common denominator and give it to those who share a healthy vision for Woodstock where the needs of aspiring students are met responsibly and with vigilance. We must always stand on the side of prosperity, viewing education as an investment, and weigh firmly against those who wish to hold our children down by believing that education funding is a burden.

Below are graphs of the daily page loads (clicks) and visits for 2011 from January 1 to yesterday morning. The gap in the data was when our StatCounter stopped working for a few days. Further below is the visitor map from mid-August to the present. We have articles that are popular internationally. The most popular of these articles is the article I published on “Gene Doping in the 21st Century” in August 2008.

In the Cafe frenzy days of 2006-2009 we had a higher number of visits each day but this was because of people that came to the Cafe 4 or 5 times a day :-o OMG! . I believe we have the same number of visitors today and perhaps even more. The difference is that that now visitors are coming to the Cafe less frequently, as for example, several times per week rather than every day.

The Cafe has compiled a short history of Woodstock over the last five and a half years with 1889 articles posted and 17,148 comments.

We are also a conduit for visitors to go to other sites from the links we put up. The Pomfret Times is the biggest benefactor of visitors from the Cafe with 174 visitors from the Cafe out of the last 1100 Cafe Visitors.