Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Welcome


Welcome to the D181 Parents for Accountability and Transparency blog.  

We are concerned D181 parents.  Each of us moved to D181 because of the outstanding schools, committed teachers and excellent educational opportunities for our children.  As parents and taxpayers, our goal is to demand transparency and accountability by the Administration and the Board of Education in all matters that impact our children's education.  We have a right to expect that in all educational matters, there should be no secrecy, and no information regarding the programs, curriculum or assessments should be withheld from us.  

The purpose of this blog is to address D181 issues that you should be aware of -- both complementary and critical.  If we have concerns about matters that may impact the children of D181, we will raise them for discussion purposes and invite you to comment on them.  If you have issues you would like us to address or investigate, please let us know.   Over the last year, many changes have taken place in D181 -- curricular, assessment, staff, board and administrative -- and many more are about to be rolled out.  We have found that despite communications the Administration sent out to parents, there is still confusion or lack of knowledge about these changes.  This blog will identify these changes and track them as they are implemented.

In order to kick off this blog, we will provide you with a Year in Review.  Over the next week, we will post highlights of significant changes that took place in 2012-2013 and then flag issues that we will be following closely in 2013-2014.

Now is the time for the community of parents and teachers to weigh in.  We welcome your opinions.






4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is a great blog! Thank you to the parents who are running it. I will be eager to read your future posts. Can you write something up about the math test results parents have been talking about in the last couple of weeks? I'd really like your take on it. HMS Parent

Richard Fitzgerald said...

I commend you on starting this website. It is important that we as parents and taxpayers hold the right people accountable for the results of the district as a whole.

I am not usually fond of the anonymous format, as I believe that if you are brave enough to type it, you should be brave enough to put your name on it. However, for this website, I think that the most important issue is the message and not the people who are writing the blog.

Good luck. I will be reading as well as a lot of parents from D181.

Richard Fitzgerald
Parent 2nd & 4th Grade Elm

Anonymous said...

Why are the administrator's salaries so high, when our children's "growth" on test results is so low!?! Too bad their standards for our children are not as high as their salary expectations.

jay_wick said...

Please consider making this a separate post.

The much disliked proposal to redistribute state funds to districts based on "property wealth" that was known as SB16 in the last legislative session appears to have been brought back from the grave.

School funding bill faces slog through legislature| Herald-Review.com

The same downstate Senator, Andy Manar (D - Bunker Hill) now attempts to factor in "cost of living" differences.

Sadly the bill fails to address the reality that Illinois has not adjusted the funding formula for State Aid since the late 1990s when schools had very different needs especially when it comes to technology and state mandates.

The article above claims the bill now has support from "a DuPage school district" and while U-46 does serve parts of some towns in the northwest corner of the county, the characteristics of that large district that mostly serves Elgin are rather different from most schools districts along the BNSF or UP-W lines that make up the core of DuPage County.

I would urge all concerned community members to research the facts. The data shows that while the State of Illinois has a Constitution that suggests state monies are to be the primary source of education funding the legislative leaders in Springfield have failed to do so. Sadly there is little likelihood that a law suit would be filed as was done to enforce the 'pension guarantees' of the same Constitution.

The inequity that this bill would perpetuate results in Illinois' most affluent school districts receiving just a few hundred dollars per special education student while the poorest school districts are theoretically entitled to receive over $4,000 per student. Unfortunately the legislators also prorate these amounts so that the lopsided reliance on property taxes is made even worse.

Senate Bill 1 is the New Senate Bill 16

Until the legislative leaders put forth a serious effort to take up their responsibility to equitably address these matters it is in the best interest of suburban residents to oppose changes that would unfairly burden our schools and do nothing to truly address the horrible dereliction of responsibility that continues to leave schools in less affluent areas unable to deliver adequate resources to students.