Woodstock CT Café

from Teacher’s Point of View

There are several problems with this plan, which I will highlight below:

1) Malloy’s plan fails to see that it takes an entire community to educate and develop a child. It takes a village, as they say. Yet no accountability is put on the community and family. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (see link below), students cannot learn at a high level when their basic needs are not being met. When students come to school hungry, unloved, lonely, and/or afraid, they will not excel in school. Does anyone truly believe that we could take all the teachers in Greenwich, move them to New Haven, and the kids there would suddenly start achieving at the same level as the Greenwich kids? The notion is preposterous.

http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/hierarchyneeds.htm

2) The new evaluation system has never been piloted. That’s right, it has never before been used. Despite this, the governor wants to tie a teacher’s license to it. How do we know if it will be accurate? Have we determined its effectiveness? Do we know if it accurately and fairly represents a teacher’s ability? Malloy wants to base a person’s livelihood on an evaluation plan that has never been piloted.

3) Malloy’s evaluation plan will fail to close the achievement gap between inner city schools and other schools. In fact, I predict that it could do the opposite. Many people don’t know this, but Malloy not only wants to tie tenure to the evaluations, but the teacher’s actual license. So rather than losing a job based on the untested evaluation, the teacher will actually lose their license to teach anywhere. How will that hurt inner city schools? It will drive the best teachers away from them. A portion of the evaluation is based on standardized test scores. Inner city schools have had significantly lower standardized test scores. If a promising new teacher has spent over $100k and 6 years to get a license, why would they risk that license on a school with historically low student achievement. Under the new plan, promising new teachers will view inner city schools as liabilities. They’ll start viewing under-achieving schools as a threat to the license they spent years and a lot of money to acquire. Inner city schools may get teachers who are desperate and can’t find jobs anywhere else, but will fail to draw in those that are so qualified, they can choose where they want to teach. Is this a logical way to help close the achievement gap?

I encourage the governor to come up with a plan that will truly benefit the kids and help to enhance student learning. Currently, his plan only looks to scapegoat teachers and punish them for things that has never been solely in their control.

For Nontheists

“The National Day of Reason — or “NDR” in the shorthand of the nontheist community — will also be held May 3, part protest, part celebration and totally godless. To that end, local groups of nontheists will hold blood drives (Groton, Conn.) training in lobbying politicians (Raleigh, N.C.) and voter registration drives (Flagstaff, Ariz.), as well as marches, rallies and social gatherings.

One group in Putnam, Conn., is holding a “science for reason” book exchange — turn in a Bible and receive a free copy of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, among other titles.” I’ve already got my copy, but thanks anyway (JL).

See the article in USAToday.

For Woodstock Academy Observers

“The academy in the past few years has added off-campus student housing in either leased or purchased homes for its international students. It is now working to bring that housing in compliance with town zoning, which does not address student housing…

Town Planner Delia Fey and Town Attorney Robert DeCrescenzo instead are recommending that student housing be allowed by special permit.

Fey has recommended a series of other modifications aimed at narrowing where student housing is permitted in town, whether new student housing can be built, and language pertaining to trash removal, the living area required per student and septic system size.

Woodstock Academy has about 50 students enrolled in its international program, and fewer than half of them live in school housing, the rest live with host families. The academy has purchased two homes in the Woodstock Hill section of town and leases a couple of others.”

See the article in the Norwich Bull.

from John

I became aware of this today. Last week when hearings were being held in Hartford to debate Governor Malloy’s plan for education reform in CT some teachers were rallying support against Malloy’s plan. It turns out that the Teachers Union in Woodstock approached the Director of Transportation for the school system and requested that four school buses be lined up to transport teachers to Hartford on the night of the hearing. Huh!

The Director of Transportation said okay and corralled four drivers to make the trip after their normal bus runs leaving Woodstock at 5 PM and returning to Woodstock after 9 PM. Make no mistake about it, the bus drivers were not happy about this but since many of them fear losing their job if they don’t follow the commands of this self-serving Director, they complied. One of the drivers was told that he could not do an afternoon run because of the night trip so no extra pay was made for suffering through the night trip. It was the Director who took over this bus driver’s afternoon route the next day and pocketed extra pay. These two bus drivers had to get up at 4-4:30 AM the next morning to drive their normal routes.

Ultimately only two school buses went to Hartford and thankfully returned without an incident. Even more astonishing is the fact that both large buses took less than ten people each to Hartford and back. The use of gas (paid for by the teachers’ union), payment of the drivers (by the teachers’ union), and the wear and tear on the buses was sponsored by the taxpayer so that the Teachers Union of Woodstock could have a presence at a political rally.

What was the Director of Transportation thinking in allowing this to happen? What was the Teachers’ Union thinking in requesting that school system employees and equipment be used to support their political agenda? Thank God there was no accident or trouble with our fragile, aging buses.

This didn’t cost much, maybe a few cents per taxpaying residence. This was mainly an abuse of two bus drivers and an inappropriate use of school system equipment that always needs repair. Given the potential liability and the political nature of this rally, I would say that this was a flagrant abuse of the entire school system, the bus drivers, the taxpayers, and especially the people who have tirelessly tried to work to improve the school system. It flies in the face of the missions of the PTO, the Education Foundation, the Jog with Judy fundraiser, the Board of Education, and who knows who else.

Consider the possibilty that the school system will have to outsource transportation at a higher cost because there will not be enough bus drivers who are willing to put up with this deplorable treatment. Then, of course, more teachers will have to be laid off.

from daughter Valerie

Subject: Alexander Holt Rotival memorial Service – April 28th
Reply-To: ROTIVAL-BRIZARD Valérie

Dear friends,

As many of you already know, our father passed on Sunday morning, April 22nd.

While the last few weeks were difficult, he was surrounded by your exceptional support and friendship.

We will have a memorial service on Saturday the 28th at the Congregational Church on Woodstock Hill.

The service will then be followed by a reception in honor of both our father and our mother who passed one year ago on the 28th of April 2011. The reception will take place at our farther’s house in North Woodstock. He always intended to use the first anniversary of her departure as an opportunity to introduce our new family home to our mother and our wonderful families and friends. We look forward to celebrating their life with you. We would appreciate if you would forward this message to those we have inadvertently omitted.

In lieu of flowers, please consider making a donation to The Connecticut Farmland Trust.

Valerie, Constance and Laurent

from John

Speaking of embryonic development, meet Kate (left) and George (right). Michelle and my son, Drew, had these two perfect human beings today. I am so happy as are they, and I am proud to be a grandfather for the seventh time. The second picture is my son Drew with mother, Michelle, holding their first child, Daniel, and one of my three daughters, Christina, with Brad and their son, Levi. Drew and Michelle live in Dallas and Christina and Brad live in Tulsa.

from Diane

One of the exciting things about “discussions” like this one is the opportunity they provide to learn. I love learning new “stuff”. Thanks to this discussion, I learned the process at conception about which I wrote in #23. Since then I’ve also learned that zygotes become embryos become fetuses become babies.
click to enlarge

Did you know that the number of weeks pregnant often commences with the FIRST day of a woman’s last period? That means a pregnancy at 6 weeks could be only 3 weeks old. Put another way, if RU-486 becomes illegal, a woman could be prosecuted for aborting an embryo before she got pregnant. Guess that answers the question about being “a little bit pregnant”. ROFL

I always thought a factoid was a small fact, sort of like a planetoid is a small planet. Nope. A factoid is a statement repeated so often that everyone thinks it is true, even though it’s not [think The Big Lie from the Eisenhower era]. The idea that 6 week old fetuses have brain activity or brain waves JUST like we here at the Café is a factoid – even John stated this as true .

The cerebral cortex, from which comes our “human” thoughts, feelings, etc, does not start forming until the 8th week.* So much for cogent thoughts at 6 weeks.

The electrical impulses in the brain of an embryo and immature fetus that have been detected by EEG are not the same as brain waves recorded for post-natal humans. They are instead random bursts of electrical activity which look the same as those produced by stimulating a fetal leg muscle.** I’d love to quote the source for footnote 7 but cannot find it online. Read the rest of this entry »

from John

Since Mad Cow Disease is in the news, I thought I would talk about it.

I first became interested in Prions when I met Carlton Gajdusek at a Pauling Institute meeting held at the Stanford Court Hotel on Nob Hill in 1986. Gajdusek was the most unassuming Nobel Prize winner (1976) I ever met, perhaps a couple of notches below Linus Pauling who was there also. So was Becki. Gajdusek’s interest in scientific endeavors started with entomology much like Darwin. In 1957 he went to New Guinea to study child growth and development in primitive cultures. He came away with the discovery of kuru, a debilitating neurological disorder among the primitive tribal natives of New Guinea who ate the brains of their victims. Basically you become deranged as the disease progresses. Gadjusek could not identify the infectious agent, such as a virus or bacterium, that caused kuru. Two things that I can think of that came out of Gajdusek’s discovery were the eradication of kuru in New Guinea because of the ending of cannibalism and the ending of the practice of feeding animal tissues and bone meal to livestock. Stanley Prusiner coined the term “prion” in 1982 and received the Nobel Prize in 1997 for demonstrating that the prion was a protein that we all have (PrP) that becomes “infectious” when mutated or misfolded. This was a hard concept for the scientific community to embrace which makes this even more fascinating. Read the rest of this entry »

We have heard that Sandy Rotival passed away on the weekend. In December, Sandy moved back to Woodstock from France, two doors up the street on Route 197 near the intersection of 197 and 169. Becki and I were fortunate to see Sandy at the Vanilla Bean a week ago and meet his daughters, Valerie and Constance, who were with him this last weekend.

Sandy worked as a diplomat for the United Nations in exotic places like Belgian Congo, Switzerland and Communist Romania. Sandy retired in 1996, and he and his charming wife, Edith, moved to their home on the Hill next to Roseland Cottage. Edith passed away almost exactly a year ago while she and Sandy were living in France. In Woodstock, Sandy and Edith helped raise funding for the Audubon Society, the Performing Arts of Northeast Connecticut, Celebrating Agriculture, the Connecticut Farmland Trust and Working Lands Alliance.

from Diane

I know there are many who view third parties in the US as an unnecessary disruption to an orderly political process. However, one of the best reasons to keep them around, maybe even throw a little money their way, is that they usually don’t have a strong contender in most national elections and therefore have the luxury of eschewing spin and/or political correctness. When I became of voting age in the 1960s, Democrats were known for their compassion, if not principles and Republicans for their principles if not compassion. Today, neither of our major parties appear to have either. They’ve both chucked it all in favor of money and power. So when it comes to the abortion issue, you don’t even have to see the press releases put out by the Reps or Dems to know what’s been said. That is why I find it refreshing to read a press release that skewers both of them by stating opposition to direct government funding of abortions AND governmental law-making that denies a pregnant woman the right to decide for herself what is right. Until we have at least SOME scientific proof of when a fetus becomes a person, the timing of that event is nothing more than a matter of belief, aka, a religious viewpoint and any laws that either support abortion or forbid it are, therefore, violations of the First Amendment. To me it is just that simple. dt

“The ugliest part of the Arizona law, however, is a provision requiring a woman to undergo a physically invasive transvaginal ultrasound before she is even allowed to choose. The goal, of course, is to humiliate her into deciding not to proceed, as punishment for what Governor Jan Brewer and the majority of the Arizona legislature consider to be her great transgression.” Mark Hinkle

This is re-posted in honor of a former Woodstocker who moved back to the out back in Australia. He’s been visiting the Cafe over the last week so I thought we should re-post his article in honor of his presence.

from the Aussie

Having grown up in the Outback near Alice Springs and the Abo lands, I am somewhat familiar with kangaroo courts. Some nit-picking dingbats will try to tell you that kangaroo courts first arose during the Calyfornia gold rush and claim jumpers but kangaroo courts were well practiced in 1800 and early 1900′s in the lawless Outback …and after all, ‘roos’ are our state bird just like your bald eagle.

Being from the down-under, which we call “the up top”, I was at first tickled as a bush pig when the Villager started to publish because I thought that it would teach me how you blokes run my adopted home of Woodstock. But after digesting many articles in this rag I began to feel like I was back reading the bush telegraph in alligator country. Read the rest of this entry »

This is their new website.

See the article in the Norwich Bull.

Superintendent Janet Tyler said the Board of Education request is as large as it is because it addresses needs that have gone unmet for many years. She said the district is also facing reaccreditation for the high school, a process that begins next school year, and a need for all-day kindergarten.

“Our children are behind before they even begin,” Tyler said. “We need to prepare them better.”

Clay Smith, a freshman at Lyman Memorial High School, said he has a petition signed by students demanding money be restored to the education budget.

“To you, the education budget may seem like a great cost-cutting opportunity,” Smith said. “To us, it’s a loss of programs.”

Judd Wardell is a former Board of Education member who said he ran for the office to cut the fat out of the budget.

“There’s nothing to cut,” Wardell said. “We’ve not given the Board of Education the money they need for too many years now.”

from Kevin

They are interesting things, these “unfunded” mandates. I believe when deciding if these are” good” or “bad” it is best to separate out how they are funded from what they do. For example, the mandate to transport our children to school is a very good thing. In general the idea behind the mandate to give special attention to special needs children is good, even if some of the particulars on how it is to be done may not be optimal. No Child Left Behind was one that wasn’t so good and leads to teaching to the test in a very narrow subset of fields.

It would seem that the assumption here is that what is considered an “unfunded” mandate is bad due to its very nature as “unfunded”. This is not true and debatable if it is truly unfunded. The state government considers that our educational funding will come from a mixture of state collected tax revenue and town collected tax revenue. When new mandates are created that have no specific state funding they are created with the express understanding that they will be funded at the local level, in our case through property taxes.

All of our municipal powers are invested in us by the state. The power to tax, what can be taxed, how much can and will be taxed, what form of government our municipality can create, etc. There is no such thing as an “unfunded” mandate that comes from the state. These new mandates are represent direction from the state government that a new thing will happen in the schools and it will be paid for by municipal taxes.

Why people in town may not like this, particularly supporters of proposition 46, is that it reminds us that all of our powers are vested in us from the state. This includes our power to create proposition 46 in the first place. Proposition 46 will only exist as long as the state allows it to do so. As soon as it comes into conflict with what the state expects us to do, we can consider it gone one lawsuit later. This is the problem that proposition 46 has been running into. There was a callout for exclusions under proposition 46 for state mandates but the ordinance has been evaluated so narrowly that it is starting to fall apart. For example, not allowing exceptions to state increases in state mandates in revaluation years (which now happen every 5 years, instead of every 10 years like when proposition 46 was created) and not considering any new mandates as increases to costs under proposition 46. Over time these have been straining proposition 46s ability to operate under state expectations.

This will either be a slow strangling of town resources until a lawsuit over something like the salt barn fiasco kills it or we can change it now and get ourselves in line with an ordinance that can stand the test of time and changing circumstance.

Thanks,

Kevin

This post represents my personal opinions and in no way should be considered an official act of the BoE or that I am speaking on behalf of the BoE in any way.

from JK

Your argument about voter turnout raises serious concerns (to Joe K). In a democratic society, people need to vote. It’s a right that many have died to protect, and around the world, it’s a right people are denied. We could extend your argument and propose that if we’re happy with president (fill in the blank) we should be able to elect him for life.

On another topic, state statutes define the role of a local BOF. Prop. 46 removes that power. As I understand it, local ordinances can’t conflict/override state statute. Were Prop. 46 to be amended to allow voters to override the limitations of Prop. 46, that conflict may be resolved.

Your assertion that revisions to Prop. 46 would only serve to “take more money unnecessarily” raises another concern. What you really should say is that it would raise taxes for spending you don’t believe to be necessary. In essence, you are saying that as long as the school is open, all is well. There have been many cuts over the years, and you obviously feel that all cuts are good. I’m not going to try to convince you otherwise, but many people would assert that some cuts are detrimental to the educational system. I would assert that some cuts can be made that will have minimal effects, but at some point, we’ve cut something that would truly benefit students.

I’m also curious as to your thoughts about Woodstock Academy. First and foremost, they have seen cuts as well. The fact that WA appears to be overcrowded, the septic system has been failing for years (that is finally being addressed, but it is shameful that it has taken so long) and there are many other physical limitations that can’t be addressed in a timely manner should cause concern.

The bottom line is that WA may be making financially responsible decisions, yet they do not face the same level of cuts as WPS. Supporters of Prop 46 should be concerned that WA sets a budget, and is done. They send the town a bill. They do not have to answer to taxpayers at all. WA can ignore inflation, property evaluations, and limits set by prop 46. While I am not in favor of cutting WA’s budget, I just can’t understand the apparent lack of concern that Prop. 46 supporters have over WA, compared to the indifference to the effects of budget cuts on WPS.
I suppose people should actually be thankful that at least one school in Woodstock is not subject to the belief that all budget cuts are good, and there’s no need to listen to the detrimental effects of cutting education spending again and again.

To the Stone Bridge Press,

As Anders Behring Breivik goes on trial this month for his bombing and mass murder in Norway, the focus of the headlines and story will be on how extremist verbal attacks on Islam and Muslims can encourage horrific crimes by well-armed culture warriors.

The Villager opinion pages have frequently published letters with incendiary language inappropriate for a general-circulation community newspaper. This spring, these have included two letters that Mr. Breivik would have read with enthusiastic agreement.

I attach here a 750-word letter by Gary Menard, printed in the Villager on March 9th, and my response, which was printed the following week, March 16th. Gary wants to warn us of the impending takeover of our legal system and abrogation of our Constitution by Muslims and their sympathizers. This is exactly what motivated Anders Breivik to act in defense of his country and culture.

As I pointed out in my 503-word response, the Judge in question was not employing Sharia Law but the respected legal principle of “Fighting Words,” considered in line with our own First Amendment. Thank you for publishing my rebuttal, but you should have rejected his original letter as inflammatory racist hate-speech suitable only for certain AM talk-radio shows.

Ignoring my points, Mr. Menard, in an 826-word letter published March 30th, renewed his attack on what he considers a violent, intolerant religion and on us purposefully ignorant apologists. I refer you to my 542-word response, emailed Monday, April 2nd at 9:00 AM, to explain how dangerous and un-American I think his letters are. But my letter wasn’t published the following Friday, or this next Friday, either. Read the rest of this entry »