Tuesday, June 9, 2009

On Tap for Tonight

The School Board meets today starting at 4pm for a closed meeting and approval of the consent agenda. We break for dinner and then reconvene at 6:30pm, beginning with three recognitions:
  1. Award for Mary Kearney, Director of Special Education
  2. New National Board Certified Teachers (17 of them by my count)
  3. Shenandoah University Teacher of the Year
We have just one action item tonight:
Then on to some interesting information items:
This policy change would prohibit LCPS employees from extending holiday periods by taking personal leave immediately before or after. The Loudoun Education Association is lobbying against this change.
The question of whether to add additional grade point weighting to honors, dual enrollment and Academy of Science classes has had additional input since our last meeting. The Board will discuss tonight and vote on June 23rd.
In the wake of a very difficult round of boundary changes, and in anticipation of an Ashburn-Area High School boundary decision this fall, some members have proposed new boundary policies. The Legislative/Policy committee last week recommended a review of existing policies in their entirety instead of taking these on one by one. Expect to see a vote to suspend the rules and enact this recommendation tonight.
  1. Policy 2-3, Code of Ethics for School Board members
  2. Policy 2-6, Oath of Office
  3. Policy 2-8, Compensation
  4. Policy 5-45, Classroom placement of twins
  5. Policy 8-61, Student Spech and Expression
These changes are largely just to bring our policies up to date with existing legislation. There are also a number of changes to Policy 2-3 raised by Mr. DuPree.

Somewhere in there we'll break for another closed meeting at 8:45.

5 comments:

  1. "Expect to see a vote to suspend the rules and enact this recommendation tonight."
    So does this mean that the School Board will do what they want regarding Ashburn area High Schools, and will just make the rules to fit what they decide? Aren't rules meant to be followed? Not changed to fit what the School Board decides? Which we all know is to keep Lansdowne at SB while seats go empty in Leesburg high schools, and Ashburn Farm is split apart, most likely between 3 high schools!!!!

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  2. Mr. Stevens, do you mean suspend the rules to vote on the recommendation that the boundary policies be reviewed, or that boundaries be adopted?

    Your post reads as if the former is what you mean, or at least I hope so.

    Thank you.

    Barbara Munsey.

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  3. It would be nice to have some community members on this committee, like they have on curriculum committees. At the very least, someone to advocate for special ed students and their families would be a welcome relief - this was a topic of conversation at special ed town hall meeting. It concerns me to hear the conversations about grandfathering students when special ed parents haven't been advised to bring up this topic with their IEP teams and are not advised of the possibility of a special exception

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  4. Let's see: Dr. Hatrick - 49 travel days; teachers - 3 personal leave days. Would the change apply to administrator vacation and travel days as well?

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  5. come on, now , anon...Dr. Hatrick's salary is frozen! We can't expect him to ALSO abide by the teacher's personal day rule, too! In all fairness, he's only making about 4 times my salary and gets his car paid for...

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