Summary of May 2, 2012 meeting

LPS Superintendent’s Teacher Advisory Council:  Summary of 5/2/12 meeting

The fifth and final meeting of the school year for the Superintendent’s Teacher Advisory Council – called together by Superintendent Steve Joel – was held at Lincoln High School on Wednesday, May 2.  Here is a summary of the highlights.  

Superintendent Update

Update on LPSDO

The groundbreaking, commemoration and celebration for the new Lincoln Public Schools District Office building will be held at 11 a.m. Tuesday, May 29, at 59th and O streets. “We continue to get mostly good reviews on how we’re doing, and we’re progressing rapidly,” Joel said.  “We’re seeing lots of dust flying right now.”

Strategic planning: technology

Joel explained that a committee of LPS and community stakeholders convened in a series of meetings held last month to begin planning a technology goal for the school district’s strategic plan. “Technology definitely seems to be the topic, nationally in education,” he said.  “Everyone is looking for someone to create the script for success…And we’re a state that is quite a bit behind.”

Joel noted that one of the greatest challenges is identifying resources to make initial purchases, but also to sustain technology.  “My vision is that we might need some sort of technology levy…or an appropriation from the state per pupil…There’s just no way for a school district of this size to afford the cost.”

Freezing staffing points

“I will apologize to all of you, but I would also ask that if anyone has a solution – send it to me,” Joel said, pointing to the fact that staffing points at schools have been frozen for several years now.

“We want to make sure we compensate people to the level of our community’s expectations,” he said. “So that leaves us with few choices… making dramatic cuts, or freezing staff points.”

Joel said he is optimistic the economy will improve, having the potential to help LPS resources in several ways: Increased sales tax receipts, and rising housing prices/assessed valuation (which would mean increased property tax receipts, one of the main sources of funding for LPS).

Meanwhile, he said that he recognizes administrators are making difficult decisions in how staffing points are being allocated.  “I know not everyone will agree, but I hope at least there is good communications in the schools about these decisions.”

LPS retires and hires

Currently almost 200 LPS employees have announced they are retiring at the end of this school year, Joel said.  “That’s very consistent with national trends as we hit the aging of our Baby Boomer generation…My sense is that this year is just a warning.  There will be more retirements to come.”

Question:  Does LPS need an entire week of early dismissal the first week of school?

Joel said he continues to examine the school calendar and look for ways to increase academic hours. Noting that all LPS schools are now air conditioned, he asked members of the Teacher Advisory Council for their reaction to the possibility of cutting down on the number of early dismissal days during the first week of school.  “Do we need a full week, or is there a compromise we could look at?”

Reaction:

  • “I think we need to remind our community that students are only dismissed one hour early, for four days…And that hour is critical to us…We are building professional teams during that very important time.”
  • “If you’re in a high school, you spend the first day for freshmen orientation day…so we’re only talking three hours.”
  • “That first week, as we are getting to know our kids, we use that hour to consider the best plan for them.  We do a lot of rearranging, placing our children in the best place.”
  • “Our special education program has lots of support staff, and we use that hour to train our paras.  Otherwise, there would be no time to accomplish that task.”

Guest speaker: Russ Uhing, director of Student Services at LPS

Uhing gave the group an overview of Student Service responsibilities – and highlighted several recent initiatives.

Overview

Uhing noted some of the major tasks of Student Services:

  • District-wide Student Records
  • Student suspensions, expulsions, enforcing new attendance laws
  • Responding to contacts related to discipline and problems such as bullying  (he gets more calls about bullying than any other single issue)
  • Health services
  • School safety
  • School social workers (Student Services oversees 18 social workers, but some schools use staffing points to hire additional workers)
  • Working with counselors for staff development and direction

Recent Student Services initiatives

1.  Bullying survey:  The school district will conduct a district-wide bullying survey beginning next week, reaching out to students, families and staff members to ask about how often bullying incidents happen – and creating the beginning of a data base.

“Then we’ll take some time examining the data and figuring out what our next steps should be.”

2.  Kindergarten assessment: Starting in the 2012-13 school year, students may enter kindergarten if they turn five years of age by July 31 – a date that was previously October 15.  However, if your child was born between July 31 and October 15, they are eligible to

participate in an assessment – coordinated by Student Services – to determine possible early entrance to kindergarten.

Uhing said the test has been administered to about 150 children to date, and about half have passed.  There is still one more opportunity to take the assessment.

3. General issues with social media: “Not a week goes by that we don’t get calls from a school, because something has happened on Facebook or Twitter,” Uhing said.

The challenge is that school officials cannot deal with an issue when it has happened off school grounds during off-school hours, he explained. “However, we can intervene when the issue begins to cause disruption in class and in school…We do have to continue to communicate and educate our kids.”

 

Updated May 4, 2012