Blogging Colleague

I'm not the only Loudoun School Board member with a blog, you know. Tom Reed started his long before I joined the Board. He's made a couple of very interesting updates in the past few days that you may be interested in:

Mr. Reed attended the recent National School Boards Association convention held March 28-April 1 and took advantage of many great sessions. I wish I had been able to take the time away from work myself to attend along with him.

In another post, Mr. Reed writes in favor of the interactive smart boards approved as part of our budget on Monday.

In his own post-budget meeting post, he outlines some specific proposals for an LCPS ombudsman.

Penguins Marching

In the days since I posted my call to Put the Penguins Back, a lot has happend. The Washington Post published a piece over the weekend, bloggers have picked it up nationwide, there is now a Facebook group devoted to the issue and tonight I read that Church Executive Magazine has picked up the story. Folks have written letters to the Superintendent and to the School Board, mostly opposing the decision to pull the book from the shelves.

If you're keeping score, we have three Board members supporting the Superintendent's decision, three Board members opposed, and three who haven't expressed their opinion yet. At next Tuesday's Board meeting I expect there will be folks coming to the dais to speak for and against, but anyone hoping for the Board to vote on the Superintendent's decison will be disappointed. While I disagree with the decision, the School Board should not make a practice of overturning the day-to-day decisions of the Superintendent outside of the normal channel of appeals, and I will not support such an effort in this case.

I continue to emphasize that an inadequate set of policies for book challenges led us to this situation, and I will post a proposal for revised policies on Tuesday February 26th for consideration at the March 4th Legislative/Policy committee meeting.

Gifted Discontent

Today's Washington Post includes a letter from a Loudoun County parent who isn't happy with the gifted programs that LCPS offers.

The gifted program in Loudoun County is an attempt at appeasement. The system officials do not want the parents of the bulk of the students pointing at the gifted program and screaming elitist nor do they want to try to justify large expenditures for a segment of the community.

Jay Mathews, the Post's resident education guru, calls the letter "an apt summary of the strains and stumbles that surround this issue:"

You put your finger precisely on the problem that gifted programs have throughout the country. Public school systems rarely have the expertise or the money to reproduce the kind of program you had as a child, and the number of students like you and your daughter who are ready for it is so small that it is hard to justify to taxpayers.

I wrote about the gifted programs in October as part of a back and forth with Loudoun's blogging gifted program critic, Elise at Loudoun Schools Feedback. She also talks about the Post article today in her blog, I give her credit for getting to it first this morning. Her assessment below:

This parent and teacher perspective, in our opinion, is absolutely accurate. And, while tepid and unimaginative, Jay's response is also absolutely accurate...a tremendous amount of potential will be added to Virginia's vast pool of the untapped.

To see my overall assessment of LCPS gifted programs, see my LCPS Gifted Programs post.

As with so many things, parents who feel impacted need to take ownership and take action. If you have the answers, you have a responsibility to get involved and share them with the rest of us.

• Take advantage of the resources made available on the LCPS Gifted and Talented Program webpage.
  
• Download and read the LCPS Local Plan for the Education of the Gifted.
• Talk to your LCPS School Board member about the changes you want.
• Attend meetings of the Gifted Advisory Committee (next meeting: Jan 10th, 7:00p)
  
• Speak during the public comment sessions of the school board meetings (2nd & 4th Tuesdays, 6:3opm)
• Find out if your Parent-Teacher organization offers after-school programs, and if so offer to teach a class for gifted students

The LCPS parent who wrote the letter refers to "system officials" as the cause of the problem. I'm certainly one of those "system officials," but more than that I'm just a dad and a neighbor who just goes to a lot of meetings. So are every other one of the "system officials." My interest isn't in appeasing, it's in trying to do the very best for every child in our community. We only have the funds to spend that the taxpayers give us, we only have the hours in the day that nature gives us, and so there is always opportunity for improvement. When Elise refers to "Virginia's vast pool of the untapped", I think of the many parents with the expertise and perspective and hours to give and I wonder how to tap into that.

Fellow School Board Blogger

I read on the Municipalist blog last night about a Jennifer Abell, member of the Charles County, MD Board of Education. Ms. Abell has a blog called "Ready, Willing and Abell." It looks like a very good example of what a local elected official's blog can be. I'm going to try to add some of the great features of Ms. Abell's blog to mine, such as a calendar, better links and more readable comments.

Forum & Convention Blogging

Today I'm going to three different events, concluding with the Virginia School Boards Association Annual Convention. First I'm going to Potowmack Elementary School for the opening of a new bank branch just for students. Then I'll join Vice-Chairman Tom Reed at a forum downtown called "Putting Race on the Table," an annual event sponsored by The Community Foundation to discuss the persistent minority achievement gap in the region.

Tomorrow I'll be at the VSBA convention all day long. During the day I will host a box-lunch roundtable for new school board members.

I'm going to make up for the fact that I probably won't be able to write any lengthy entries over the next couple of days by trying a little live-blogging from the road using Twitter. Let me know if you're following along.

Government Bloggers

I was introduced recently to a fledgling blog called "Municipalist" that profiles government bloggers. I've read all of his entries to date, and I'm surprised to read that officials who blog are very rare. The author of the blog contacted me and my colleague Tom Reed (who writes "Loudoun Schools Dais") to ask us some questions. He posted my interview on election day, and I invite you to have a look.

LCPS Gifted Programs

There is an interesting conversation about Gifted programs in LCPS over on Loudoun Schools Feedback. This is a blog that I read regularly for a critical parent's view of the system. I'm not going to respond directly to the points made on that blog because I don't want to undercut those views and because I'm not the LCPS PR department. I do want to add my thoughts to the blogosphere though.

First, for more information about our Gifted programs, see the Gifted Programs page on the LCPS website. You might be particularly interested in the Gifted Programs FAQ. Second, if this is an area that really concerns you, please get involved with the Gifted Advisory Committee, which meets next on November 15th.

LCPS and all other districts are required to issue a local plan for the gifted to the state every five years, and our report was issued just this past June. The Gifted Advisory Committee worked together on the report, which is on the LCPS website as Proposed Local Plan for the Education of the Gifted. When this plan was put forward I needed extra time to read and understand it, and it was held from the board agenda until I was able to sit down with Assistant Superintendent for Instructional Services Sharon Ackerman, Director of Curriculum and Instruction Peter Hughes and Gifted Program Supervisor Julie Kelly. We talked for over an hour about the LCPS approach to gifted programs.

I think that they are the best folks to represent to you what the program philosophy and execution is, so I refer you again to the LCPS website and the Gifted Advisory Committee if you want to learn more. For my part, I am satisfied that this is an area of considerable emphasis for LCPS and that at the administrative level we have the best people available working with the best available knowledge on the subject. As with many areas, other school districts come here to learn how to run a successful gifted program.

One note of interest is that our programs are different than in Fairfax County Public Schools, where kids are labled "Gifted & Talented" and then pulled into separate classrooms from their peers. I have friends with "GT" kids in the Fairfax system who find this to be a problem for a number of reasons. One is that gifted kids are not gifted in all areas. Another, that a kid who shows gifts at one age may have gotten ahead of peers who may well catch up in a few years. Most importantly, isolating kids as gifted apart from their peers in Fairfax has a tendency to create enormous pressure to get into Thomas Jefferson HS among that group, and no encouragement among students who aren't in it. Finally, the whole concept of separating these kids almost entirely from their peers is just elitist.

LCPS is also developing programs for kids who are "Twice Exceptional," meaning that while in one area they are gifted, in another they need special education services. This is leading-edge in public schools, and illustrates directly the incredible complexity surrounding kids' intellectual abilities.

One final note, especially for those of you who champion the SOLs and NCLB standardized testing. When every kid must pass the same test at the end of the year, every teacher must teach from the same text and our schools are judged entirely on how many kids pass and not on how many kids excel, the emphasis will be on the bottom line and not on the leading edge. This was the design of NCLB... to not allow schools to ignore the kids who are struggling while trumpeting the kids who are soaring by basing evaluations entirely on the kids who are struggling. I think there is plenty of room to argue in favor of this approach, but there is no room to deny that it is a shift in our emphasis in which some kids will win and some will lose.

So as you think and talk about Gifted programs in LCPS remember that this is a complex issue, that our folks are doing their very best for every child, and that there is an opportunity for you to get involved and make it better.

Living in LoCo

Tammi Marcoullier writes a Loudoun County blog called Living in LoCo for WashingtonPost.com, and I read it daily. Today she referenced a new blog by an LCPS parent called Loudoun Schools Feedback, and promoted it with the phrase:

“just the thing the school board doesn't want people reading”

I like Tammi’s blog, it is a good source of information. But it's old schtick to sell something with the exciting claim that it exposes the dark underbelly that some authority figure is trying to hide from you. The truth is that the School Board is just nine hard-working people, all of them parents of kids who are in or have been through the LC Public Schools, all of whom ran for the School Board hoping to make a positive difference, and none of them whom have been there for so long that they have a personal stake in masking problems.