Woodstock CT Café

from Frank Corden

My approach to governance comes directly from my experience in the private sector. Good performance and success in the market place warrant further investment not less. Over the years that Dr. Baran has led the Woodstock Public schools performance in fact improved. Last year, WPS was the best performing school district in Windham County as measured by performance and when compared to cost, easily the most effective and efficient. More bang for each dollar spent per student.

In business, you define the job you are trying to do and then commit the funds necessary to do it well. Unfortunately, in Woodstock as in many other towns, the community at large has failed to clearly define the job of education.

Is it strictly classroom instruction of the 3 R’s?
Where does funding infrastructure for science and technology education fall on the priority list?
What about other non-core areas such as music and physical education?
How about athletics, should they be part of the school budget?
What about academically oriented after school programs as mentioned above (History Day, Science Fair, Public Speaking etc.)?
Do after school buses and extra help sessions for struggling students belong in our priorities?
What about services for students with physical or learning disabilities?
Do we have as great a responsibility to support the full potential of gifted students compared to students with disabilities?

Each of these spending areas has it’s advocates. Read the rest of this entry »

from Frank Corden

Independent, Taxpayer, Con and all others who seem to be routinely participating in a number of thoughtful discussions, I’d like to tee one up that flows from Independent’s comment above regarding a few tough years ahead.

Clearly, we need to get our state and federal budgets under control. As we look at the approach of the Reagan Republicans (and as most recently championed by the Tea Party activist), abandoning regulation hasn’t served us very well. Their collective cry for “smaller government” is too simplistic. There appears to be this sense that by starving government for funds, government will get better.

Rather it seems that a cash poor government is generally headed to becoming a poor government. Case in point, starving the regulatory arms of the SEC, the bank regulators and the food safety inspectors hasn’t made us any richer or safer.

Organizational behavior virtually guarantees a poor outcome. When organizations are starved for resources, in the absence of VERY STRONG leadership, the organizations don’t try to limit what they do, but rather peanut-butter the resources across as many of their previous activities as possible. The result is that the organization tries to “do it all” but instead does it all poorly.

If we are going to reduce government spending and still have well run programs that protect the health and safety of our citizens and the financial future of our country, what we need to do is to settle on the appropriate priorities for government at each level, federal, state and local. Then be rigorous about holding to those priorities.

So, the question I pose for discussion is, “what are the appropriate rolls for the federal government” and “what should we shut down”. In each case of the do’s and don’ts, I like to discuss what rationale we would use to justify the recommendation.

from Frank Corden

So to the point, the only position you (WVG) have mentioned that I took that is contrary to your views has to do with Woodstock Academy. You stipulated to items, one that I supported the efforts of the BoE chair to propose legislation changing the statutory status of WA. The second is a general point regarding WA’s budget actions having a detrimental impact on the K-8 programs.

I was not involved or knowledgable of the chair’s action regarding meeting with State legislators. Further, I don’t recall Sherrie Vogt’s name ever being mentioned during the BoE meetings. With that said, I do believe that the governance of WA is structure in a manner that makes it unresponsive to the needs of Woodstock, the largest sending town. If a change in the statutory status or governance structure of WA is a means to that end, I certainly would seriously consider supporting it.

With respect to the second point, I do believe that the budgetary actions of Woodstock Academy have had detrimental impacts on the K-8 system. The education budget is of a fixed size as defined by the Board of Finance. When tuition for Woodstock students to attend Woodstock Academy increases substantially and those increases aren’t adequately addressed by the budget imposed by the Board of Finance, Woodstock Public Schools takes the hit.

In 4 of the 6 years I served this community on the Board of Education, unjustifiable increases in the WA budget directly resulted in cuts in staff and programs at Woodstock Elementary School and Woodstock Middle School. Read the rest of this entry »

 from Dean

WVG, you are just guessing on election results. I know plenty of republicans who would have voted for him (Corden), myself included. Heck, I’ll draw some better conclusions than that from the past races.

1) If Mr. Rosendahl ran that election, he would have lost badly, perhaps worse than Mr. Richardson. A lot of people were tired of his attacks. That was evidenced in the extraordinarily low vote totals that his allies got.

2) If Mr. Powers ran against anyone else, he would have also gotten the same number of votes as Mr Richardson. He got less than 50% of the vote running against himself.

3) If Mr. Corden ran in the general election, he would have won. Pretty clear from the June results.

Given the recent election results, it is clear that the majority supported his actions and the board’s.

Anyways, I’d much rather be talking about the future than debating whether someone could have gotten through a primary when they chose not to run. That is pretty old news.

from Con

As illustration of your point I recall one particular FOI Demand Action which I believe went all the way in the administrative process and, because it was so broad, burdened a lot of employees to search carefully in order to comply with a demand to basically produce ‘any & all communication to, from or among [Name, X, Y & Z], including emails, notes, blogs, etc. for X Months’ - and compliance demands production of every scrap, so imagine each employees tedious and time-consuming efforts on just the email ‘trees’ alone - Employees who had to stop working at their actual job and labor on this matter, all paid for on the Taxpayer’s dime.

As far as I could tell, the only purported purpose of the FOI Demand was the implementation of Meeting Agendas that would be comprehensive, transparent and allow no unfair surprises. Seems Fair; the FOI Demand did not, nor did it seem suited to achieve that end.

I don’t know if the parties ever just sat down and talked; I don’t believe that direct request regarding Agenda changes was ever made; nor did I ever hear of ANY kind of offer of informal meeting; nor of any compromise; or Alternative Dispute Resolution; or efforts to narrow matters to keep costs down and ensure that the FOI Demand language limited itself to truly germane material. There was an atmosphere of a stubborn stand-off on both sides, but only one side initiated the matter and seemed to a lot of us to have had a stern and stubborn lesson to teach (at our expense). Read the rest of this entry »

from Frank Corden

Kevin: Thanks for taking the time to present an example of the kind of rational decision making that characterizes the administration and the Board of Education in general and Dr. Baran in particular. Though you can disagree on the numbers that one applies in any of these sorts of decisions, the structured process assures that when you do settle on representative/realistic numbers you are likely to arrive on a sound course of action.

Unfortunately, as with any pre-emptive action, you can’t tell how things would have turned out if you had acted differently. The likes of Shultz, Wholean and Powers will be just as quick to criticize Dr. Baran for not seeking an opinion if a situation escalates to a grievance, regardless of the outcome.

Another point you alluded to but didn’t expand on was the “opportunity cost”. There are at least two categories of opportunity cost here. First, the money that is spent on the legal advice helps provide (but not guarantee) a deterent to future costs. The costs of that grievance or litigation is the difference between having and not having a spring sport, or between having and not having public speaking or other comparable after school program. Spending $62 for a bit of insurance against losing one of those after school programs makes great sense. Read the rest of this entry »

A response to the uninformed musings of Wholean, Powers, and Shultz.

by Kevin 

I think it is important to know what is behind these numbers before coming to any conclusions. I understand that it is normal that when people don’t know the context of something they tend to make one up. I do happen to have some visibility into these items so I thought I’d put a little context around them.

As I understand it the $62.50 was for the administration changing a student’s grade that they thought was incorrect against the wishes of a teacher. In such a case they really have two choices; 1) they can leave it alone but that’s problematic when they feel it is to the student’s detriment (our raison d’etre) 2) attempt to change it against the teacher’s wishes. As I understand it discussion had already happened and the administration wanted to move forward with the second option because that’s what they believed was in the student’s best interest (I have no visibility into the facts behind the grade so I have no way to know who was “right” or “wrong” so please don’t read that in).

If you look through the legal bills they pulled you will see what even a relatively inexpensive union grievance can cost in legal bills, not to mention time and focus of the administrative staff. Spending $62.50 up front so both sides understand the legal authority granted to each group is comparatively minor insurance to preempt a possible grievance.

This gets back to what I’ve been talking about quite a lot lately. The difference between understanding long term vs. short term costs. I’m going to explain a little of the math behind this using some admittedly arbitrary numbers. I’m not suggesting that the administration is making decision trees for all of their decisions but this does illustrate to importance of considering the full costs of the decisions we make in many different contexts.

For the sake of argument let’s say that the cost of an average union grievance is $5000 in legal bills, time and energy (the opportunity cost of what we could be doing other than a union grievance, this is much more costly than the obvious legal bills). Let’s also say for the sake of argument that the average legal consultation is $100. Read the rest of this entry »

from Newcomer

I spent today at the WES attending both sessions of the 2010 Winter Olympics. I had not had a chance to attend them before, although my children have participated in prior years. I just have to commend the PE teacher, Mr. Lazur. No wonder he’s Woodstock’s Teacher of the Year. Based on what I saw today, I’d say that distinction is long overdue and richly deserved - and then some. Every event in the winter Olympiad was represented. The day was complete with opening and closing ceremonies, pop quiz questions about the different events, and the children even learned about several countries and their respective flags. There was even an Olympic torch to be lit at the opening cermony and extinguished at the closing ceremony with an explanation about the tradition of the torch. I can’t even imagine the amount of planning and creativity that’s required to develop such a day for the children. I would bet very few elementary school children are treated to such a fun way to learn about a historical sporting event and the other nations of the world that also participate. Amazing doesn’t even begin to describe what I enjoyed seeing the children actively learn about today.

So a huge heartfelt thanks to Mr. Lazur and to all of the parents and staff who also volunteered their time helping the children at each sporting event station. What a wonderful cultural and physical fitness experience for our kids!

by Taxpayer

I thought that the meeting went very well. It was nice to see the new Headmaster of Woodstock Academy and I was glad that he saw the issue of Woodstock education funding as a mutual K-12 concern and not an “us vs. them” situation (WA vs. WPS). I asked a few questions and got some very solid answers. One is that the Woodstock Academy field expansion is on hold (pending some zoning and environmental issues) and will not impact this year’s education budget. Other concerns I had are longstanding problems that have haunted us and Ct. education funding for years, but nonetheless, are important to raise.

So pretty much the same old same old, but compounded by a terrible economy which will make for a “perfect storm”, as Headmaster Caron called it. As Kevin can attest, this year’s budget will thus be a tough one. The BOE will continue discussing spending priorities and budgeting strategies again on this Thursday’s meeting.

click to enlarge

I don’t get it. Based on these numbers (from the Hartford Courant), Woodstock students will benefit by a little under $14 each per year and about 7.8 cents each per school day. You wonder if it is worth the cost of the application filing and administrative paper work. Apparently, 67 out of 187 school districts did not sign up with the State Department of Education for this cash cow. This program may only benefit large inner city school systems.

ConnCan’s Statement Regarding the Education Stimulus Money

“The federal government’s $4 billion dollar Race to the Top competition is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Connecticut to reform its public schools. With the largest achievement gap in the country and an enormous budget deficit, no state needs to win this competition more than we do.

On Jan. 19, the commissioner of education submitted our state’s Round 1 application for the Race to the Top. This is a good first step, but its not enough. Connecticut is like a C student applying early admission to Yale–we can’t just count on the application essay to get us over the top.

Read the rest of this entry »