In some very telling responses tonight at the biweekly school board meeting, we saw a perfect example of what’s been wrong with our school district for so many, many years.
Two questions were posed at public oral communications. One had to do with the idea of staggering administrative evaluations and contracts so that they don’t fall at the same time. The other was a suggestion that the BUSD should accelerate teacher retirements in order to “save money.”
In her answer to the latter suggestion, Debbie Kutka agreed that anything “we” can do to get more “veteran teachers” to leave early would be a good thing, and that there could be a way to find some substantial savings there.
But when she responded to the idea of staggering the adminstrators’ contracts, she chirped up that this was something we needed to do, because we don’t want to lose any of our valued people in this area.
The obvious question is, what kind of employer would be actively encouraging their most experienced and “veteran” rank-and-file employees to take off and leave? Not a very wise one.
And why is retaining adminstrators being done in preference, so much so that we need to make sure they don’t all cancel out at the same time for some bureaucratic reason?
Don’t you love the priorities here?
Talk about irony. In management-heavy school districts like Burbank, the teachers are always dispensable, and the older ones who know the most are the deadest weight of all.
But lord, we do need to protect those bosses…
For the last 25 years, Burbank has had the kind of inanely run school district that Burbank deserves. Just no judgment, anywhere.
Let’s see. We have janitor bosses who sexually harass their secretaries with e-mails and get away with it, newly-built schools that don’t drain right, wacko teacher spy-in schemes, bigoted school board members who manipulate the system to get freebies for their own kids, a Board that wants to spend $500,000 to “mount” projectors that most teachers don’t want to do, the works.
And now– at the same meeting– they talk about wanting to Kindle the kids with ridiculous “digital” textbooks, because, as Larry Appelbaum puts it, textbooks are going out of style because kids don’t get their information that way any more.
Oh yeah? They do if you make them. Why even teach them to read then? If many kids had their way, they wouldn’t be getting their information anywhere near a school, and it has been that way since before the printing press.
Who cares what the kids want? Just who is the boss, especially when it comes to reading at school lessons? Or are these a bunch of miracle children, who don’t ever have to write things down any more. Glory be!
We admit, we are truly inspired at the sight of all these kids now “reading” their newly-acquired digital toys around town instead of those silly books — NOT !!
This Kindle idea is also the biggest racket since someone sold the district on putting tennis courts on top of an unneeded, multi-story student parking lot. It’s a windfall for the publishers, and a real drag for parents, who will be forced to buy reams of paper and overpriced ink cartridges in order to make up for the loss of paper texts.
Actually, there will be someone making something off this deal– and that’s the publishers, who will be making out like bandits with this pawn-off of their manufacturing responsibilities.
And what about the families that don’t have up to date computer equipment? Or the busy teachers who don’t want to have to worry about manning an in-class laser printer all day, churning out these “digital” texts?
God, these people– they’re just really reckless in their inanity. Is this the best we can do?
