From the Harford County Board of Education:
The Board of Education of Harford County met in an open business meeting on Monday, April 4, 2011, in the Board Room of the HCPS/A.A. Roberty Building and took the following actions or received the following presentations:
Recognized the following:
– Winter 2010-11 HCPS Maryland Public Secondary School Athletic Association (MPSSAA) State Winners
Approved the Consent Agenda:
– Affirmation of Monthly Contract Awards
Minutes of Previous Meetings:
– March 14, 2011 Board Business Meeting
Received a presentation regarding the Proposed 2012-13 Calendar. The proposed calendar will be posted on the school system website for 30-days to allow for public comment. The Board will vote on the 2012-13 Calendar at its May 8th business meeting.
Received a presentation on the proposed Amended FY2012 Budget Approval due to the numbers presented by the County Executive last Friday and the State funding that reflected a total shortfall of $23,459,597. The Board will hold a special business meeting on Monday, April 11th at 7:00 p.m. to discuss and approve an Amended FY2012 Budget.
HCPS Teacher says
EVERYDAY MATH!!!!!! All of those consumable books each elementary school child gets is insane. Plus, they don’t even use half the pages in them in some schools. A complete waste of a program and a complete waste of money. That math program being eliminated could probably save you a million if not more.
HCPS Teacher says
And how much is it costing for the Promethian Bus to be at Patterson Mill tomorrow? It is a nice tease on all the teachers on great technology that schools won’t have funds to access or buy.
OZ says
Technology only serves to enhance instruction nor does it teach a student by itself. You must still have good teachers in the classroom to start with and most teachers do not need technology to be effective. Technology is just another tool, can some times become a crutch for teachers and interfere with quality teaching. The school system should forgo these purchases until we can actually afford it.
tickedteacher says
How about getting rid of waste of our time teacher inservice days. You know, the ones where the principals and instructional facilitators put together so that they can say they actually accomplished something with their teachers. I would much rather be in the classroom with my kids and get out earlier. How about all the overpaid administrators and Instructional facilitators staying after school everyday and keeping up with their useless programs, tudoring kids, coaching, and supervising after school events. That would take a lot of work from all the underpaid teachers. Or how about that horrible Everyday Math Program in Elementary schools. All those consumable books. What ever happened to taking a hard back book home and copying homework problems out of the book instead of waste consumables. This county wants children to be able to explain what they do in math. Isn’t this the perfect way if they have to copy problems from a book. A book they can use year after year. Primary grades only should have consumables. Grade 3 and up should not. That would cut millions I am sure just in the elementary schools alone. Each elementary school child has 3 consumable mathbooks PER KID!!!!!!!!!!!
me says
Some ideas after (briefly) skimming through the HCPS budget….
No to the Nurse Case Manager position @ $93,906 to “assess, coordinate and monitor medical services/options for HCPS employees. Do not see the point of this position. IB Testing fees $24,380 – is this a requirement that the students’ fees be paid? Professional Dues under the Executive Administration section went from $865 in 2009 to $18,500 in 2011 and 2012. What am I missing here?
Seems like a lot could be reduced in the consultants, conferences, meetings sections. Sure it’s great to attend workshops, conferences, but, not if times are tough.
There is $34,800 budgeted for Minority recruiting and $42,520 for Recruiting in the human resources. Couldn’t this be combined by one person?
On the MSTA Convention day that occurs every October, keep it a closed day for students, but have it count as one of the 10 teacher development days. Either you go to the conference (and provide proof) or you go into school that day and work in your room, catch up on work, plan, etc. For goodness sakes, please no staff development workshops!!
How about incentives for perfect attendance among teachers – individually or school wide – quarterly, yearly? That would reduce the cost of substitutes perhaps and also improve morale. One year our school held monthly drawings to a local restaurant for teachers w/perfect attendance. Small gesture, but much appreciated.
There is also a huge amount of wasted paper, at least from what I’ve seen in kindergarten….On average, there’s easily 8-10 papers that come home – at the very least, things should be printed front to back. Don’t know if this is a curriculum wide issue or just this particular teacher.
Kate says
What does the Director of Community Engagement do – Dr. Jonathan Brown? Shouldn’t he have been involved during the redistricting? Is his position necessary? How many other positions aren’t necessary of people who don’t work with students?
dmichaels76 says
No one knows better the amount of money that is urinated away by the school system than teachers. That’s why teachers have known for years all the ways to increase not only salaries and benefits for themselves, but resources that go DIRECTLY into classrooms and benefit children. Here are just a few examples:
1) Get rid of inservice days. They are a waste of time. Period.
2) Get rid of all the people whose sole purpose is to plan and implement inservice. Instructional facilitators and the like. Get rid of them all.
3) Chop the endless layers of administration. All those six-figure salary “Supervisor of Supervisory Supervision” people. There are tons of them. Can them.
4)Load all the computers in the system with LINUX. It’s free. And so are all the apps for it. Millions and millions of dollars could be saved.
5) Stop paying people for coaching. If you want to coach, volunteer. If a teacher doesn’t volunteer, get a parent to volunteer. If a parent doesn’t volunteer, tough luck. Cancel the season. Not fair to the kids? Tell the parents. It’s their kids, let them come out and coach them for free.
6) Cut the superintendent’s salary in half.
7) Make every administrator in the system teach at least ONE class. Superintendent included. If you want to work for the kids, work WITH the kids. No more teaching your token two or three years just so you can climb the edu-corporate ladder. Teach half a day, administer half a day. We’ll save a bundle by cutting your full admin salary and by not having to hire as many teachers.
There. There are seven ways the school system could save millions of dollars and it won’t cost the taxpayers one red cent. And it comes straight from the mouth of a teacher.
dalat1968 says
excllent!! Now add retirement incentives to bring pay costs down by hiring new teachers. Probably an idea too complex for the current board to understand and too late in the process. But it is worth mentioning
Sarcasm Intended says
1) Get rid of inservice days. They are a waste of time. Period.
>>Great idea – cut my pay by 10 days ( we could even call them furlough days to make it look better).
2) Get rid of all the people whose sole purpose is to plan and implement inservice. Instructional facilitators and the like. Get rid of them all.
>>I guess this would work but then who would hold teachers accountable to quality instruction. That’s right there are no bad teachers
3) Chop the endless layers of administration. All those six-figure salary “Supervisor of Supervisory Supervision” people. There are tons of them. Can them.
>>Tons of them – Please identify the “tons”. Once again, I guess we don’t need content supervisors that hold teachers accountable because there are no struggling or poor teachers.
4)Load all the computers in the system with LINUX. It’s free. And so are all the apps for it. Millions and millions of dollars could be saved.
Who is going to train the teachers? We just got rid of all the “staff developers”.
5) Stop paying people for coaching. If you want to coach, volunteer. If a teacher doesn’t volunteer, get a parent to volunteer. If a parent doesn’t volunteer, tough luck. Cancel the season. Not fair to the kids? Tell the parents. It’s their kids, let them come out and coach them for free.
>>I guess the only problem with this will be it takes away the only reason why most PE teachers teach – to coach.
6) Cut the superintendent’s salary in half.
>>Yea, why not this way we can feel better about ourselves. After all we don’t believe people should be paid a competitive salary.
7) Make every administrator in the system teach at least ONE class. Superintendent included. If you want to work for the kids, work WITH the kids. No more teaching your token two or three years just so you can climb the edu-corporate ladder. Teach half a day, administer half a day. We’ll save a bundle by cutting your full admin salary and by not having to hire as many teachers.
>>>This will work. We don’t care that the 2nd year teacher down the hall loses her job. I have 15 years in, it will be a long time before they cut my position.
There. There are seven ways the school system could save millions of dollars and it won’t cost the taxpayers one red cent. And it comes straight from the mouth of a teacher.
I Left says
If you give department chairs of the core content subjects half-loads, they can (and should):
*Handle observations within the department (eliminating the need for some of the school administration)
*Plan/organize content inservice and curriculum writing (eliminating the need for content supervisors and the support staff of each, plus making it more likely that the inservice days will actually be useful).
There is SO much administrative waste in Harford County that it isn’t even amusing.
Also- The PE department only accounted for three coaches in my old school, so I don’t think it’s that big of an issue.
Sarcasm Intended says
Yea – I want my department chair doing my observation. I’m sure HCEA will like teachers observing for evaluation purposes especially when the teacher being observed doesn’t agree with the teacher who did the observation.
Aren’t we really exchanging one administrative level for another. Maybe the idea is that we teachers really don’t need administrators.
It always makes me wonder when people make a blanket statement like “There is SO much administrative waste in Harford County that it isn’t even amusing.” How do we as teachers know how to operate a school system? We know how to teach but does that mean we know how to manage a 1/2 billion dollar system.
We assume a lot of things just like people assume a lot about teaching.
DA says
You seem to have a low opinion of classroom teachers. Are you an administrator or are you trying to become one? The problem that most have with central office and administration in general is the layers. Also that too many teachers use the administrative latter to escape the classroom because they are tired of the students or were not very good teachers to begin with and admin. is their only way out of the classroom.
Sarcasm Intended says
Actually I have a very high opinion of my profession. But being a teacher doesn’t make me the expert on how to run an effective school system. It makes me an expert on how to provide quality instruction to my students.
When we assume we know how to operate a school system we fall into the same logic that exist where John Q. Public knows how to be an effective teacher just because they went to school 30 years ago.
If I follow your logic, no adminstrators should come from the teaching ranks. Where would we get administrators from? Perhaps we should bring profession managers from the business world to manage my school?
DA says
I didn’t say all administrators were poor/burned out teachers, but I’ll stand on my statement that many are. I think you underestimate the intelligence and ability of classroom teachers to make sound managerial decisions. I know several classroom teachers that could perform at the highest level of school system management/administration but choose to stay in the classroom because they like kids. Many could do a better job than those that hold those admin positions now. I know because I’ve been there.
DA says
I do not believe there is anything in the contract that ranks layoffs (or involuntary transfers) to seniority. Don’t be so sure that you are safe!