Swine Flu in Utah Schools

Park City School District has closed its schools until at least May 5 in response to likely cases of Swine Flu in schools. Several students likely contracted the disease during a Spring Break trip to Mexico. Students are thrilled, according to the Tribune.

USOE has created a webpage for schools and parents regarding the not-yet-an-epidemic.

Don't bother to check facts or attribute statements

The Ogden Standard-Examiner had a whopper in a story about education funding cuts in Northern Utah.

"Although Morgan is dealing with a 7 percent cut in revenues, larger districts are dealing with double-digit decreases. Alpine, on the other hand, must only deal with a 3 percent reduction. Charter schools, however, are enjoying increases of 17 percent." (Emphasis mine.)

No source is cited for this complete lie, and no correction has been made to the article, which I accessed at 9:30 on Tuesday, April 28.

What appears to be happening is that the paper is counting the increase in charter school students as an increase in funding per student. Any knowledge of education law and funding in Utah would prevent such an error, as would a simple phone call. Perhaps OSE's reporters just can't be bothered to do any actual reporting.

Perhaps the answer is Granite Charter High School

Budget cuts may mean the closure of Granite High in the Granite District, a quasi-magnet school tailored to be more personal because of the school's size.

Read this article and Granite sounds like a charter school. Perhaps it could be successful as one. Charters that size also experience similar questions regarding their budget. Yet, charters are typically able to operate successfully--see East Hollywood, City Academy and Beehive--also in the Granite district.

If the district can't make the program work, perhaps the school would secede and become an independent charter school. They may find its easier to make budgets work without the bureaucratic overhead.

Why we need dress codes...

...to keep achievement levels up to standard...

Granite's cuts are official

The Granite School Board became the first (or at least one of) to adopt a budget for next school year, formalizing several large budget reductions. Among the cuts:

• Eliminating steps and salary adjustments for non teachers
• Eliminating 95 district-level positions, including janitors, security, and music and math specialists
• Increasing class size averages by 1/4 student
• Eliminating two school days
• Changes to transportation and eliminating some routes
  

Open Source University

Dave Wiley, a professor at BYU and founder of Open High School of Utah, an online, open-source charter school opening this fall, is profiled in this article. He argues that universities as currently constituted will be obsolete within ten years, made so by technology that has changed connectivity, lifestyle, and expectations of college students.

It's an interesting read.

My own thoughts: Without copyright protections, wouldn't that remove the most important incentive to create and innovate?

Accreditation questions

Tom Morgan, a member of the State Charter School Board and a vice president at Zion's Bank (and a member of my Stake Presidency), is driving an effort to require all charter schools to become accredited by the Northwest Association of Accredited Schools. Secondary schools (any school with 9th grade or higher) already require this accreditation, and some charters without the requirement have chosen to become accredited anyway. Morgan's goals are:

• Boost public perception by having a third party verify quality
• Improve quality and reduce risk through independent review
• Relieve pressure and workload at the state office, particularly given big budget cuts

Those are all valid reasons. I also believe that third party review and recognition will allow charters to increase public (and legislative) confidence. I think that having a third party review will likely be less bureaucratic than a state office-driven review.

That said, I have concerns with limiting third party recognition by mandating that schools choose only a single accreditation agency. I believe we can accomplish Morgan's goals by allowing for more than one avenue of accreditation.

Wouldn't having a school certified by the Core Knowledge Foundation as an officially approved school also boost public perception, verify quality, and relieve presssure at USOE? International Baccalaureate, Expeditionary Learning, and other accreditation boards all exist that may match a given charter school's mission more closely than NAAS.

One founding principle of charter schools is that choice improves quality by matching the needs of individual students. The same principle ought to apply here. Let's provide choice so that individual schools can meet high standards in ways that meet the school's needs.

More tax revenue than expected

My philosophy in budgeting for schools is always to err on the side of underestimating revenue and overestimating expenses. When you can be accurate, that's always best, but when we're predicting the future, be conservative.

I'm pleased to see that the legislature has used that same approach. State tax revenues are coming in higher than predicted. That's great news for those of us that feared a repeat of this year, when revenues were estimated high and cuts came 2/3 of the way through the school year.

The legislature most likely "won't have to come back into special session in May or June to further trim the current year's spending plan."

Senator Hillyard says, "If we don't have to come into special session this fiscal year, we probably won't have to come into special session at all" later in 2009 to readjust the 2009-10 budget, which starts July 1.

Twelve new charter applicants--three virtual

Twelve applications for new charter schools were submitted by the April 1 deadline, and three of those were for virtual schools. The DNews has an interesting if somewhat inaccurate story. I worked closely with Children First Utah, which applied for the Aspire Online Charter School. The story inaccurately says that Utah Connections Academy is the Children First-sponsored school.

The description of Utah Connections should be for Aspire, but that aside, the description of having learning centers spread across the state to allow low income and at-risk students access to online learning is correct. I wrote about a model school for this approach here.

Wasting my time

So I spent last week calling major school districts across the state. I talked with Granite, Jordan, Davis, Alpine, and others. I asked the following questions to find out what districts were doing to cope with budget cuts:

• Will you be shortening the school year?
• Will you be eliminating professional development days?
• Will you be freezing or cutting teacher salaries?
• Will you be changing any benefit programs to reduce benefits or increase employee cost?
• Will you be increasing class size?
• Will you be reducing any non-teaching personnel?
• Will you be making any other cuts to programs or general operations?

I had gathered lots of information that I was planning to share at the UAPCS meeting on Monday. Then, Sunday morning Amy Stewart beat me to the punch and published everything in the DNews.

Granite makes its funding cut decisions--and Nebo

Granite's district leadership met this week to review options and recommend budget cuts for next year. See the Trib story here.

Highlights:

• Teachers will lose some development days and the associated pay
• Teachers will not receive a cost-of-living increase
• Teachers will likely absorb any increase to benefit costs
• Non-teaching staff may be required to take a three day furlough
• Some district "specialists" that are licensed educators may be moved to open teaching positions
• Non-tenured teachers will know by May 5 whether or not they will be returning

Meanwhile, a little further south, "Nebo School District will impose four furlough days during the 2009-2010 school year in order to deal with $10 million in budget cuts from the state. Lana Hiskey, spokeswoman for the school district, said the days will affect every employee in the district, from administrators to janitors, and will save $2 million. The four days will be what used to be teacher quality days when students were not in school, so no school days will be affected."

Local papers cover local charters

Charters sometimes are the little schools that don't matter in the media. We are often treated seperately, as though we are somehow different and not of the public education system as a whole. So, it's nice to see smaller local papers take a more local approach, and target their education reporting on charter specifically, as the St. George Spectrum does today with Gateway Preparatory Academy.

State Retirement suffers in economic downturn

New schools, and since a new law passed giving schools another chance to join, potentially all schools that don't participate in state retirement may be giving the system a careful look to see if it makes sense to join that pension program, or to create a retirement program on their own.

I strongly favor avoiding state retirement for many reasons that have to do with cost, flexibility, and ownership. But I often hear from schools and teachers that URS is more secure and stable. Particularly during the economic hard times, people see the market driving down and their 401(k) statements doing the same, and for some reason believe that the state's pension program is the risk-free alternative.

In fact, the State Retirement lost $5.6 billion from 2007 to 2008, and has certainly lost more since, but "audited numbers are not available."

In fact, an employee owned and managed retirement plan like a 401(k) or 403(b) has tremendous advantages for security over state retirement. Employees can choose to invest their money in bonds, cash, gold, stocks, or a any mix at alll of those. That kind of flexibility makes an independent retirement program a much safer bet for employees and a less expensive yet richer benefit offering for schools.

Flawed background checks

An audit released yesterday shows that school districts, but mostly the bureaucracy--in this case the Departmet of Public Safety, aren't following through. Here's a KSL story.

Getting a background check is part of teacher's licensure process. In theory, every teacher with a current educator's license should have an up-to-date criminal background check. "A 1999 law directed the Utah Department of Public Safety to maintain a data file of school employees for cross-referencing against arrest. But that never happened, they say. The data file was supposed to be funded by fees collected by the Utah Office of Education."

Mountainville recently updated their policy to require the school to perform complete background checks on all non-licensed employees every few years. If the bureaucracies do their part on the criminal database and follow through, that will be sufficient. If not, then Mountainville and other schools may want to amend policies to double-check teachers' records to ensure compliance.

No waiver needed

On Friday, the State Board of Education adopted guidelines that will allow districts and charters, if they meet certain parental input and local approval guidelines, to shave up to three professional development and five school days from next school year to deal with budget reductions.

Fewer school days means that schools save a little money on utilities and janitorial cost, but the big savings would only come if teachers and other staff weren't paid for those days. Eight of a total 185 or so days is about a four percent salary savings--about $40,000 for a school with a $1 million teacher salary budget, plus associated taxes and benefits.

See DNews story.

**Update**
It's important to note here that, despite comments I've heard from charter people, the board is allowing but neither requiring nor recommending schools to make this change.

More news about district approaches to budget cuts

The Herald Journal (Logan) has in interesting piece on what their district is doing to cope with budget reductions. Highlights:

• Teachers could face a pay and work cut due to the loss of quality teaching funding for professional development
• The Cache District will probably not fund step and lane changes. Yet to be determined is whether employees will begin to be required to pay a portion of their insurance premiums.
• Some large cuts come in Capital Outlay and Transportation, two areas where charters aren't funded anyway. That means charters don't face those funding reductions
  

What some districts are cutting

From Today's Tribune:

Districts are preparing to deal with that cut in different ways. The Weber School District is delaying purchases of land, buses and textbooks; teachers will lose a day-and-a-half in paid planning time; and health insurance increases will likely be picked up by employees, said district spokesman Nate Taggart. Alpine School District is cutting 29 full-time administrative positions through attrition and reshuffling, scaling back a program that puts teaching assistants into classrooms, and slashing the district's supplies budget by 10 percent, said Rhonda Bromley, district spokeswoman.