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Referendum Climate: Madison Mayor Proposes 6% City Budget Spending Increase



Dean Mosiman:

Cieslewicz today will propose a $237.9 million “share the pain” operating budget that raises city taxes $53 on the average $247,974 home.
The proposed budget, a 6 percent spending increase — the largest Cieslewicz has ever offered — delivers new money for police, fire, the library and Metro Transit, but freezes or cuts spending in many areas.
“You’ll find no extreme cuts to any one agency, but many small cuts,” Cieslewicz said. “We did manage to keep long-term commitments.”
The 2.9 percent increase in taxes on the average home is among the fifth-lowest in 30 years, but overall tax collections are up 8 percent, the biggest increase since 1993.
“I was focused primarily on taxes on the average home,” Cieslewicz said. “That is what people experience.”

Much more on the 2008 Madison School District referendum here.




“Limit Low Income Housing” – Madison Police Official



Patricia Simms:

A top Madison Police Department official says the city should reduce or freeze building low-income housing because the tenants are overwhelming police services.
In addition, Jay Lengfeld, captain of the West District, wrote an e-mail to Madison Alderman Thuy Pham-Remmele, 20th District, on Monday in which he suggested the city should license landlords to “weed out the bad ones” and give landlords more leeway to reject applicants with a history of bad behavior.
“The city needs to reduce or freeze the number of subsidized housing units in the city,” he wrote. “The at-risk population in Madison has exceeded the ability of service providers to service them.”
Lengfeld’s comments, part of an exchange of e-mails between Lengfeld and Pham-Remmele over quality of life issues on the West Side, sparked the wrath of at least one affordable housing advocate.




Arts Task Force to present findings and recommendations to Madison School Board: Presentation at 6 pm, Monday, October 6, 2008



Doyle Administration Building, 545 West Dayton Street, Madison [Map]

“The arts are not a luxury; they are essential”. State Supt. of Public Instruction Elizabeth Burmaster
Being concerned about the effect of cuts to funding, staffing and instruction time on arts education and the effect of these cuts on low-income students and students of color, the Madison Metropolitan School District’s (MMSD) Board of Education formed the district’s Fine Arts Task Force in January 2007 to respond to three charges:

  1. Identify community goals for Madison Metropolitan School District K-12 Fine Arts education including curricular, co-curricular and extra-curricular.
  2. Recommend up to five ways to increase minority student participation and participation of low-income students in Fine Arts at elementary, middle and high school levels.
  3. Make recommendations regarding priorities for district funding of Fine Arts.

Members of the Task Force will present the findings and recommendations to the MMSD School Board on Monday, October, 6, 2008, at 6:15 pm, in the McDaniels Auditorium of the Doyle Administration Building, 545 West Dayton Street, Madison.
Students, parents and the general public are encouraged to attend to show support for the role of the arts in ensuring a quality education for every MMSD student. Attendees can register in support of the report at the meeting.
Nineteen community members, including 5 MMSD students, were appointed by the School Board to the Task Force, which met numerous times from February 2007 through June 2008. The Task Force received a great deal of supportive assistance from the Madison community and many individuals throughout the 16 month information gathering and , deliberation process. More than 1,000 on-line surveys were completed by community members, parents, artists, arts organizations, students, administrators and teachers, providing a wealth of information to inform the task force?s discussions and recommendations.
The full Task Force report and appendices, and a list of Task Force members, can be found at http://mmsd.org/boe/finearts/.
Fine Arts Task Force Report [1.62MB PDF] and appendices:

For more information, contact Anne Katz, Task Force co-chair, 608 335 7909 | annedave@chorus.net.




An Email to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on Credit for non MMSD Courses



Dear Superintendent Nerad:
I was rather surprised to learn today from the Wisconsin State Journal that:
“The district and the union also have quarreled over the role of MTI members in online learning for seven years. Under the new agreement, ANY (my emphasis) instruction of district students will be supervised by Madison teachers. The deal doesn’t change existing practice but confirms that that practice will continue.”
You are quite new to the MMSD. I am EXTREMELY disappointed that you would “cave in” to MTI regarding a long-standing quarrel it has had with the MMSD without first taking the time to get input from ALL affected parties, i.e., students and their parents as well as teachers who might not agree with Matthews on this issue. Does this agreement deal only with online learning or ALL non-MMSD courses (e.g., correspondence ones done by mail; UW and MATC courses not taken via the YOP)? Given we have been waiting 7 years to resolve this issue, there was clearly no urgent need for you to do so this rapidly and so soon after coming on board. The reality is that it is an outright LIE that the deal you just struck with MTI is not a change from the practice that existed 7 years ago when MTI first demanded a change in unofficial policy. I have copies of student transcripts that can unequivocally PROVE that some MMSD students used to be able to receive high school credit for courses they took elsewhere even when the MMSD offered a comparable course. These courses include high school biology and history courses taken via UW-Extension, high school chemistry taken via Northwestern University’s Center for Talent Development, and mathematics, computer science, and history courses taken at UW-Madison outside of the YOP. One of these transcripts shows credit for a course taken as recently as fall, 2005; without this particular 1/2 course credit, this student would have been lacking a course in modern US history, a requirement for a high school diploma from the State of Wisconsin.
The MMSD BOE was well aware that they had never written and approved a clear policy regarding this matter, leaving each school in the district deciding for themselves whether or not to approve for credit non-MMSD courses. They were well aware that Madison West HAD been giving many students credit in the past for non-MMSD courses. The fact is that the BOE voted in January, 2007 to “freeze” policy at whatever each school had been doing until such time as they approved an official policy. Rainwater then chose to ignore this official vote of the BOE, telling the guidance departments to stop giving students credit for such courses regardless of whether they had in the past. The fact is that the BOE was in the process of working to create a uniform policy regarding non-MMSD courses last spring. As an employee of the BOE, you should not have signed an agreement with MTI until AFTER the BOE had determined official MMSD policy on this topic. By doing so, you pre-empted the process.
There exist dozens of students per year in the MMSD whose academic needs are not adequately met to the courses currently offered by MTI teachers, including through the District’s online offerings. These include students with a wide variety of disabilities, medical problems, and other types of special needs as well as academically gifted ones. By taking appropriate online and correspondence courses and non-MMSD courses they can physically access within Madison, these students can work at their own pace or in their own way or at an accessible location that enables them to succeed. “Success for all” must include these students as well. Your deal with MTI will result in dozens of students per year dropping out of school, failing to graduate, or transferring to other schools or school districts that are more willing to better meet their “special” individual needs.
Your rush to resolve this issue sends a VERY bad message to many families in the MMSD. We were hoping you might be different from Rainwater. Unfortunately, it says to them that you don’t really care what they think. It says to them that the demands of Matthews take primarily over the needs of their children. Does the MMSD exist for Matthews or for the children of this District? As you yourself said, the MMSD is at a “tipping point”, with there currently being almost 50% “free and reduced lunch” students. Families were waiting and hoping that you might be different. As they learn that you are not based upon your actions, the exodus of middle class families from the MMSD’s public schools will only accelerate. It will be on your watch as superintendent that the MMSD irreversibly turns into yet another troubled inner city school district. I urge you to take the time to learn more about the MMSD, including getting input from all interested parties, before you act in the future.
VERY disappointingly yours,
Janet Mertz
parent of 2 Madison West graduates
Tamira Madsen has more:

“Tuesday’s agreement also will implement a measure that requires a licensed teacher from the bargaining unit supervise virtual/online classes within the district. The district and union have bickered on-and-off for nearly seven years over the virtual/online education issue. Matthews said the district was violating the collective bargaining contract with development of its virtual school learning program that offered online courses taught by teachers who are not members of MTI.
In the agreement announced Tuesday, there were no program changes made to the current virtual/online curriculum, but requirements outlined in the agreement assure that classes are supervised by district teachers.
During the 2007-08 school year, there were 10 district students and 40 students from across the state who took MMSD online courses.
Though Nerad has been on the job for less than three months, Matthews said he is pleased with his initial dealings and working relationship with the new superintendent.
“This is that foundation we need,” Matthews said. “There was a lot of trust level that was built up here and a lot of learning of each other’s personalities, style and philosophy. All those things are important.
“It’s going to be good for the entire school district if we’re able to do this kind of thing, and we’re already talking about what’s next.”




Madison Schools & Madison Teachers Union Settle Online Class Administration & Athletic Director Conflict



Wisconsin State Journal:

At a joint news conference at MTI headquarters, Madison schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad and MTI Executive Director John Matthews said the settlement resolves issues that have festered for up to eight years.
Among other things, the agreement reinstates Boyce Hodge, the longtime West High School athletic director, to that position and as coach of the boys basketball team for the current school year. The district’s other three major high schools also will have full-time athletic directors.
The district and the union also have quarreled over the role of MTI members in online learning for seven years. Under the new agreement, any instruction of district students will be supervised by Madison teachers. The deal doesn’t change existing practice but confirms that that practice will continue.

Tamira Madsen:

Matthews said he was pleased with the negotiations and agreements, and added that he’s enjoyed working with Nerad.
“I think probably the over-reaching issue that this resolution provides is an improved problem-solving relationship between the union and the school district that’s possible now with the coming of Dan Nerad as the superintendent in Madison,” Matthews said.

Fascinating and an interesting look at new Superintendent Dan Nerad’s approach.
Related: Madison Teachers June, 2008 Athletic Director Issue Press Release 12K PDF and Arbitrators award 222KB PDF.




Memorial, West top state in National Merit semifinalists



Tamira Madsen:

Students from Madison Memorial and Madison West continued a tradition of academic excellence among their peers in Wisconsin, as semifinalists were announced Wednesday for the 2009 National Merit Scholarships. Twenty-six students each from Memorial and West qualified in the prestigious nationwide competition, the most students from any other high school in the state.
Among other Madison schools, eight students qualified from Edgewood, six from East, two from La Follette and one home-schooled student also qualified, for a total of 60 National Merit semifinalists from the city.
It’s the sixth year in a row that at least 60 or more district students have qualified at the semifinalist level. Sixty-two students qualified in 2007, 67 in 2006 and 60, 69 and 67 students the three preceding years.
Superintendent Dan Nerad said he was pleased to learn about the students’ achievements.
“It’s very exciting,” Nerad said in a telephone interview. “First of all, I think it’s a remarkable performance for these students, and obviously, we’re proud of their performance. The kids in the school district are high-performing kids, once again, we continue to see how they’re doing.




You’re invited to attend the first national GREEN CHARTER SCHOOLS CONFERENCE November 7-9, 2008 in Madison, Wisconsin



The conference is presented by the Green Charter Schools Network, UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and many partnering educational and environmental organizations.
SEE CONFERENCE PROGRAM & ONLINE REGISTRATION HERE
Conference Keynoters:
William Cronon is UW-Madison Professor of History, Geography & Environmental Studies. His research seeks to understand the history of human interactions with the natural world and how we depend on the ecosystems around us to sustain our material lives, He is the author of several books, including Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature and Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.
Morgan Brown — Assistant Commissioner Morgan Brown oversees charter school programs, special education policy, food and nutrition services, adult basic education, and American Indian education programs at the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE). Previously, he served as the Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Innovation & Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education.




Madison Edgewood senior gets a perfect ACT, almost on SAT
6 Dane County Students Score a Perfect 36 on the 2007 ACT



Andy Hall:


Edgewood High School senior Matthew Everts recently learned he’s just about perfect — when it comes to the two major college-entrance exams, anyway.
Matthew, who hopes to attend a university on the West Coast, received a 36, the highest possible composite score, on the ACT.
He remembers feeling focused when he took the ACT in June, a week before tackling the SAT.
“I knew that if I did well I wouldn’t have to take the test again,” Matthew said Tuesday. “Not having to take a four-hour test is always a good thing.”
On the SAT, Matthew received a perfect 800 on critical reading and math, two of the three SAT Critical Reasoning Tests, along with a 740 out of a possible 800 on the writing test.
Matthew also took the SAT in three subject areas — chemistry, math level two and U.S. history — and received a perfect score on all three tests.

Tamira Madsen:

(Adam) Schneider, who plays trumpet in the Middleton school band and is a member of the ecology club, expects to attend college and study biology at UW-Eau Claire or St. Olaf College, a liberal arts college in Minnesota. He also plans on working toward a graduate degree in botany, doing field research and teaching once he finishes school.
Schneider is one of six Dane County students to post perfect marks on the ACT test during the 2007-08 school. Others who earned perfect marks were Mary Kate Wall and Matthew Everts from Edgewood High School, Axel Glaubitz and Dianna Amasino from Madison West High School and Alex Van Abel from Monona Grove High School. All the students were juniors when they took the test.
At the state level, 22 students received perfect scores on the ACT test last school year. On the national level, less than one-tenth of 1 percent of students that take the ACT test earn a perfect mark.
Meanwhile, six Madison Metropolitan School District students earned perfect test scores in 2006.




Safety Climate: A look at Police Calls to Madison High Schools



Doug Erickson:

Total police calls to Madison’s four main high schools declined 38 percent from the fall semester of 2006 to last spring. But those figures tell only a partial story, and not a very meaningful one.
That’s because the numbers include all police calls, including ones for 911 disconnects, parking lot crashes and stranded baby ducks. (It happened at La Follette last May.)
The State Journal then looked at police calls in eight categories closely related to safety — aggravated batteries, batteries, weapons offenses, fights, bomb threats, disturbances, robberies and sexual assaults. Those calls are down 46 percent from fall 2006 to spring 2008.
The schools varied little last spring in the eight categories. Memorial and West each had 13 such calls, La Follette 14 and East 16.
School officials are relieved by the downward trend but careful not to read too much into the figures.
“We know there’s almost a cyclical nature to crime statistics and even to individual behavior,” said Luis Yudice, who is beginning his third year as district security coordinator.
Art Camosy, a veteran science teacher at Memorial, said he thinks the climate is improving at his school. Yet he views the police figures skeptically, in part because the numbers are “blips in time” but also because he wonders if the district’s central office is behind the drop.
“Are our building administrators being pressured not to call police as often?” he asks.
John Matthews, the longtime executive director of Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI), the district’s teachers union, contends that the district’s leadership has indeed done this from time to time, directing building administrators to hold off on calling police so often.
Yudice, a former Madison police captain, said there was a time years ago when the district was extremely sensitive about appearing to have a large police presence at its schools. He rejects that notion now.
“It’s just the opposite,” he said. “We are more openly acknowledging that we have issues that need to be dealt with by the police. Since I’ve been working here, there has never been a directive to me or the school principals to minimize the involvement of police.”

All four Madison high schools feature an open campus. It appears that Erickson only reviewed calls to the High Schools, not those nearby. 1996-2006 police calls near Madison High Schools is worth a look along with the Gangs & School violence forum.
Finally, I hope that the Madison Police Department will begin publishing all police calls online, daily, so that the public can review and evaluate the information.




Welcome to the Nerad era
Madison’s new school chief seems ready for a tough job



Marc Eisen:

Nerad is earnest, diplomatic and clear spoken. It’s a good bet that most anybody who hears him talk will find something they like in his message. Whether that adds up to support for a coherent educational program remains to be seen.
He faces huge challenges: not just closing the achievement gap while maintaining programs that attract middle-class families, but doing it while state fiscal controls continually squeeze his budget.
Equally hard will be overcoming the district’s own organizational stasis — it’s tendency to stick with the status quo. For all of Madison’s reputation as a progressive community, Madison schools are conservatively run and seriously resistant to change.
Authoritarian, top-down management grew under Nerad’s predecessor, Art Rainwater. Innovations like charter schools are still viewed skeptically, including by Nerad. Four-year-old kindergarten, which could be key to narrowing the achievement gap, is still seen as a problem. The middle school redesign project of a few years ago has been judged by insiders as pretty much a non-event. The high school redesign effort that Nerad inherited seems intent on embracing a program that is still unproven at West and Memorial.

Much more on Dan Nerad here, including his January, 2008 public appearance video.




Madison High School “Redesign”: $5.5M Small Learning Community Grant for Teacher Training and Literacy Coordinators



Andy Hall:

A $5.5 million federal grant will boost efforts to shrink the racial achievement gap, raise graduation rates and expand the courses available in the Madison School District’s four major high schools, officials announced Monday.
The five-year U.S. Department of Education grant will help the district build stronger connections to students by creating so-called “small learning communities” that divide each high school population into smaller populations.
Many of those structural changes already have been implemented at two high schools — Memorial and West — and similar redesigns are planned for East and La Follette high schools.
Under that plan, East’s student body will be randomly assigned to four learning communities. La Follette will launch “freshman academies” — smaller class sizes for freshmen in core academic areas, plus advisers and mentors to help them feel connected to the school.

Tamira Madsen:

“The grant centers on things that already are important to the school district: the goals of increasing academic success for all students, strengthening student-student and student-adult relationships and improving post-secondary outlooks,” Nerad said.
Expected plans at Madison East include randomly placing students in one of four learning neighborhoods, while faculty and administrators at La Follette will create “academies” with smaller classes to improve learning for freshmen in core courses. Additional advisors will also be assigned to aid students in academies at La Follette.

Related:

The interesting question in all of this is: does the money drive strategy or is it the other way around? In addition, what is the budget impact after 5 years? A friend mentioned several years ago, during the proposed East High School curriculum change controversy, that these initiatives fail to address the real issue: lack of elementary and middle school preparation.
Finally, will this additional $1.1m in annual funds for 5 years reduce the projected budget “gap” that may drive a fall referendum?




Madison police calls near local high schools: 1996-2006



Madison School District Safety Coordinator Luis Yudice (Luis is a retired Police Officer and a East High Grad) at a recent West High School neighborhood crime discussion (10/18/2007):

“Big picture perspective:
Our community really has changed a lot within the past five years. I sense a great deal of stress within the police department.
Citywide issues
Increasing violence involving girls. He has looked at a lot of data with the District Attorney’s office. Girls are extremely angry.
Angry parents are coming into the schools.
Increasing issues in the neighborhood that end up in the schools. Mentioned South Transfer Point beating and that Principal Ed Holmes mediated the situation at an early stage.
Growing gang violence issue particularly in the east side schools. We do have gang activity at Memorial and West but most of the issues are at Lafollete and East. Dealing with this via training and building relationships
What the school are experiencing is a reflection of what is going on in the community.”

Madison Police Chief Noble Wray, via Bill Lueders @ Isthmus (7/30/2008):

He (Wray) began by talking about perceptions of crime, and especially the notion that it’s getting worse in Madison. He stressed that it wasn’t just the media and public who felt this way: “If I would ask the average beat cop, I think they would say it’s gotten worse.” But, he added, “Worse compared to what?”

The absence of local safety data spurred several SIS contributors to obtain and publish the police call data displayed below. Attorney and parent Chan Stroman provided pro bono public records assistance. Chan’s work on this matter extended to the Wisconsin Attorney General’s office.
A few important notes on this data:

  • 13% of the records could not be geocoded and therefore are not included in the summary information. The downloadable 1996-2006 police call data .zip file is comprehensive, however.
  • Clicking on the numbers below takes the reader to a detail page. This page includes all matching police calls and a downloadable .csv file of same. The csv file can be opened in Excel, Numbers and many data management tools.
  • This summary is rather brief, I hope others download the data and have a look.

























































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































Police Calls within .25 miles of:
Madison East Area Edgewood Area LaFollette Area Memorial Area West Area
1996 1285 392 324 869 728
1997 1351 455 403 896 750
1998 1340 343 488 875 703
1999 1281 352 477 969 772
2000 1391 300 528 888 933
2001 1476 305 480 769 1034
2002 1470 363 491 886 1019
2003 1362 349 403 865 921
2004 1455 346 449 989 1012
2005 1311 325 465 994 917
2006 1221 330 389 1105 838
Weapons Incident / Offense
Madison East Area Edgewood Area LaFollette Area Memorial Area West Area
1996 5 0 3 4 6
1997 5 0 3 4 0
1998 10 0 5 2 1
1999 10 0 5 4 0
2000 4 0 6 2 5
2001 3 0 3 0 0
2002 11 0 3 5 5
2003 4 1 1 4 5
2004 4 0 9 7 4
2005 9 0 6 6 2
2006 10 1 5 7 3
Drug Incident
Madison East Area Edgewood Area LaFollette Area Memorial Area West Area
1996 10 0 10 9 7
1997 16 0 7 6 4
1998 12 1 8 10 6
1999 18 0 7 18 4
2000 16 2 13 17 12
2001 18 0 10 20 12
2002 22 0 14 16 12
2003 23 2 18 15 8
2004 26 0 20 17 7
2005 19 0 17 20 12
2006 24 2 11 15 8
Arrested Juvenile
Madison East Area Edgewood Area LaFollette Area Memorial Area West Area
1996 59 1 35 28 38
1997 72 0 83 52 29
1998 21 0 34 17 14
1999 16 0 29 24 7
2000 42 0 76 14 15
2001 52 0 66 19 15
2002 51 0 69 13 12
2003 9 0 9 9 3
2004 8 0 8 9 4
2005 11 0 10 7 3
2006 6 0 21 11 4
Bomb Threat
Madison East Area Edgewood Area LaFollette Area Memorial Area West Area
1996 1 0 0 0 1
1997 1 0 1 0 0
1998 4 2 0 0 1
1999 7 0 15 0 1
2000 4 0 17 2 1
2001 1 0 8 10 11
2002 2 0 9 0 4
2003 1 0 2 1 11
2004 6 0 4 0 6
2005 1 0 4 0 0
2006 3 0 0 0 4

Related links:




Will West High School’s Tierney Chamberlain “Get In the Picture”?



West High School senior Tierney Chamberlain is one of six East Coast finalists in the reality-t.v. show “High School Musical: Get In the Picture.” Watch the performance that moved her from semi-finalist to finalist.
As many of you surely know, Tierney has a huge and amazing voice. Check out this 2006 video of her singing the national anthem. Tierney was last seen in the role of Cassie in West’s spring, 2008, production of “A Chorus Line.”
Tierney, our hats are off to you back here in Madison, not just at West, but all over town. You are an AMAZING talent. We’re rooting for you all the way!




Investment interest exceeds Waukesha & West Allis schools’ profits



Amy Hetzner & Avrum Lank:

Two area school districts are paying more in interest than they are receiving this quarter in a complex investment program they undertook two years ago to help pay retirement benefits, a Journal Sentinel analysis found.
The investment plans implemented in the Waukesha and West Allis-Milwaukee districts are the same as a program that an outside analyst said was causing a loss for the Kenosha Unified district in the current quarter.
For part of their investments in the complicated programs, all three districts borrowed money at fixed rates that now exceed what they receive in income. In addition, because the value of the investments has fallen substantially over the last year, the interest rate on debt issued by district-run trusts has increased enough to cut into profits they had expected to make.
As a result, Waukesha and West Allis-West Milwaukee could be obligated to pay out thousands of dollars more in interest than they are receiving from the investments for the quarter ending this month.

The article notes that Erik Kass, Waukesha’s executive Director of Business Services will soon become assistant superintendent of business services in Madison. A significant decline (from $48M in 2000 to $24M in 2006; annual budgets were $252M and $333M) in the Madison School District’s “Equity Fund” balance (the difference between assets and liabilities) has been an issue in recent board races and meetings.
It will be interesting to see how both the past experiences of Erik Kass and incoming Superintendent Dan Nerad frame their approach to local governance and community interaction.




Advocating a Standard Graduation Rate & Madison’s “2004 Elimination of the Racial Achievement Gap in 3rd Grade Reading Scores”



Leslie Ann Howard:

Back in 1995, when the Wisconsin State Journal and WISC-TV began a civic journalism project to study the racial achievement gaps in our schools, the statistical measures of student achievement and reading in third grade put the issue in sharp focus.
United Way and our community partners’ efforts, through a variety of strategies including the Schools of Hope tutoring program, relied on those strong, focused statistics to measure the success of our 1-on-1 and 1-on-2 tutoring.
By 2004, Superintendent Art Rainwater was able to announce the elimination of the racial achievement gap in third grade reading scores, because our community had focused on stable statistical measure for over 10 years.
A standard graduation rate formula would create the same public focus for our nation’s efforts to increase high school graduation rates.

Related:




Students with learning disabilities get extra attention at Walbridge, a private Madison school



Pamela Cotant:


One morning, students at Walbridge School used their fingers to trace letters representing sounds in a mix of sand and sparkling glitter on a paper plate.
When a student was squeamish about the task, he asked if he could trace with a pen instead of his finger.
This lesson is an example of the multisensory approach taken by Walbridge School, which was founded in 1986. The private, nonprofit school enrolls children in grades 1 through 8 at 7035 Old Sauk Road on the Far West Side.
“We teach children who learn differently, who cannot succeed with traditional ways of learning,” said Gary Lewis, head of the school.
The primary concerns for students at Walbridge are learning issues rather than behavioral, he said. Some have specific disabilities such as dyslexia, dysgraphia and attention deficit disorder.
Some students have other concerns such as confusion over space and time.




11 Madison-area students win at National History Day



Wisconsin Historical Society:

We are proud to announce the national finalists and alternates for the 2008 Wisconsin History Day State Event held on May 3, 2008. The national finalists represented Wisconsin at the national contest June 15-19, 2008 at the University of Maryland – College Park.
The first and second alternate in each category are offered the opportunity to attend the national contest in the event that the finalist entry is unable to attend.
Each finalist designs their entry to reflect the annual theme. The entries below reflect the annual theme for 2008: Conflict and Compromise in History.
This year’s local winners: Amanda Snodgrass (Mount Horeb High School), Joanna Weng (Velma Hamilton Middle School), and Alexandra Cohn and David Aeschlimann (Madison West High School). The following students from Eagle School were also winners: Hannah O’Dea, Carolyn Raihala, Sophie Gerdes, Sonia Urquidi, Nate Smith, Jeffrey Zhao and Eli Fessler.

Via the Capital Times.




Personal Education Plan (PEP) at West High supports students in their schoolwork and goals for their future



Len Mormino:

As guidance counselors it’s a struggle when we hear our students say, “I came to see you about planning for next year, but you were booked up for the entire week. So I put my name down for next week, but can you remind me about it when you see me?”
Solid theories about how to work with a disengaged student or a high achieving student do not take into account that we have very little time to devote to students in this regard. Research suggests different ways to help high school students navigate traditional academic coursework but none of the research accounts for the distorted ratios we have of student to staff.
Thanks to a grant from the Aristos Program and the Foundation for Madison’s Public Schools, at West we’ve developed the online Personal Education Plan (PEP). The heart of PEP is it collects and stores information students enter into it on the subjects we discuss with them throughout their four years in high school. Even more valuable, the information is accessible to the student, parent, teacher, counselor, or principal, to help support that student in their schoolwork and goals for their future.
For example, an 11th grade male student expresses boredom with classes and is not engaging in school activities. With PEP, I access his profile and note that in 10th grade he expressed interest in an “artistic/humanities path.”




Madison School District Administration’s Proposed 2008-2009 Budget Published



The observation of school district budgeting is fascinating. Numbers are big (9 or more digits) and the politics significant. Many factors affect such expenditures including local property taxes, state and federal redistributed tax dollars, enrollment, grants, referendums, new programs, politics and periodically local priorities. The Madison School District Administration released it’s proposed 2008-2009 $367,806,712 budget Friday, April 4, 2008 (Allocations were sent to the schools on March 5, 2008 prior to the budget’s public release Friday).
There will be a number of versions between this proposal and a final budget later this year (MMSD 2008-2009 Budget timeline).
I’ve summarized budget and enrollment information from 1995 through 2008-2009 below:

(more…)




New Madison School Chief Meets & Greets



Susan Troller:

Dan Nerad is already beginning to reach out to the community, three months before he formally steps into his new role as Madison’s next superintendent of schools.
In The Capital Times’ offices on Wednesday, School Board President Arlene Silveira introduced Nerad to staff members, noting that last week was spring break in Green Bay, where he is currently the superintendent of schools.
“Dan spent his vacation in the Doyle Building,” Silveira said, referring to the site of the Madison school district’s central administration.
Nerad was in Madison Wednesday, speaking to media editorial boards and joining current Superintendent Art Rainwater to address a lunch meeting of the Madison Downtown Rotary club.
“My role will be to add value to what is already an excellent school district,” Nerad told the Rotarians. He added that he is committed to the goal of continuous improvement.
“You have to focus on the next steps,” he said.
During his visit to The Capital Times, Nerad described innovations in Green Bay during his tenure. They include specialty focus areas in each of the district’s four high schools and a plan for 4-year-old kindergarten slated to begin during the 2008-2009 school year.

Watch a brief video of Dan Nerad’s remarks at Saturday’s Memorial / West Strings Festival.




Madison’s Paul J. Olson Elementary School



Susan Troller:

Madison’s new elementary school on the far west side will bear the name of Paul J. Olson, a beloved Madison teacher, principal and ardent conservationist, following a vote at Monday night’s School Board meeting.
Olson, who was born in Mount Horeb and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, spent most of his life on crutches following a childhood bout with polio. He died in 1993 at age 84.
Three of Olson’s four children were at Monday’s meeting.
“The thing that always struck me most about my dad was his optimism. He believed in the art of the possible,” Tom Olson said following the meeting. He said his father’s focus on overcoming any obstacle was what he taught his students.
The younger Olson and his brother Jim attended the meeting with their sister, Karen Sullivan of Janesville. They noted their father loved the natural world and was a committed environmentalist, fisherman and outdoorsman. He enjoyed canoeing and navigated the Boundary Waters on crutches.




Madison to Finalized Elementary School Name Tonight



Susan Troller:

The long saga of naming Madison’s newest elementary school will end tonight as the School Board makes its selection from four final choices.
The names are Jeffrey Erlanger, an advocate for people with disabilities; Paul J. Olson, a conservationist and well-known Madison educator; Howard Temin, a Nobel Prize-winning UW cancer researcher; and Ilda Thomas, a community activist who helped found Centro Hispano.
The Erlanger and Olson names have received the most community support to date.
“We have the school, the principal, the boundaries. We are looking forward to having a name,” School Board President Arlene Silveira said this morning.
The four final names were recommended to the board by a citizen committee which met extensively in January and early February, winnowing a pool of 87 names submitted by the public down to four.




Madison School Board to Discuss Credit for Non-MMSD Courses Today @ 5:00p.m.



The Performance & Achievement committee meets today at 5:00p.m. [Directions & Map] to discuss a policy on credit for non-MMSD courses. Janet Mertz has been following this issue for years, in an effort to support a “clearly written policy” on such courses. Read Janet’s summary after the most recent discussion of this matter (26 November 2007):

Madison School Board Performance & Achievement Committee Meeting 11/26/2007At the November 26, 2007 meeting of the MMSD BOE’s Performance and Achievement Committee [18MB mp3 audio], the District’s Attorney handed out a draft of a policy for the District’s Youth Options Program dated November 20, 2007. It is a fine working draft. However, it has been written with rules making it as difficult as possible for students to actually take advantage of this State-mandated program. Thus, I urge all families with children who may be affected by this policy now or in the future to request a copy of this document, read it over carefully, and then write within the next couple of weeks to all BOE members, the District’s Attorney, Pam Nash, and Art Rainwater with suggestions for modifications to the draft text. For example, the current draft states that students are not eligible to take a course under the YOP if a comparable course is offered ANYWHERE in the MMSD (i.e., regardless of whether the student has a reasonable method to physically access the District’s comparable course). It also restricts students to taking courses at institutions “located in this State” (i.e., precluding online courses such as ones offered for academically advanced students via Stanford’s EPGY and Northwestern’s CTD).

The Attorney’s memorandum dated November 21, 2007 to this Committee, the BOE, and the Superintendent outlined a BOE policy chapter entitled “Educational Options” that would include, as well, a policy regarding “Credit for Courses Taken Outside the MMSD”. Unfortunately, this memo stated that this latter policy as one “to be developed”. It has now been almost 6 years (!) since Art Rainwater promised us that the District would develop an official policy regarding credit for courses taken outside the MMSD. A working draft available for public comment and BOE approval has yet to appear. In the interim, the “freeze” the BOE unanimously approved, yet again, last winter has been ignored by administrators, some students are leaving the MMSD because of its absence, and chaos continues to rein because there exists no clearly written policy defining the rules by which non-MMSD courses can be taken for high school credit. Can anyone give us a timetable by which an official BOE-approved policy on this topic will finally be in place?

Links:

Meanwhile, online learning options abound, including the news that National Geographic has invested in education startup ePals. Madison, home of a 25,000 student public school system, offers a rich learning environment that includes the University of Wisconsin, MATC and Edgewood among others.




Madison hosts all-city Scrabble tournament



Emily Mills:

Break out the dictionaries and the little wooden squares because it’s time for a Madtown Scrabble smackdown!
A citywide Scrabble tournament, organized by Madison Family Literacy, aims to help raise funds for reading and education programs for adults and children in the city. The tournament runs from February 23-24 at the Hilldale Shopping Center, and kicks off with a challenge game between Mayor Dave and whoever makes the highest bid for the honor of schooling him at wordplay.
Started in 1999 as part of the federal Even Start program, Madison Family Literacy (MFL) grew out of a need to restructure and move ahead when federal funds began to dry up for the various original branches of the organization. The programs provide adult education courses in English literacy, high school equivalency, employment readiness, childhood development and other essential skills to various at-risk and lower income families throughout Madison. They also provide daily early childhood classes for up to 50 children. And though many local and national groups, including Attic Angels, Returned Peace Corps Volunteers and the Barbara Bush Foundation have chipped in to help keep the program afloat, finances remain tight.
Patti La Cross, the current coordinator, explains: “In the past four years, several things have happened: The federal budget for Even Start was reduced by about 70% and in succession the two other Madison Even Start grants were reaching the end of their four-year cycles. So, we voluntarily merged, eventually becoming One Grant — Madison Family Literacy — and serve the city’s least educated, lowest income families on just over 1/3 of the original funds. And our success at meeting or exceeding all our performance indicators still went up!”
In addition to those families it was already serving, the program took on over 30 Hmong refugee families who began moving into subsidized housing in Madison back in July of 2004. Despite less money coming in and being told to cut back, MFL actually added services for these and other ethnic groups in the area.




On Madison Boundary Changes



Dear Board,
As the opening of a new school is coming close, I was surprised to some extent that the plans were changed with such a short amount of time left before the new year.
So………..I dug up my West Side Long Term Planning Binder and reviewed all the data presented to us, as a member of that committee, and remembered the HOURS we spent debating and reviewing the pros and cons of each plan. I believe this is a very hard process and I am sad it is being altered at this late date.
I think one thing many of us felt on the Long Range Planning Committee was even with the new school and addition to Leopold we did not devise a Long Term Plan. My #1 suggestion to the board would be to revisit the plan of “making the map look better” and balancing the income levels but TO MAKE IT A LONG TERM plan and say in 6 years this is what we are going to do. (and stick to it) I think when you spring it on families that in a few months Johnny has to switch schools, we parents are too invested and comfortable with the school and protest the change. But if a 6 Year Plan was in place with some options to start at the new school, grandfather for a couple of years the protest would be great but families would have lots of time to accept the change and deal with it. It would also be a LONG TERM PLAN.

(more…)




West Side Parents Angry About Proposed School Boundaries Charge



channel3000.com:

Some in a big Madison neighborhood are outraged over the latest plan to change West Side school boundaries to make way for a new school opening near Hawk’s Landing next fall.
Residents in the Valley Ridge neighborhood are pledging to start a petition drive and to do whatever it takes to stop the proposal.
The new, yet-to-be-named school on the far West Side has prompted officials to try to rearrange boundary lines on the West Side. But, the boundary lines are different than initially proposed and some in Valley Ridge said they are in shock.
“I feel very deceived,” said parent and homeowner Beth Todd, vice president of the Glenn Stephens PTO.
Todd, her husband and other parents said they were always told their children would not be affected by the new boundary changes in meetings with school officials before the referendum for the new school passed.
Currently, Valley Ridge children go to Stephens school as well as Jefferson Middle School. But under a new proposal, that would all drastically change, and, some contend, for no good reason.




16 Year Old Mugged Near West High Thursday Evening



Madison Police Department:

Around 6:26 p.m. on December 20th Madison police responded to the 2300 block of Eton Ridge to meet with a robbery victim. A 16-year-old told police he had just finished basketball practice and was crossing Regent Street when he observed a group of approximately seven individuals. The victim walked from Regent Street to Virginia Terrace [MAP]
to where his car was parked on Eton Ridge. As he neared his vehicle he says three from the group he had noted moments earlier came up quickly behind him. He says perpetrator #1 grabbed him and demanded money. He did not have any money. The victim says #1 next rummaged through his pockets and stole his iPhone.
No weapon was seen, and it is not known whether this robbery and another (case #152841) that happened on N. Mills Street two hours later are connected.




Boundary Plan for New West Side Elementary School



Susan Troller:

The latest plan will be presented to the public with an opportunity for comment early next year, said Sue Abplanalp, assistant superintendent for elementary schools.
Known as Plan A, it moves fewer children and brings building capacities and numbers of low-income students at all schools into closer alignment, said Kurt Kiefer, Madison schools’ director of research.

515K PDF.

(more…)




Madison School Board Votes for More Security Funds



Listen to the discussion [47MB MP3 Audio].

Andy Hall & Brittany Schoep:

“This is one of the most important things we’ve brought before you,” Rainwater told the board. “It is critically needed to ensure our schools continue to be safe.”
“We’re walking a really fine line right now,” School Board President Arlene Silveira said. “I think these positions will really help keep us on the positive side of that line.”
The high school positions are designed to help students with behavior, academic, social, transitional and other problems who can hurt themselves and the learning environment, Memorial High School Principal Bruce Dahmen said.

Susan Troller has more:

In an interview before Monday night’s meeting, Pam Nash, assistant superintendent for high schools and middle schools said, “The number of incidents I deal with in the high schools and middle schools is going up every year. We want to get a proactive handle on it. It’s as simple as that.”
“This is not only important but critical to the future of our schools,” Superintendent Art Rainwater said as he recommended an initial proposal to spend $720,500 for security measures. The money is available through the recently signed state budget, a windfall Madison schools did not know they would get when the Board inked the final budget in October.
The board approved hiring four case managers at East, West, Memorial and La Follette and five positive behavior coaches will be brought on board at O’Keeffe, Sherman, Jefferson, Black Hawk and Whitehorse middle schools.

Related:




Madison: Missed Opportunity for 4K and High School Redesign



Marc Eisen:

The good news is that the feds refused to fund the school district’s proposal to revamp the high schools. The plan was wrongheaded in many respects, including its seeming intent to eliminate advanced classes that are overwhelmingly white and mix kids of distressingly varied achievement levels in the same classrooms.
This is a recipe for encouraging more middle-class flight to the suburbs. And, more to the point, addressing the achievement gap in high school is way too late. Turning around a hormone-surging teenager after eight years of educational frustration and failure is painfully hard.
We need to save these kids when they’re still kids. We need to pull them up to grade level well before they hit the wasteland of middle school. That’s why kindergarten for 4-year-olds is a community imperative.
As it happens, state school Supt. Elizabeth Burmaster issued a report last week announcing that 283 of Wisconsin’s 426 school districts now offer 4K. Enrollment has doubled since 2001, to almost 28,000 4-year-olds statewide.
Burmaster nailed it when she cited research showing that quality early-childhood programs prepare children “to successfully transition into school by bridging the effects of poverty, allowing children from economically disadvantaged families to gain an equal footing with their peers.”

Related:




Madison Schools Consider an Increase in School Safety/Security Spending



Susan Troller:

We are at a point in our high schools and middle schools where we need to take some action to assure the public that our schools remain safe and secure,” Superintendent Art Rainwater said. He noted that public safety had become a significant issue in neighborhoods throughout the city.
But long time board member Carol Carstensen asked to table the proposal, and other board members agreed to put the decision off a week for more study.
“I’m probably going to vote for it,” she said. “But I would like a little more time and more details in the next week.”

Related:




Madison School District Administration Presentation on High School Redesign



The Madison School viewed a presentation from the Administration Monday evening on their proposed High School redesign. Listen via this mp3 audio file (or watch the MMSDTV Video Archive).
Susan Troller:

“Sometimes institutional history can be a weight around your neck,” Rainwater noted. “This can be an opportunity to bring in new ideas, and new blood,” he added.
Rainwater has said change is necessary because high schools today look and feel much like they have for generations but that students will live and work in a world that has changed dramatically, and which demands new skills and abilities.
He acknowledged that the path was likely to be bumpy, and noted that the plan — which has been developed thus far without public input — recognizes that there are major concerns in the community regarding changes to Madison’s school system.
Some of those concerns include worries about trying to balance resources among students of widely varying abilities, about “dumbing down” the curriculum with inclusive classrooms, the potential for the high schools to lose their unique personalities and concerns that addressing the broad ranges of culture in the district will not serve students well.

Background:




Madison School District School Security Discussion



Madison School Board: Monday evening, November 12, 2007: 40MB mp3 audio file. Participants include: Superintendent Art Rainwater, East High Principal Al Harris, Cherokee Middle School Principal Karen Seno, Sennett Middle School Principal Colleen Lodholz and Pam Nash, assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools.
A few notes:

  • First 30 minutes: The City of Madison has agreed to fund police overtime in the schools. Johnny Winston, Jr. asked about supporting temporary “shows of force” to respond to issues that arise. Maya Cole asked what they (Administrators) do when staff choose not to get involved. East High Principal Al Harris mentioned that his staff conducts hall sweeps hourly. Sennett Principal Colleen Lodholz mentioned that they keep only one entrance open during recess.
  • 52 minutes: Al Harris discussed the importance of consistency for staff, students and parents. He has named an assistant principal to be responsible for security. East now has data for the past year for comparison purposes. Additional assistant principals are responsible for classrooms, transitions and athletics.
  • 55 minutes: Art Rainwater discussed District-wide procedures, a checklist for major incidents and that today parents are often informed before anyone else due to cell phones and text messaging.
  • Recommendations (at 60 minutes):
    • Pam Nash mentioned a strong need for increased communication. She discussed the recent West High School community forums and their new personal safety handbook. This handbook includes an outline of how West is supervised.
    • 68 to 74 minutes: A discussion of the District’s equity policy vis a vis resource allocations for special needs students.
    • 77 minutes – Steve Hartley discusses his experiences with community resources.
    • 81+ minutes: Steve Hartley mentioned the need for improved tracking and Art Rainwater discussed perceptions vs what is actually happening. He also mentioned that the District is looking at alternative programs for some of these children. Student Board Representative Joe Carlsmith mentioned that these issues are not a big part of student life. He had not yet seen the new West High safety handbook. Carol Carstensen discussed (95 minutes) that these issues are not the common day to day experiences of our students and that contacts from the public are sometimes based more on rumor and gossip than actual reality.

I’m glad the Board and Administration had this discussion.
Related:




Drama at East and West



Need a Little Drama in Your Life?
Come support the drama communities at East and West!
At West HS [Map] — “I Hate Hamlet”
Friday, November 9, 7:30
Saturday, November 10, 7:30
Tickets $5.00
At East HS [Map] — “The Crucible”
Thursday, November 15, 7:30
Friday, November 16, 7:30
Saturday, November 17, 2:30 and 7:30
Tickets $5.00




WestFest 2007: 11/17/2007 1 to 5p.m.



Introducing WestFest – an assortment of vendors with a variety of products all in one place, designed to make shopping easier for you! The best part of all is that your purchases will directly benefit West High clubs, sports, PTSO & MWABA.

200K PDF Flyer. Map




Madison High School Police Calls & Discipline Rates:
Comparing 2001/2002 and 2005/2006



Madison Parent’s School Safety Site:

When there’s violence at school, parents want answers to their questions about school safety. If parents are told “our school is safer than other schools”, where’s the data that supports that vague reassurance? Police call-for-service data (as posted on this site from time to time) is one indicator of school crime, but it’s only part of the picture, and may not be a reliable basis of comparing school to school – or even comparing whether the safety situation in one particular school is improving or deteriorating.
We looked at police call data for East, LaFollette, Memorial and West High Schools in 2001-02, and in 2005-06. (Data notes: This data was obtained by public records request to the Madison Police Department. Due to the format in which the data was provided, the call totals for each school are for calls made to the block in which each school is located, rather than the specific street address of the school. Calls for each year were tallied over a July 1 through June 30 period in order to track the corresponding school years used for comparison below. Variations in school enrollment between the comparison years aren’t reported here since they don’t appear to affect the analysis or conclusions, but that information is readily accessible on the DPI web site. The DPI web site is also the source of the discipline data presented below.)




Madison School Board Forum – Today



Madison School Board:

The Members of the Madison School Board have agreed to attend and participate in the Northside Planning Council and the East Attendance Area Parent/Teacher Organization Coalition (NPC/EAAPTO) Forum to be held on Sunday, October 21, 2007 (3:00p.m. at the UW Memorial Union’s Tripp Commons). This joint meeting of the NPC/EAAPTO Coalition and the members of the School Board constitutes an open meeting of the members of the Madison School Board for which public notice must be given pursuant to Wisconsin Statute § 19.82 through § 19.84.

Map & Directions to the UW Memorial Union. Maya Cole has more.
Andy Hall:

But do small, neighborhood schools really lead to higher achievement levels for students?
“I don ‘t think there ‘s any hard-core answer to that, ” said Allan Odden, a UW-Madison education professor and nationally recognized expert in education policy and reform.
Research so far, Odden said, fails to show a clear link between achievement and school size, particularly within the range of sizes in Madison.
The district ‘s smallest elementary school is Nuestro Mundo, with 181 students, and largest is Leopold, with 718.
Odden does offer an opinion, though, of Madison ‘s turmoil over neighborhood schools.
“What I would say is the city has too many schools in some neighborhoods and it costs too much to keep some of them open, ” Odden said. “The issue to me here is not effectiveness (of small schools compared to larger schools). The issue to me is budget and politics. ”
The other trade-off, in some neighborhood schools, is that students may be packed into classrooms or have inferior bathrooms or gyms, compared to their peers in larger, newer buildings.

This is an issue. The classroom fixtures in new school structures (far west elementary building) are quite different than those found in most facilities.




West High / Regent Neighborhood Crime Discussion



Parents, staff and community officials met Wednesday night to discuss a number of recent violent incidents at and near Madison West High School [map]
I took a few notes during the first 60 minutes:
Madison Alders Robbie Webber and Brian Solomon along with James Wheeler (Captain of Police – South District), Luis Yudice (Madison School District The Coordinator of Safety And Security), Randy Boyd (Madison Metro Security) and West Principal Ed Holmes started the meeting with a brief summary of the recent incidents along with a brief school climate discussion:
James Wheeler:

Police beat officer and Educational Resource Office (ERO) patrol during West’s lunch period.
“There have been complaints from the houses around the school” so MPD increased patrols to “make a statement last week”.
Still a relatively safe neighborhood.
3 arrests at Homecoming.
Made a drug dealing arrest recently.
People do see drug dealing going on and have reported it.
There have been additional violent incidents, especially at the Madison Metro transfer points

Ed Holmes

Behavior is atypical of what we have seen on the past . Perpetrators are new to West.
Emphasized the importance of a safe learning environment.
Make sure there are police and school consequences and that they are severe. These crimes are unacceptable and should not be tolerated.

Randy Boyd (Madison Metro)


60+ bus runs daily for the school system.
There have been some serious fights at the transfer points. Cameras are in place there.
Main problem is confidentiality due to the students age. Can track them via bus passes.
Adding DSL so that the police precinct can monitor the transfer points. Incidents are about the same as last year but the numbers are going up.
Baptist church elders have helped patrol the South Transfer Point. We are looking for more community help.

Luis Yudice

Big picture perspective:
Our community really has changed a lot within the past five years. I sense a great deal of stress within the police department.
Citywide issues
Increasing violence involving girls. He has looked at a lot of data with the District Attorney’s office. Girls are extremely angry.
Angry parents are coming into the schools.
Increasing issues in the neighborhood that end up in the schools. Mentioned South Transfer Point beating and that Principal Ed Holmes mediated the situation at an early stage.
Growing gang violence issue particularly in the east side schools. We do have gang activity at Memorial and West but most of the issues are at Lafollete and East. Dealing with this via training and building relationships
What the school are experiencing is a reflection of what is going on in the community.

Parents:

Parent asked about weapons in school, metal detectors and k9 units.
Response:


Do we have weapons in school? Yes we find knives in all the schools. No guns. Unfortunate fact is that if a kid wants to get their hand on a gun, they can. They are available.

Ed Holmes:

“We took away a gun once in my 18 years”.
I want to get across to the students – if they see something they have to report it. We have 2100 students and 250 staff members.

Parents:

Kids are afraid of the bathrooms
Another lunch assault that has not been reported.
Incidents are much higher than we know because many incidents are not reported.

A parent asked why the District/Police did not use school ID photos to help victims find the perpetrators? Ed Holmes mentioned that District has had problems with their photo ID vendor.

Madison School Board member (and West area parent) Maya Cole also attended this event.




Ed Hughes and Marj Passman on Madison’s Small Learning Community Climate and Grant Application



I sent an email to Ed and Marj, both of whom have announced their plans to run for Madison School Board next spring, asking the following:

I’m writing to see what your thoughts are on the mmsd’s high school “reform” initiative, particularly in light of two things:

  1. The decision to re-apply for the US Dept of Education Grant next month
  2. The lack of any public (any?) evaluation of the results at West and Memorial in light of their stated SLC goals?

In other words, how do you feel about accountability? 🙂

They replied:
Marj Passman:

I am generally supportive of small learning communities and the decision to reapply for a Federal grant. Our high schools continue to provide a rich education for most students — especially the college bound – but there is a significant and maybe growing number of students who are not being engaged. They need our attention. The best evidence is that well implemented small learning communities show promise as part of the solution to increasing the engagement and achievement of those who are not being well served, do no harm and may help others also. My experience as a teacher backs up the research because I found that the caring relationships between staff and students so crucial to reaching those students falling between the cracks on any level of achievement are more likely to develop in smaller settings. Some form of small learning communities are almost a given as part of any reform of our high schools and if we can get financial help from the Federal government with this part of the work, I’m all for it.
I think it is important not to overestimate either the problems or the promise of the proposed solutions. The first step in things like this is to ask what is good that we want to preserve. Our best graduates are competitive with any students anywhere. The majority of our graduates are well prepared for their next academic or vocational endeavors. We need to keep doing the good things we do well. If done successfully, SLCs offer as much for the top achieving students as for any group – individual attention, focus on working with others of their ability, close connection to staff, and consistent evaluation.
You also asked about “accountability” and the evaluations of the existing SLCs. Both evaluations are generally positive, show some progress in important areas and point to places where improvements still need to be made. Neither contains any alarming information that would suggest the SLCs should be abandoned. The data from these limited studies should be looked at with similar research elsewhere that supports SLC as part of the solution to persistent (and in Madison) growing issues.
Like many I applauded when all the Board members asked for a public process for the High Schools of the Future project and like many I have been woefully disappointed with what I’ve seen so far. Because of this and the coming changes in district leadership I’d like to see the redesign time line extended (the final report is due in April) to allow for more input from both the public and the new superintendent.
Thanks for this opportunity
Marjorie Passman
http://marjpassmanforschoolboard.com

Ed Hughes:

From what I know, I am not opposed to MMSD re-applying for the U.S. Dept. of Education grant next month. From my review of the grant application, it did not seem to lock the high schools into new and significant changes. Perhaps that is a weakness of the application. But if the federal government is willing to provide funds to our high schools to do what they are likely to do anyway, I’m all for it.
Like you, I am troubled with the apparent lack of evaluation of results at West and Memorial attributable to their small learning communities initiatives. This may seem inconsistent with my view on applying for the grant, but I do not think we should proceed further down an SLC path without having a better sense of whether in fact it is working at the two schools that have tried it. It seems to me that this should be a major focus of the high school redesign study, but who knows what is going on with that. I asked recently and was told that the study kind of went dormant for awhile after the grant application was submitted.
My own thoughts about high school are pointing in what may be the opposite direction – bigger learning communities rather than smaller. I am concerned about our high schools being able to provide a sufficiently rich range of courses to prepare our students for post-high school life and to retain our students whose families have educational options. The challenges the schools face in this regard were underscored last spring when East eliminated German classes, and now offers only Spanish and French as world language options.
It seems to me that one way to approach this issue is to move toward thinking of the four comprehensive high schools as separate campuses of a single, unified, city-wide high school in some respects. We need to do a lot more to install sufficient teleconferencing equipment to allow the four schools to be linked – so that a teacher in a classroom at Memorial, say, can be seen on a screen in classrooms in the other three schools. In fact, views of all four linked classrooms should simultaneously be seen on the screen. With this kind of linkage, we could take advantage of economies of scale and have enough student interest to justify offering classes in a rich selection of languages to students in all four high schools. I’m sure there are other types of classes where linked classrooms would also make sense.
This kind of approach raises issues. For example, LaFollette’s four block system would be incompatible with this approach. There would also be a question of whether there would need to be a teacher or educational assistant in every classroom, even if the students in the classroom are receiving instruction over the teleconferencing system from another teacher in another school. I would hope that these are the kinds of issues the high school re-design group would be wrestling with. Perhaps they are, or will, but at this point there seems to be no way to know.
There are some off-the-top-of-my-head thoughts prompted by your question and by Maya Cole’s post about the high school re-design study. Feel free to do what you want with this response.

Related Links:

Thanks to Ed and Marj for taking the time to share their thoughts on this important matter.




Analyzing Madison High School’s WKCE Scores



“Madtown Chris”:

For those folks so enamored of the various suburban “great schools” you should make sure you look at the facts. Specifically, I’m pretty amazed at the relatively poor performance of Waunakee HS. It’s down in the 66th percentile statewide. That’s not terrible but it’s not a super-dooper school either. Contrast it with West HS which is in the 99th percentile statewide and, in fact, the 4th best high school in Wisconsin (according to my analysis, etc, etc)
Anyway for the most part, the high schools do pretty well. I would say anything above 80th percentile statewide is pretty good. Who knew that Wisconsin Heights HS was so good? I don’t even know where it is! It got on this list because the district was in the area. It probably helps that they only have something like 95 students in 10th grade.




US Department of Education Response to Madison’s SLC Grant Application



Angela Hernandez-Marshall 971K PDF:

We have completed our review of applications received under the Smaller Learning Communities Program (CFDA 84.215L) [MMSD SLC Application]. The Department received a total of 236 eligible applications in this competition. Of these, 38 were selected for funding. Unfortunately, your application was not selected for funding this year.
Each application received a comprehensive review b y external reviewers who had experience implementing, documenting, or evaluating policies, programs, or practices at the national, state, or district level to improve the academic achievement of public high school students. Panel members included teachers, school, district, and state administrators, technical assistance providers, education researchers and program evaluators. Using the criteria published in the Federal Register notice, three reviewers independently rated each application and documented strengths and weaknesses.
The Department does not return copies of unfunded application to the applicant but we will retain a copy of your application until the end of this calendar year in the event that you wish to discuss it with us. We are enclosing a copy of the reviewers’ evaluations and comments, which you may use to strengthen your proposal for future competitions. To that end, please check our website beginning in November 2007 for information about the next Smaller Learning Communities grants competition: http://www.ed.gov/programs/slcp/applicant.html.
We appreciate the time and thought that went into the planning and preparation of your application. Your ongoing school improvement efforts are critical to improving educational services that will meet the unique needs o f high school students. Again, we do regret that we are unable to support your application and thank you for your effort.
Please forward any further inquiries to me at smallerlearningcornmunities@ed.gov.

The first reviewer noted (page 3) that “(5) As part of the district’s strategic planing there is no examination of the successes and weaknesses of previous SLC initiatives (pages 15-16).”.
Related, via Jeff Henriques:




West High School Homecoming Police Calls



Madison Police Department:

Both of these Police Reports did not include West High’s address (30 Ash Street). The incident address can be a factor in reporting school related issues. See the Madison Parents’ School Safety Site’s Police call data summary from July 2006 to June 2007. NBC 15 also covered these incidents.




An Update on the Foundation For Madison Public Schools



Susan Troller:

“Be true to your school” could be the motto of a challenge the Foundation for Madison’s Public Schools has issued to friends and supporters of public education here.
According to Martha Vukelich-Austin, foundation president, it’s taken less than 10 months for over half the schools in Madison to meet a challenge grant aimed at helping build individual endowments at every local elementary, middle and high school in the city.
The foundation is an independent, nonprofit community group that raises money to help support public education in Madison.
The grant promises to match every dollar raised at each individual school with 50 cents from the Madison Community Foundation — which manages the funds for the Foundation for Madison Public Schools — up to $3,750 at each of 48 schools. Pledges totalling up to $180,000 will yield an extra $90,000 for the schools, for a total of $270,000 to be divided among 48 schools.
…….
For example, Mendota Elementary School, with one of Madison’s highest poverty rates among its students but strong academic scores, had an endowment of $36,745 as of the second week in September. Other elementary schools with impressive endowments include Thoreau, with $54,968, and Shorewood, with $39,047.
East High School has an endowment of $82,944, and tiny Shabazz City High has an endowment of $63,027, compared with West High School’s $26,800, Memorial High School’s $26,397 and La Follette High School’s $13,632.
Among middle schools, Cherokee and Spring Harbor lead the pack with $63,886 and $59,855 respectively.

Local entrepreneur John Taylor provided a $250K “Challenge Grant” in December, 2003. It would be interesting to add his perspective to the the conversation. Clusty Search on John Taylor.




Madison School District Talented & Gifted Spending vs. Total Budget



mmsdtag.jpg

Madison United for Academic Excellence has a meeting this evening:

Out of Level Testing Opens Doors of Opportunity, Midwest Academic Talent Search—MATS),” 7:00 p.m. McDaniels Auditorium, Doyle Administration Building, 545 W. Dayton Street. [Map]

This chart presents a useful opportunity to review spending via the handy $339M+ MMSD Citizen’s Budget for 2007-2008 (The citizen’s budget is one of the work products from Lawrie Kobza’s stint on the finance and operations committee this past year).
2007-2008 Student Count: 24,268




Madison schools’ lunch period isn’t what it used to be



Andy Hall:

And somehow, in a time window one third the size that many adults take for lunch, 215 young children crowd around picnic-style tables, consume chicken nuggets — or whatever they brought from home — and hustle outside to play.
Squeezed by tight school budgets, the federal No Child Left Behind law and Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction rules on instructional time, the school lunch period isn’t what it used to be in many school districts.
ver the years,” said Frank Kelly, food services director of the Madison School District, who estimates that overall, school lunch periods in the district have been trimmed about 10 minutes over the past 10 years.
“I don’t think people are going to accept anything less than this.”
In fact, in response to complaints from parents four years ago, Madison officials eased the lunch crunch a bit for elementary students by using the last five minutes of the class period before lunch to move students to the cafeteria.
There was talk four years ago of expanding the elementary lunch period to 35 minutes. But the idea was dropped after officials estimated it might cost more than $2 million to pay teachers and lunch supervisors.
“We don’t have much flexibility in extending that,” said Sue Abplanalp, an assistant superintendent who oversees Madison’s elementary schools.
While DPI leaves it up to local officials to determine the length of lunch periods, Madison educators say they believe they attain a decent compromise by giving:
•Elementary students 20 minutes.
•Middle school students 30 to 34 minutes.
•High school students about 35 minutes (except at West High School, where most students get 55 minutes under a plan initiated last year).
Those schedules are typical of what’s found around Wisconsin, said Kelly, who has worked in food service for 31 years.
“For most of our people, it works very well,” Madison schools Superintendent Art Rainwater said.




Madison’s Superintendent Search: Public Input



The public has an opportunitiy to provide input regarding qualities sought for the new Superintendent:

  • 9/19/2007; 7:00p.m. at Memorial High School (Auditorium) [Map]
  • 9/20/2007; 7:00p.m. La Follette High School (Auditorium) [Map]

I passed along a few general thoughts earlier today:

  • Candor
    An organization’s forthrightness and philosophy is set from the top.
    I cited examples including: the past method of discussing referendum costs without the effect of negative aid (reduction in state aids that requires increased local property taxes), parsing math and reading test results, structural deficits and collecting data on new initiatives to determine their validity and utility [RSS]. Public/Taxpayer confidence in our $340M+ school district is critical to successful future referendums.

  • Interact with our rich community
    Madison offers an unprecedented financial and intellectual environment for someone willing to seize the opportunity.

  • Raise academic expectations via a substantive, world class curriculum
    We do our students no favors by watering down curricular quality.

Susan Troller has more.




West and Memorial lead state in National Merit scholars



Susan Troller:

wo Madison high schools easily outpaced any other high schools in Wisconsin in the number of students who qualified as semifinalists for the 2008 National Merit Scholarships. Thirty-one students at West High School qualified and 24 qualified at Memorial in the prestigious scholarship competition.
Schools with the next highest numbers of semifinalists were Mequon’s Homestead High School in Ozaukee County with 17 semifinalists and the University School of Milwaukee with 16 semifinalists.
Four students at East High, two students at La Follette and one student at Edgewood also qualified for a total of 62 National Merit semifinalists from Madison.
Other Dane County high schools with qualifying students include Middleton (10 students), De Forest (5 students), Monona Grove (3 students), Verona (3 students), Oregon (2 students), Sun Prairie (2 students), Mount Horeb (2 students, including a student who is homeschooled), Deerfield (1 student) and Waunakee (1 student).




West HS English 10: Request for Data — Reply from Pam Nash



I received the following reply to my request for English 10 data from Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools Pam Nash:
Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2007 14:27:48 -0500
From: pnash@madison.k12.wi.us>
To: lauriefrost@ameritech.net, eholmes@madison.k12.wi.us, hlott@madison.k12.wi.us, arainwater@madison.k12.wi.us, mbking1@wisc.edu
Laurie-
Mr. Holmes and his staff will do this. Pam
Pamela J. Nash
Assistant Superintendent
for Secondary Schools
Madison Metropolitan School District
(608) 663-1635
(608) 442-2149 (fax)

And here’s what I wrote back:
Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2007 15:21:06 -0500
To: pnash@madison.k12.wi.us, eholmes@madison.k12.wi.us, hlott@madison.k12.wi.us, arainwater@madison.k12.wi.us, mbking1@wisc.edu
From: “Laurie A. Frost”
Subject: Re: English 10 early results request
Cc: asilveira@madison.k12.wi.us, lkobza@boardmanlawfirm.com, lucym@charter.net, jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us, mcole@madison.k12.wi.us, bmoss@madison.k12.wi.us, ccarstensen@madison.k12.wi.us
Thank you, Pam. I will look forward to receiving the data.
I know you all probably see me as a thorn in your side. Please try to understand, I am simply trying to keep you honest with the public … and empirically based.
If the results are positive — if English 10 is associated with a significant change in the target variable of concern (rigor of elective choices in 11th and 12th grade) — wouldn’t you want to know?
And if the results are not positive, wouldn’t you want to know?
Laurie




West HS English 10: Request for Data



Here is an email I sent to the BOE, asking them to request important outcome data for West HS’s English 10 initiative. Embedded in the email is my own request for such data. As both a content and a process issue, I should think this would be of interest to all SIS readers. By all means, feel free to write to these people with your own request. –LAF
August 22, 2007
Dear BOE (especially Performance and Achievement Committee members Kobza, Winston and Cole):
Please see my email below to various people involved with the West HS English 10 initiative. Thank you for taking the appropriate and expected responsibility to obtain these data and make them public. We need to know if the things we are doing to our high school students are actually having the desired impact, in part, to guard against our doing things for our own misguided adult reasons (things like politics and stubborn pride).
I should think that the gap-closing effectiveness (or lack thereof) of a core course in 10th grade English at one of our four high schools would be of significant interest to community members throughout the District, including parents, teachers and students at the other three high schools … and especially members of our School Board.
Many thanks,
Laurie
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2007 08:42:39 -0500
To: hlott@madison.k12.wi.us,mbking1@wisc.edu,eholmes@madison.k12.wi.us,pnash@madison.k12.wi.us,arainwater.k12.wi.us
From: “Laurie A. Frost”
Subject: English 10 early results request
Dear All:
One of the primary reasons for the implementation of English 10 at West High School was concern about the failure of some groups of West students to take rigorous English electives in their upper class years.
Can you please send me the data regarding the English electives chosen by this year’s 11th graders when they registered for classes six months ago? (Needless to say, I would also like to see the English elective data for the past few years, so that a meaningful comparison can be made between the choices of English 10-era versus pre-English 10-era students.)
This is the first group of West students to take English 10, so a look at the early results of the curricular initiative seems appropriate, as does sharing that information with the West community. I assume that the data are appropriately disaggregated by race and SES, given your concerns and your hypotheses about the impact of the new core course.
Many thanks.
Laurie Frost
West HS parent




Madison Parents Seek Court Order to Open Enroll into Monona Grove School District



Andy Hall:


Madison resident Allison Cizek, 5, is about to enter kindergarten, but a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that restricts the use of race in assigning children to schools may influence which school district she attends.
Allison ‘s parents, Jeff and Jennifer Cizek, filed a petition in Dane County Circuit Court on Thursday seeking an immediate court order that would allow her to attend Taylor Prairie School in the Monona Grove School District this fall.
“I wouldn ‘t be spending money on this if it wasn ‘t important to me, ” Jeff Cizek said Friday evening.
“The color of a person ‘s skin doesn ‘t matter. They should all be treated the same. ”
The family ‘s attempts to transfer Allison from Madison to Monona Grove have been rejected by Madison School District officials who ruled that because she is white, her departure would increase racial imbalance in her Madison school.
Allison ‘s family lives on Madison ‘s Southwest Side in the 2800 block of Muir Field Road. The home is in the Madison School District ‘s Huegel Elementary attendance area.
But her mother teaches in the Monona Grove School District, and last year Allison attended a pre-kindergarten program in that district east of Madison.




Madison School District Small Learning Community Grant Application



136 Page 2.6MB PDF:

Madison Metropolitan School District: A Tale of Two Cities-Interrupted
Smaller Learning Communities Program CFDA #84.215L [Clusty Search]
NEED FOR THE PROJECT
Wisconsin. Home of contented cows, cheese curds, and the highest incarceration rate for African American males in the country. The juxtaposition of one against the other, the bucolic against the inexplicable, causes those of us who live here and work with Wisconsin youth to want desperately to change this embarrassment. Madison, Wisconsin. Capital city. Ranked number one place in America to live by Money (1997) magazine. Home to Presidential scholars, twenty times the average number of National Merit finalists, perfect ACT and SAT scores. Home also to glaring rates of racial and socio-economic disproportionality in special education identification, suspension and expulsion rates, graduation rates, and enrollment in rigorous courses. This disparity holds true across all four of Madison’s large, comprehensive high schools and is increasing over time.
Madison’s Chief of Police has grimly characterized the educational experience for many low income students of color as a “pipeline to prison” in Wisconsin. He alludes to Madison’s dramatically changing demographics as a “tale of two cities.” The purpose of the proposed project is to re-title that unfolding story and change it to a “tale of two cities-interrupted” (TC-I). We are optimistic in altering the plot based upon our success educating a large portion of our students and our ability to solve problems through thoughtful innovation and purposeful action. Our intent is to provide the best possible educational experience for all of our students.

Much more on Small Learning Communities here [RSS SIS SLC Feed]. Bruce King’s evaluation of Madison West’s SLC Implementation. Thanks to Elizabeth Contrucci who forwarded this document (via Pam Nash). MMSD website.
This document is a fascinating look into the “soul” of the current MMSD Administration ($339M+ annual budget) along with their perceptions of our community. It’s important to note that the current “high school redesign” committee (Note Celeste Roberts’ comments in this link) is rather insular from a community participation perspective, not to mention those who actually “pay the bills” via property taxes and redistributed sales, income and user fees at the state and federal level.




Naming our newest elementary school



In the interest of transparency, I am posting one of the e-mails received in relation to the decision to restart the naming process for the new school on Madison’s far West side. I also am posting my response, which shares the reason for my apology to the Hmong community on Monday night, and also for advocating that the board go back to square one on the naming process.
It is my expectation/understanding that the board will establish a time line for the nomination and selection process at our July 9 meeting. People who nominated names the first time can resubmit the materials without revision. People who want to submit new or alternate names must follow the process (e.g., commentary on public forums does not constitute a nomination or formal objection).

Dear Board members:
Thank you for doing the right thing and removing Vang Pao*s name from the new west side elementary school. I know it was a difficult decision for you, although I*m not sure why. I was a bit disconcerted about the *regret* and apologies issued to the Hmong community about your votes. How much controversy does a person need before he is unacceptable as a name for an elementary school? You would have never considered General Westmoorland*But, I digress. I really do appreciate the political situation you felt yourself to be in and appreciate your vote for what is best for the children of Madison. You are to be commended!
On another note, I*d like to encourage you to amend your policy to proceed with naming by using the three names left on the original list. My concerns are that the community is not going to heal properly if we have to go through all this again. Naming a school shouldn*t be this difficult. You have an opportunity here to take the best way out and allow the community to move on and give yourselves the chance to deal with more pressing issues*like budget!
Please*take the high road and go back to the list of three and let*s be done with this.
Thanks again, for removing Vang Pao*s name. Your courage is greatly appreciated.
Heidi Reynolds

=============
MY RESPONSE:
Dear Ms. Reynolds,
Thank you for taking the time to write. I am not sure that I understand your response, since you so often said – and have gone to great lengths to present yourself to the media as someone who wants to compromise, have nothing against the Hmong, and want to heal the rift between communities.
I cannot speak for my fellow board members, but state for the record that my apologize comes from compassion for the pain and suffering that the Hmong community have experienced in their lives and have been experiencing again since Vang Pao’s arrest. My comments are sincere, just as are my comments that there are no winners in this unfortunate set of events.
As for reopening the process, it seems to me that we have been subjected to repeated allegations that we did not follow board policy the first time around. I cannot speak for my colleagues, but it is my personal hope that by going back to square one we can ensure that the process is followed to the fullest. (There is no policy that mandates going back to the list of finalists in a case such as this, so we are in fact following board policy by starting over.)
Sincerely,
Lucy Mathiak




Madison School Board’s “Final Exam”



Susan Troller:

Even smart, hardworking students sometimes blow an exam or forget to do their homework, and the results usually show up on their report cards. The same perhaps could be said for the Madison School Board, which essentially finishes its term tonight.
The board has one more big test as it closes out the school year with a bang. Members will be discussing whether to remove the controversial name of Gen. Vang Pao from the district’s newest elementary school now being built on the far west side. In addition, they will be voting on a new two-year contract between the teachers union and the distict. The tentative contract was ratified by the union late last week.
Those two issues represent opposite ends of the broad spectrum of board business. The school naming is primarily symbolic, but it packs a huge emotional wallop; the contract vote gets less general attention, but holds the details critically important to the district’s financial health.




Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater’s Presentation on the Proposed High School Redesign and Small Learning Community Grant



hs6112007.jpg

hsrdv.jpg

June 11, 2007

35 Minute Video | MP3 Audio

Background Links:

A few general questions about this initiative:

  1. Does it make sense to spend any time on this now, given that the MMSD will have a new Superintendent in 2008?
  2. If the problem is preparation, then should the focus not be on elementary and middle schools?
  3. The committee’s composition (this link includes quite a bit of discussion) does not inspire much confidence with respect to community, teacher and student involvement.

Two page MMSD “feedback worksheet” 259K PDF.




Madison Math Task Force Meetings Today and Wednesday



Week of June 11, 2007
Tuesday, June 12
9:00 a.m. Math Task Force
1. Introduction of Task Force Members
2. Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Math Instructional System
3. Next steps on How to Proceed and Timeline
4. Adjournment
Wisconsin Center for Education Research
1025 West Johnson St.
Madison, WI 53706 [map]
13th Floor Conference Room
Wednesday, June 13+
9:00 a.m. Math Task Force
1. Approval of Minutes dated June 12, 2007
2. Next Steps for How to Proceed and Timeline
3. Background Information from the Madison School Board to Address the Charge to the Task Force
4. Assignment of Tasks
5. Schedule of Future Meetings
6. Adjournment
Wisconsin Center for Education Research
1025 West Johnson St.
Madison, WI 53706 [map]
13th Floor Conference Room




Accelerated Biology at West HS Stands Still



I have a friend who is fond of saying “never ascribe to maliciousness that which can be accounted for by incompetence.” These words have become a touchstone for me in my dealings with the Madison schools. I work harder than some people might ever believe to remember that every teacher, administrator and staff person I interact with is a human being, with real feelings, probably very stressed out and over-worked. I also do my best to remember to express gratitude and give kudos where they are due and encourage my sons to do the same. But recent events regarding Accelerated Biology at West HS — and how that compares to things I have heard are happening at one of the other high schools in town — have stretched my patience and good will to the limit.

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Madison School Board selects a firm for superintendent search



For immediate release: Friday, June 8, 2007 (sent late Friday afternoon)
The Madison Board of Education has selected the firm of Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates of Glenview, ILto conduct the search for the hiring of a new superintendent. HYA was selected from among four businesses which applied for the search contract.
Board President Arlene Silveira said, “We are delighted to reach an agreement with Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates because they are nationally known and very highly respected in the field of superintendent searches. They specialize in working with districts of more than 20,000 students.” The MadisonSchool District’s enrollment is 24,755 students.
Superintendent Art Rainwater has announced that he will retire in June 2008.
Among the early steps in the search process, interviews will be conducted with school district and community representatives in order to develop for the Board a leadership profile of a new superintendent.
The flat fee for the search services to be provided by HYA will be $24,000.
COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS? PLEASE CONTACT:
Madison Metropolitan School District
Public Information Office
545 W. Dayton St.
Madison, WI 53703
608-663-1879

Links:




Madison Students Participate in an International Origami Exhibit



Gayle Worland:

There are plenty of pages to turn in a library, though usually it’s between book covers. At the Pinney Branch Library, carefully arranged and locked behind glass, stand adventures in paper of a much different sort: “Origami By Children,” a traveling exhibit of tiny, ingeniously folded works selected in an international competition by the group OrigamiUSA.
Two Madison students have works in the exhibit, which was first assembled in 2005 but only now has arrived in Madison. Each creation is deceptively simple: many are made from a single sheet of paper, yet turned into a fanciful creature or sharp-edged geometric shape by the skilled, young hands of their creators.
“Origami is a very different art than arts that are based on expression, like painting,” says Natalya Thompson, a Madison West High School sophomore whose interlocking paper “Bow-Tie Motif,” made from 48 squares of three-inch-by-three-inch paper, is featured in the exhibit. Most pieces in the small show are based on designs created by published origami masters.

Origami USA website




Consolidated Madison Golf Team Causes Controversy



Andy Hall and Rob Hernandez:

The Madison School District may have “opened a big door” by authorizing the consolidation of golf teams at its four high schools into two programs as a tiny part of its $7.9 million in budget cuts, a Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association official said Tuesday.
The Madison School Board included that measure as it balanced the district’s $339.6 million budget late Monday night because, as in most school districts, costs have grown faster than the state allows the district to raise property taxes.
If the merger of the golf teams gains Big Eight Conference and WIAA approval before a June 1 deadline, Madison Memorial will combine with Madison West, and Madison La Follette will combine with Madison East, beginning with the boys seasons in 2008.
The projected $14,895 savings to the district – all in the form of coaching salaries – was the smallest of the last-minute additions to the district’s budget cuts.




An open letter to the Superintendent of Madison Metropolitan Schools



Dear Mr. Rainwater:
I just found out from the principal at my school that you cut the allocations for SAGE teachers and Strings teachers, but the budget hasn’t even been approved. Will you please stop playing politics with our children education? It?s time to think about your legacy.
As you step up to the chopping block for your last whack at the budget, please think carefully about how your tenure as our superintendent will be viewed a little more than a year from now when your position is filled by a forward-thinking problem-solver. (Our district will settle for no less.)
Do you want to be remembered as the Superintendent who increased class size as a first step when the budget got tight? Small class size repeatedly rises to the top as the best way to enhance student achievement at the elementary level. Why would you take away one of best protections against federal funding cuts mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act? Rather than increase pupil to teacher ratios, have you checked to see if the pupil to administrative staff ratio has been brought closer to the state-wide average? (In 2002, Madison Metropolitan schools were at 195 children per administrator; the rest of the state averaged 242 children per administrator.) Have the few administrative openings you?ve left unfilled over the past few years actually brought us into line with the rest of the state?

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April 3, 2007 Madison School Board Election Update



Much more on the election here.




School Board Candidate Forum: Madison United for Academic Excellence



Thanks to Laurie Frost & Jeff Henriques for organizing Thursday’s MAUE forum: Video / 30MB MP3 Audio. This event included some interesting questions:

  • 14 minutes: On the Superintendent’s proposed reductions in the budget increase and their affect on the MMSD’s 6 TAG members. Do you believe TAG services still have a role?
  • 20:40 What strategies do you have to raise academic standards for all students and avoid pitting one group of parents against another?
  • 27:50 What are the most positive and negative traits you would bring to the (school) board?
  • 34:28 Please state your position on the educational approach of offering core courses, delivered in completely heterogeneous groupings, with no opportunity for self selected ability grouping? (see West’s English 10)
  • 41:29 How do we do a better job of identifying academically gifted students?
  • 48:42 Would you support a referendum to deal with the (2007/2008) budget shortfall?
  • 54:26 Would you support African centered pedagogy classes for Madison High Schools?
  • 1:00 Where do you see MTI’s advocacy for teachers coming into the greatest conflict with the District’s students?
  • 1:07 What position or talent most distinguishes you from your opponent?

Download the 105MB video here.
Madison United for Academic Excellence.




Spring 2007 Madison School Board Election Update: Vote April 3!



  • Christine & Trent Sveom kindly forwarded candidate responses to additional questions not contained within the previously posted Video from the March 5, 2007 West High Forum. The questions:
    • Please explain your views on additional charter schools given the success of Nuestro Mundo here in Madison and several offerings in Appleton just to name a few?
    • How can the school district provide for second languages to be taught to all students starting in Kindergarten and continuing through all grades?
    • The board will be hiring a new superintendent. Please discuss what you believe is
      the top 3 criteria for a superintendent. You are free to ignore my request to address communication between Board and Administration/Superintendent, Boards communication with public, Superintendent and Public.

    • What role should School Board, Parents and Educators play in changing state law,
      which adversely affect our schools?

    • What accountability mechanisms do you envision? (Directed to Rick & Maya)
    • What is your position on the health insurance issue for teachers, that is the WPS option versus HMO’s?

    Responses:




“Bitter Medicine for Madison Schools”:
07/08 budget grows 3.6% from 333M (06/07) to $345M with Reductions in the Increase



Doug Erickson on the 2007/2008 $345M budget (up from $333M in 2006/2007) for 24,342 students):

As feared by some parents, the recommendations also included a plan to consolidate schools on the city’s East Side. Marquette Elementary students would move to Lapham Elementary and Sherman Middle School students would be split between O’Keeffe and Black Hawk middle schools.
No school buildings would actually close – O’Keeffe would expand into the space it currently shares with Marquette, and the district’s alternative programs would move to Sherman Middle School from leased space.
District officials sought to convince people Friday that the consolidation plan would have some educational benefits, but those officials saw no silver lining in having to increase class sizes at several elementary schools.
Friday’s announcement has become part of an annual ritual in which Madison – and most other state districts – must reduce programs and services because overhead is rising faster than state-allowed revenue increases. A state law caps property-tax income for districts based on enrollment and other factors.
The Madison School District will have more money to spend next year – about $345 million, up from $332 million – but not enough to keep doing everything it does this year.
School Board members ultimately will decide which cuts to make by late May or June, but typically they stick closely to the administration’s recommendations. Last year, out of $6.8 million in reductions, board members altered less than $500,000 of Rainwater’s proposal.
Board President Johnny Winston Jr. called the cuts “draconian” but said the district has little choice. Asked if the School Board will consider a referendum to head off the cuts, he said members “will discuss everything.”
But board Vice President Lawrie Kobza said she thinks it’s too early to ask the community for more money. Voters approved a $23 million referendum last November that included money for a new elementary school on the city’s Far West Side.
“I don’t see a referendum passing,” she said.

Links: Wisconsin K-12 spending. The 10.5M reductions in the increase plus the planned budget growth of $12M yields a “desired” increase of 7.5%. In other words, current Administration spending growth requires a 7.5% increase in tax receipts from property, sales, income, fees and other taxes (maybe less – see Susan Troller’s article below). The proposed 07/08 budget grows 3.6% from 333M+ (06/07) to $345M (07/08). Madison’s per student spending has grown an average of 5.25% since 1987 – details here.
UPDATE: A reader emails:

The spectre of central city school closings was what prompted some of us to resist the far-west side school referendum. Given the looming energy crisis, we should be encouraging folks to live in town, not at the fringes, strengthen our city neighborhoods. Plus, along with the need to overhaul the way we fund schools, we need a law requiring developers to provide a school or at least the land as a condition to development.

UPDATE 2: Susan Troller pegs the reduction in the increase at $7.2M:

Proposed reductions totaled almost $7.2 million and include increases in elementary school class sizes, changes in special education allocations and school consolidations on the near east side.
Other recommendations include increased hockey fees, the elimination of the elementary strings program and increased student-to-staff ratios at the high school and middle school levels.

UPDATE 3: Roger Price kindly emailed the total planned 07/08 budget: $339,139,282




18 Year Old Madison Resident Wins National Vocabulary Championship



James Barron:

Rich Cronin, the president and chief executive of GSN, said he was not just thrilled to watch the competition, he was euphoric. “One person will be the ‘American Idol’ of vocabulary,” he said. (In the end, after an afternoon with its share of technical difficulties and dashed hopes, the winner was Robert Marsland, 18, of Madison, Wis. He will receive $40,000 toward college tuition. The winners in the finals and in the earlier citywide competitions held nationwide divided more than $80,000 in tuition money. The Princeton Review, a tutoring and test preparation service, came up with the questions. )
Off camera, it took Joel Chiodi, GSN’s vice president for marketing, a moment to remember a word he had learned from listening to contestants around the country.

Susan Troller:

Madison’s Robert Marsland, 18, took first place at the inaugural National Vocabulary Championship Monday in New York City, nabbing a trophy and a $40,000 scholarship prize. Last year, he nailed a perfect 36 on his ACT college entrance exam, and in 2003 he represented Wisconsin in the National Spelling Bee.
He is a student at the tiny St. Ambrose Academy on Madison’s west side, where he studies both Greek and Latin.




Comments on the 2006 Madison Edge School Referendum & Possible Closure of a “Downtown School”



Dan Sebald:

I’m somewhat incredulous about the comments from the Madison School Board President Johnny Winston Jr. in Susan Troller’s article about Monday’s meeting. Do I understand correctly? The School Board packaged the new west side elementary school with two other spending items to ensure its passage as a referendum on last November’s ballot, and now the School Board is reluctant to put forth a referendum to fully fund downtown schools? And they give no reassurance about seeking to keep the downtown school curriculums and class size intact?
And what of these comments about no public outcry? If the public is to do the political footwork to get rid of draconian state-imposed caps, we wouldn’t need a School Board.
From someone who has no vested interest in one’s own children’s education yet recognizes the importance of a solid education for everyone, I say Madison’s school system is in obvious decline.
My opinion is that if the modus operandi is school funding by referendums and we get a referendum for a new school on the edge of the city, then we get a referendum to fund downtown schools.
If that referendum fails, then it fails, which would be a good indication of where priorities in the community lie and also a sad disappointment.
Dan Sebald Madison

This is a fascinating issue, particularly given the folks that lined up to support last fall’s referendum.




Madison’s Mendota Elementary School beats the odds



What does it take to truly create a school where no child is left behind?
That question defines what is probably the most pressing issue facing American public education, and a high-poverty school on Madison’s north side west of Warner Park seems to have figured out some of the answers.
Mendota Elementary is among a small handful of schools in Madison where the percentage of children from low-income families hovers above 70 percent. But contrary to what most research would predict, Mendota’s standardized test scores meet or beat Madison’s generally high district averages, as well as test scores from throughout the state, on the annual Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam.
In fact, Mendota’s test scores even exceed those of many other local schools where the majority of students come from more affluent homes with a wealth of resources to devote to child raising, including both time and money.
From “Successful schools, successful students” by reporter Susan Troller, The Capital Times, January 26, 2007.

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I Support the Madison Studio School



Taxpayers, parents and students, particularly those who will enter our schools over the next few decades will benefit from more local choices if the Madison Studio School can lift off, soon.
The Madison School District Administration’s recent history has been marked by a reduction in choice for parents and students and generally a monolithic approach to curriculum. Examples include the rush toward one size fits all curriculum in high schools [East High School and West High School’s English 9/10], the annual attempt to kill elementary strings and the ongoing implementation of scripted curriculum such as Connected Math, among others. This has occurred despite flat overall enrollment and growing district budgets.
The Madison Studio School initiative rises out of the successful near westside Preschool of the Arts family. Learn more by visiting their website along with these articles.
Lifting off is made more difficult by the Madison School District’s structural deficit, which further limits annual increases in the $331M+ budget.
I hope that The School Board, Administration and Studio School proponents can mutually find a way to say yes, rather than, as Scott Milfred points out, starting with the usual same service reasons to say no.
Over time, I believe the Studio School will grow and spawn additional charter initiatives, perhaps offering middle and high school students more options.
For me, this is simply a governance issue. I think movement away from the typical monolithic approach will benefit our students and community over the long haul.
A closing data point: Appleton’s public schools offer 13 charter options, compared to Madison’s two.
David Cohen makes some useful counter-points in his comments below.




Innovation in the Madison Public Schools



Scott Milfred:

The Madison School District just went through a successful school building referendum. Yet a key argument by opponents resonated with the public. The critics asked: Why not close an East Side school with falling enrollment to help pay for construction of a school on the far West Side where the number of students is increasing?
Enter a core of enthusiastic East Side parents pitching an idea they believe could fill Emerson at little cost and ease the pressure to construct yet another school elsewhere. If the parents are right, their proposal for turning Emerson into a charter school just might be the only way to save it from closing.
Charter schools are free from certain state rules and strive to innovate. The Emerson parents are proposing a “Studio School” that would emphasize the arts and technology. The charter school would start with two combined kindergarten-first grades next fall. It would feature more hands-on group projects driven by student interests. Yet core subjects such as reading, writing and arithmetic would still be incorporated throughout school activities.
Madison’s stubborn teachers union has long been suspicious of charter schools. The union has taken a defensive position that presumes the very suggestion of a charter school implies that traditional schools are somehow inadequate.
The union shouldn’t feel insecure. Our traditional Wisconsin public schools do many great things in the face of daunting challenges. Yet public education can and must get better and try new things — even if some attempts fail.




West High School Small Learning Community Presentation 1/8/2007 @ 7:00p.m.



Madison West Small Learning Community Coordinator Heather Lott is giving a presentation at Monday evening’s PTSO meeting: “SLC Post-Grant Update and Discussion”. Location: Madison West High School LMC [Map] West’s implementation of Small Learning Communities has been controversial due to the move toward a one size fits all curriculum (English 9 and English 10).
Background Links:

Loading Clusty Cloud …

Parents with children potentially on their way to West High School should check out this Monday evening event.




Reading Between the Lines: Madison Was Right to Reject Compromised Program



Jason Shephard:

From the beginning, Mary Watson Peterson had doubts about the motivations of those in charge of implementing federal education grants known as Reading First. As the Madison district’s coordinator of language arts and reading, she spent hundreds of hours working on Madison’s Reading First grant proposal.
“Right away,” she says, “I recognized a big philosophical difference” between Madison’s reading instruction and the prescriptive, commercially produced lessons advocated by Reading First officials. “The exchange of ideas with the technical adviser ran very counter to what we believe are best practices in teaching.”
The final straw was when the district was required to draft daily lesson plans to be followed by all teachers at the same time.
“We’ve got 25,000 kids who are in 25,000 different places,” says Superintendent Art Rainwater. The program’s insistence on uniformity “fundamentally violated everything we believe about teaching children.”
In October 2004, Rainwater withdrew Madison from the federal grant program, losing potentially $3.2 million even as the district was cutting personnel and programs to balance its budget. Rainwater’s decision, made without input from the school board, drew intense criticism and became an issue in last year’s board elections.

From a public policy perspective, the School Board should have discussed the $3.2M, particularly given the annual agony over very small changes in the District’s $333M+ budget.
The further concern over a one size fits all Reading First requirement (“We’ve got 25,000 kids who are in 25,000 different places,” says Superintendent Art Rainwater.) is ironic, given the push toward just that across the District (West’s English 10 [Bruce King’s English 9 report] and the recently proposed changes at East High School).
Barb Williams noted that other “blessed by the District” curriculum are as scripted as Reading First in a December, 2004 letter to Isthmus. More here via Ed Blume and here via Ruth Robarts.
It will be interesting to see what Diana Schemo has to say about Reading First.




2007 – 2008 Madison School District Budget Discussions Underway



Watch Monday evening’s school board discussion [Video | Download] of the upcoming larger than usual reductions in revenue cap limited increases in the District’s 2007 – 2008 budget (they are larger than normal due to the recently disclosed 7 year structural budget deficit). The 2006 / 2007 budget is $333M+ (it was $245M in 98/99 while enrollment has remained flat, though the student composition continues to change).

Related Links:




West / Memorial Cell Tower Lease Hearings



A parent’s email:

To All:
A Spring Harbor parent alerted me to hearings being held by the school board this Wednesday at 6:00 PM at Midvale Elementary [map] on the proposed lease of property at West and Memorial for cell towers. For details, please go to www.madison.k12.wi.us/topics/cell. This should be a somewhat controversial issue, since some people are concerned with the safety of cell towers.
I personally am concerned that, if the school board leases property for cell towers to Cingular or U.S. Cellular, they do so for a fair price and make sure that fair increases are built in over the course of the contract. (I lived in a building in Chicago which had given a wireless company a lease at a fixed rate in perpetuity. That was a very good deal for the lessee and a bad deal for the lessor.)
I hope that one or more of you is familiar with the safety issues and that one or more of you is an expert on real estate leases and would be willing to represent our interests at this hearing on Wednesday night. Unfortunately, I am an expert on neither, so I don’t think I can add anything.

FWIW, US Cellular is owned by TDS.




Madison School Board: Superintendent’s High School Redesign Presentation & Public Comments [Audio / Video]



Four citizens spoke at Monday evening’s school board meeting regarding the proposed “high school redesign”. Watch or download this video clip.
Superintendent Art Rainwater’s powerpoint presentation and followup board discussion. Watch or download the video.

Links:




On, Off and On Again 11/27/2006 Madison School Board High School Redesign Discussion



Susan Troller wrote this on Tuesday, 11/21/2006:

A presentation on the redesign of Madison’s high school curriculum scheduled for next week’s School Board meeting has been scrapped for the immediate future, School Board President Johnny Winston Jr. confirmed late this morning.
“We’ll hold off on changes until we get a better feel for how the process will work,” Winston said.
Winston, other School Board members and members of the administration met this morning to discuss high school curriculum proposals, including changes in accelerated classes for freshmen and sophomores at East High.

Andy Hall wrote this on 11/22/2006:

Madison School Board President Johnny Winston Jr. said community outcry and confusion over East’s plans to restructure its classes likely will dominate the board’s discussion of reforming operations in the district’s high schools. The meeting is set for 8 p.m. Monday in the auditorium at the Doyle Administration Building, 545 W. Dayton St.
“I’m sure we’re going to hear a lot from the community,” Winston said. “Board members want to hear it. They want it now.”
Winston said he expects people riled about potential or recent changes at La Follette and West high schools also will attend.
The board, Winston said, needs to set direction for the district’s schools and needs to be kept informed. He’s opposed to eliminating classes for talented and gifted students. “We need to be enhancing them,” he said.
It’s essential, Winston said, for parents, students, teachers and the community to have a voice in any talks about changing the way schools are run.
“I really hope we can get this thing, whatever it is, in order,” Winston said.

Indeed, a look at the School Board’s calendar for Monday, 11.27.2006 reveals that the High School Redesign discussion is scheduled for 8:00p.m. that evening.
The Board has been criticized over the years for simply not discussing some of the tough issues such as health care, the District’s rejection of $2M in federal Reading First funds (the politics and implementation of Reading First have been controversial. However $2m is $2m and it at least deserved a public conversation) and West High’s full speed ahead on a one size fits all curriculum (See also “the Fate of the Schools“.
I’m glad to see the Board take this up Monday. A recent discussion of the District’s quiet policy change regarding credit for non-madison school district courses appeared, disappeared and now is on a 12/11/2006 Performance and Achievement committee agenda.




2 West High Students Face Charges In Connection With Bomb Threat



Channel3000:

Two Madison West High School students have been suspended and are facing criminal charges after allegedly creating a bomb scare twice — once on Monday and on Halloween.
A 17-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl allegedly just wanted to play a practical joke, but the school’s officials said they don’t think it’s a laughing matter and are sending a strong message.
“We can’t have students making those kinds of threats. We will have to take those kinds of threats very seriously. There will be consequences both from the school district and from the criminal justice system,” said Ed Holmes, principal at West High School. “One student not wanting to go to class shouldn’t impact on over 2,000 people in a school community.”




East High School to Follow West’s One Size Fit’s All 9/10 Curriculum?



From a reader involved in these issues:

The plan for East HS is to have only regular classes (that is, no Advanced (formerly AcaMo) and no TAG classes) and AP classes (which, presumably, only juniors and seniors will be able to take). East currently offers 9 AP classes. This means there will be a core curriculum delivered in completely heterogeneous classes (except for the special ed and ESL classes) across the boards in 9th and 10th grades. Our source did not specify if this means the end of Paul DuVair’s renowned TAG Biology class. There also is no word on embedded honors options, like West now offers (though we have heard many reports about how profoundly uneven implementation is — aside from the fact that embedded honors options rarely give students the critical opportunity to learn together at a high level).
The only exception to this plan will be math, largely because the kids enter East already ability grouped (i.e., some into Algebra, some into Geometry, etc.).
Additional info —
— the official word is that this plan is coming from Alan Harris himself (yeah, right)
— the other official word is that one of the reasons for this drastic change is that the TAG students were “coasting” (huh?)
So please spread the word — especially to East attendance area parents that you know, including parents of younger kids — and please attend, if you can. And if anyone can videotape …

Related Links:

I wonder how Shabazz fits into this? It seems like an outler, given the current high school curriculum direction.




Madison BOE Progress Report for November 8th



I would like to thank our community for their passage of the referendum on November 7th. This referendum will build a new school in Linden Park, finance the cafeteria and remodeling of Leopold Elementary and refinance existing debt…

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More Madison Building Referendums on the Way?



Susan Troller:

On Tuesday, voters will make a decision on a $23.5 million school referendum that would include giving the green light to an elementary school on Madison’s far west side, but school district officials see it as just the first of several in the near future.
Based on current residential growth patterns, as many as five new elementary schools may eventually be needed to accommodate new generations of children in and around Madison, according to Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Art Rainwater.

Interesting timing.




Dane County health insurance costs are lowest in Wisconsin



A new study by the Institute for One Wisconsin found that Dane County had the lowest regional health insurance cost in the state, as did the Madison metropolitan area compared to other metro areas.
The analysis by the nonprofit research and education organization, which supports a progressive agenda, found that there was a nearly 30 percent cost variation between the highest and lowest cost areas.
Northwestern Wisconsin had the highest costs by region, followed by west-central and then southeastern Wisconsin. The Racine metro area had the highest cost, followed by the Chippewa Valley and then La Crosse.
By Anita Weier, The Capitol Times, October 31, 2006.
October 31, 2006

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Dane County Saves $1.2M on Employee Health Insurance: Will the Madison School District Follow This Lead?



Recently, the Sun Prairie School district and its teachers’ union successfully bargained with DeanCare to bring down future costs for employee health insurance. This week Dane County and five of its employee unions agreed to save $1.2M in employee health insurance costs for 2007 by moving all covered employees to one provider, Physicians Plus HMO. County reaches pacts with 5 of 9 employe unions They chose Physicans Plus HMO following a competitive bidding process.
Can the Madison School Board learn from these examples? I hope so.
On September 25, the Human Resources Committee (Kobza, Vang and Robarts) heard a presentation from a Bob Butler, an attorney-consultant from the Wisconsin Association of School Boards on this topic. Containing MMSD’s employee health insurance costs: what’s next? The presentation demonstrated why school districts have no choice but to work with employee representatives to try to get the best health insurance for the lowest cost.
On Monday, October 23, the Human Resources Committee will consider making recommendations to the full board regarding future health insurance costs. The meeting will be at 7:45 p.m. in McDaniels Auditorium and will be televised.




To Voting Madison Citizens



I didn’t vote for the Leopold referendum last spring, and I still believe that was the correct vote. If the community had voted to build a second school on Leopold then we would not have the opportunity for the community to vote “Yes” on this referendum, which I believe is a better financial and long term solution for our growth. When I was asked to participate on the Westside Long Range Planning Task Force, I was determined to find a better solution for our district than building another school.
I approached this job with study and concentration, as did many of the Task Force participants. In my effort to not build a new school I looked at shifting students East, shifting South, moving 5th graders to middle school, and moving neighborhoods to other schools and in the end I found it was more than just filling seats. The shifts made equity uneven. One shift created a school with less than 5 % low income while others were closer to 70%. Other shifts still left some schools too full because the seats were not where the growth is coming from. Some shifts worked but only for two years. After many hours of discussion and shifting, it became clear that we could shift students if we wanted to; split neighborhoods, shift them again in two years, create schools of inequity, provide 100’s of students with a bus ride of 45 minutes or more each way, and change our classroom quality so that teachers no longer had classrooms but carts that they moved from room to room (Art and Music Teachers). When we thought about those options, none of us wanted it for our own children or grandchildren and we believed that for $30 a year, others in the community would prefer that their children and grandchildren not be handed one of these options either. There are other options, but none with the long term solutions that the current referendum provides.

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Facts & Questions about the 2006 Madison School District Referendum



Questions:

What is the anticipated cost of equipping the Leopold addition and the elementary school at Linden Park? Are those projected costs included in the referendum authorization or not?
What is the anticipated cost of operating the Leopold addition and the elementary school at Linden Park? How will those costs be appropriated/budgeted (and in what years?) given that the Board expects to have to cut $6-8 million per year?
What are the “shared revenue” total costs for each of three parts of the referendum question? Are these costs included in the $29.20 estimated cost for a median assessed home-owner? Please provide the ‘working papers’ or calculations arriving at these costs. How can a home-owner figure the annual cost of this referendum for the assessed value of their home?
What information about the Ridgewood complex and projected enrollment was used to calculate the need for the Leopold addition?
Construction has already begun for the Leopold addition without voter/taxpayer approval. What is the current impact on the operations budget? What would be the future impact on the operations budget if the referendum fails?

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East & West locked down on Monday



From madison.com:

Madison school officials locked down East High School this morning after “serious” threats were made by one student to another.
The school’s safety procedures call for the doors, which were secured at 11 a.m., to remain locked until the end of the school day at 3:30 p.m. Students were not to be released until that time.
The threat was made to one student who was at the school by another who was off school grounds.
“The danger is outside the school, not inside,” said school district spokesman Ken Syke. “That’s why we went into lockdown.”
Officials said the threats stemmed from fights between East High students over the weekend, with the disputes remaining unresolved today.
Syke said rumors circulating among students that someone was spotted with a gun are simply “not true.”
But he added, “It was a legitimate enough notice that we have taken it seriously.”
Also at West High School this morning, pellet gun shots were reportedly fired from a vehicle passing the school. The shots were reported by a witness who heard the shots and saw the vehicle.
Police had the alleged perpetrator in custody by 1 p.m. District security coordinator Luis Yudice, West High administrators, central office staff and Madison police worked together to initiate the district’s safety and security procedures to respond to the situation at West, which included limiting access to the school until early this afternoon.




Falling need for West side school?



Do current housing declines wipe out the need for a new West side school? Here’s an article from The Capital Times (Oct. 9, 2006):

Home building keeps plunging here
The decline in home building in Dane County this year accelerated in September, remaining the weakest this century, according to the latest figures from MTD Marketing.
There were just 73 permits issued for single-family homes and duplexes here in September, less than half the 195 last September, and at least 68 below every September back to 1999, the earliest year MTD reported figures.
The September permits did set a record average value for the month at $242,836. The average square footage was 2,410, third highest since 1999.
Year-to-date through September, there were 1,116 permits in Dane County, 711 below a year ago and at least 332 below every year back to 1999. The average value for the first nine months of the year did set a record at $246,660. The average square footage of 2,449 was behind only the 2,469 in 2004.




Madison School District Policy Change Regarding Credit for Non-MMSD Courses



I emailed this message to the Madison School Board:

A policy change has recently been implemented in the MMSD regarding whether students can receive high school credit for courses offered by the MMSD that they take elsewhere (e.g.’s, via correspondence through UW-Extension, Stanford’s EPGY, and Northwestern’s Letterlinks programs, attendance at UW or MATC, summer programs offered through the Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth and Northwestern’s Center for Talent Development).
Prior to this fall, students could receive high school credit for non-MMSD courses as long as they obtained prior written approval that the courses they planned to take were deemed worthy of high school credit. I have recently learned that this is no longer true. Rather, the only non-MMSD courses that can currently be approved for high school credit are ones in which a comparable course is not offered ANYWHERE in the District.
Why the change in policy?

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The Midwest Academic Talent Search



Madison United for Academic Excellence (MUAE) is hosting an informational session about the Midwest Academic Talent Search (MATS) program run by the Center for Talent Development (CTD) at Northwestern University.
The MATS provides an opportunity for academically advanced students in grades three through nine to take an out-of-grade-level standardized test. Students in grades three through six may take the Explore test (essentially an ACT designed for eighth graders); students in grades six through eight may take the SAT test; and students in grades six through nine may take the ACT test. For students who routinely hit the ceiling of their district and state level tests, an out-of-grade-level test may be the only way to truly know what they know. Test results may be used for advocacy purposes, as well as to access a wide array of advanced educational experiences across the country.
Our guest speaker for the evening will be Carole Nobiensky, longtime staff member and Director of Programs at the Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth (WCATY).
Please join us on Wednesday, September 27, from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in Room 209 of the Doyle Administration Building, 545 West Dayton Street.




Madison School District Progress Report



Via a Johnny Winston, Jr. email:

Welcome back to school! I hope you had a wonderful summer. On August 28th the Madison school board approved plans Plan CP2a and Plan CP3a relative to boundary changes that will be necessary if the November 7th referendum to construct an elementary school on the Linden Park site passes or fails. The plan will need to be adjusted depending on enrollment. The board also passed a resolution to place $291,983.75 of the Leopold addition/remodeling monies in the contingency fund of the 2006-07 budget if the referendum passes less the expenses incurred relative to the initial financing of the project
On August 21st, Partnerships, Performance and Achievement and Human Resources convened. The Partnerships Committee (Lucy Mathiak, Chair) discussed strengthening partnerships with parents and caregivers and is working to develop a standard process for administering grants to community partners. Performance and Achievement (Shwaw Vang, Chair) had a presentation on the English-as-a-Second Language Program. Human Resources (Ruth Robarts, Chair) discussed committee goals and activities for 2006-07
On August 14th the board approved a policy that allows animals to be used in the classroom by teachers in their educational curriculum but also protects students that have allergies or other safety concerns. Questions about the November referendum were discussed and an additional JV soccer program at West High school was approved. This team is funded entirely by parents and student fees. The Finance and Operations Committee (Lawrie Kobza, Chair) met to discuss concepts and categories of a document called the People’s Budget that would be easier to read and understand. Lastly, three citizens were appointed to the newly created Communications Committee (Arlene Silveira, Chair): Deb Gurke, Tim Saterfield and Wayne Strong

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Fall Referendum: Madison School District Boundary Changes



WKOW-TV:

Regardless how people in Madison vote this November the school board will make boundary changes, forcing some students into new schools. Two options were chosen Monday night to deal with overcrowding. The first option reflects what the district would look like if the referendum passes. The second option on the table is in case it doesn’t pass

Susan Troller:

bout 510 students will move if the new school, located west of County M in a rapidly developing area of new homes, is approved and built. If the referendum fails, over 225 students will move and program changes, including converting art and music rooms to classrooms and increasing class size, will be necessary to gain capacity, said Mary Gulbrandsen, the district’s chief of staff.
School Board members also voted unanimously on Monday to return over $291,000 to the School District’s contingency fund if the referendum passes. That amount represents money already approved to construct the addition at Leopold, which came out of the district’s operating budget.
Board member Lawrie Kobza said she felt the public was asking good questions about the referendum, and that it was the board’s responsibility to work hard to develop good answers.
An area of concern for Kobza is that the proposed new school does little to change the substantial discrepancy between schools with high and low concentrations of low-income students.




Human Resources Committee of Madison Board To Set Agenda



On Monday, August 21 the Human Resources Committee of the Madison School Board will have its first meeting at 7:00 p.m. in Room 103 of the Doyle Administration Building (545 West Dayton Street).
Following a goal-setting meeting of the Board on June 19, the committee will address a number of important issues, beginning with alternative ways that the district could negotiate health insurance coverage for its employees with the goal of providing the same quality service, higher wages and savings for the district. Committee members this year are Shwaw Vang and Lawrie Kobza. I am the chair.

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Making the Grade: Madison High Schools & No Child Left Behind Requirements



Susan Troller:

Don’t assume that a school is bad just because it’s not making adequate yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law. That comment came today from Madison School Board member Lucy Mathiak, whose children attend or have attended East High School.
East and three other Madison public high schools were cited for not making the necessary progress outlined by No Child Left Behind legislation, which requires that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014. In addition to being cited for not making adequate yearly progress, East was also rapped for not having made sufficient progress for two straight years.
La Follette High School, which was on the list last year for not making progress two years in a row, was removed from that list this year. However, there were other areas this year where La Follette did not meet the required proficiency levels for some groups of students.
“I’m not saying I’m thrilled to see the results,” Mathiak said. “But it’s not as if all schools have equal populations of students facing huge challenges in their lives, chief among them issues of poverty.”

Sandy Cullen:

Art Rainwater, superintendent of the Madison School District, said the preliminary list of schools that didn’t make adequate yearly progress, which the Department of Public Instruction released Tuesday, “didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know.”
“Sooner or later, between now and 2013, every school in America is going to be on the list,” Rainwater said.
Rainwater said there are students at all schools who aren’t learning at the level they should be, and that the district has been working hard to address the needs of those students.

WKOW-TV:

It’s a list no school wants to land on. In Wisconsin, the number of schools not meeting federal guidelines more than doubled, from 45 last year to 92 in 2005-06. The lists can be seen here. One list contains schools not making adequate yearly progress (AYP) for one year. Schools in need of improvement are schools who have failed to meet AYP for two or more years in a row.
Of the 92 schools were the four main Madison high schools, though Superintendent Art Rainwater cautioned against reading too much into it.
At many local schools this past school year, only one or two segments of students failed to score high enough on state tests.
In Madison, East, La Follette, West, and Memorial high schools all did not make enough yearly progress. The state department of public instruction cited low reading scores at three of those four.
Superintendent Art Rainwater said those lower scores came from special needs and low-income students. “Certainly this in a very public way points out issues, but the fact that they didn’t do well on this test is secondary to the fact that we have children who are in the district who aren’t successful,” said Rainwater.
Staff at Memorial and LaFollette were already working on changes to those schools’ Read 180 programs, including adding special education teachers.

DPI’s press release.
DPI Schools Identified for Improvement website.
Much more from Sarah Carr:

The list has “broken some barriers relative to different parts of the state,” Deputy State Superintendent Tony Evers said. Still, the majority of schools on the list are from urban districts such as Milwaukee, Madison and Racine.




2006 / 2007 Madison School Board & Committee Goals



The Madison School Board meets June 19, 2006 @ 5:00p.m. to discuss their 2006 / 2007 goals for our $332M+ schools. A friend wondered what goals readers have in mind.
I thought it might be useful to consider the Board’s goals in light of the District’s strategic plan [450K pdf]:

  1. Instructional Excellence
    Improving student achievement
    Offering challenging, diverse and contemporary curriculum and instruction.
  2. Student Support
    Assuring a safe, respectful and welcoming learning environment.
  3. Staff Effectiveness
    Recruiting, developing and retaining a highly competent workforce that reflects the diversity of our students.
  4. Home and Community Partnerships
    Strengthening community and family partnerships, and communication.
  5. Fiscal Responsibility
    Using resources efficiently and strategically.

My thoughts are below:

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Announcement from Madison School Board President Johnny Winston, Jr. (and the 04 / 07 elections)



Via a Johnny Winston, Jr. MMSD email:

It is with great humility that I announce that I have been elected to serve as President of the Madison School Board. I am honored to have the opportunity to provide leadership to our school district and community. Serving as President is the culmination of part of a life long dream to be a public servant.
I was elected to the board in 2004. During my tenure, I have served as Chair of the Finance and Operations and Partnership Committees and most recently as role of Vice President. I welcome working with the entire elected school board. Some of the critical matters for us to address include but are not limited to: the building of new schools to accommodate our growing district, student achievement, parent involvement and strengthening communication and partnership efforts in our community. Together, we can identify and implement creative solutions to these issues.

Johnny, along with Shwaw and Ruth’s seat are up for election in April, 2007. Today’s public announcement by former Madison School Board member Ray Allen that he’s running for Mayor [more on Ray Allen] (same 04/07 election) and MTI’s John Matthews recent lunch with Mayor Dave mean that positioning for the spring election is well under way.
Another interesting element in all this is the proposed fall referendum for a new far west side elementary school [west task force] and the Leopold expansion (I still wonder about the wisdom of linking the two questions together…., somewhat of a do-over for Leopold linked to another question). Have the local prospects for passing a referendum improved since the May, 2005 vote where two out of three failed (including a much larger Leopold expansion)?
I think it’s hard to say:

Televising all board meetings and a more active district website may or may not help, depending of course, on what’s being written or mentioned.
Jason Shephard’s seminal piece on the future of Madison’s public schools will resonate for some time.
It will be an interesting year. I wish the entire Board well as they address these matters. It’s never too early to run for school board 🙂 Check out the election pages for links and interviews.

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Midwest Summit on Boys at Risk



Reader Kathy Andrusz emails:

1st Annual Midwest Summit on Boys at Risk will be held in Madison at the Pyle Center on Monday, June 12, 2006. The keynote speakers are Leonard Sax and Kevin Davern (see brochure for details).

The Gender Studies Project is delighted to announce their 1st Annual Midwest Summit on Boys at Risk. This pioneering conference will be held on June 12 at the Pyle Center in Madison, WI. The Summit boasts two prestigious keynote speakers: Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D., creator of the National Association on Single Sex Education; and Kevin Davern, founding headmaster of The Avalon School, Bethesda, MD, and classroom instructor for 17 years in the independent school education of young men. See the brochure for details. Download the brochure for details. (416kb pdf)