Does Education Need To Help Boys Too?

When schools report their scores to the WCUSD board, I many times will ask for break outs on gender differences. We get information on race, economic status, special education, english language learners etc.. The state doesn’t require a breakout on gender.

Too many, including at least one WCUSD board member refuse to acknowledge what the statistics say. Boys are being left behind. Today in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune was a piece that tells the truth.

Here is part of it:

“The good news is that reading scores for 9- and 13-year-olds are the highest ever according to results released last week from the 2008 National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The bad news is that boys trail girls in reading performance at all age levels. The gap at age 9 is 8 points, at age 13 is 8 points, and at age 17 is 11 points. This is not a new trend-boys have been scoring lower than girls on U.S. Department of Education reading tests for more than 30 years.”

We need to acknowledge it and work to help every child, including boys.

Which Teacher Will Get The Lay Off Notice

Unfortunately, we know the answer.

This cartoon was published byLAObserved.com. WCUSD has many wonderful teachers. We do have a few bad ones and once they have tenure it is almost impossible to protect our classrooms from them.

John Shewmaker, Leave My Kids Out Of It!

For over a year I have been attacked falsely on various blogs. These attacks were always anonymous. Today, I finally found out whom the coward was that was doing it. As it turns out that someone was John Shewmaker. John Shewmaker is a failed several times over school board candidate and gadfly that is also the father of the newest school board member Jessica Shewmaker.
 
I set up this blog as a way to inform voters about decisions of the school board, partially as a response to the secretive blog postings. John has set up a site 
 
It is a slash and burn personal vendetta site. He has posted some of the comments on other websites. That’s how I found out who it was.
 
I would like to answer all the questions he raises if anyone wants to know the answers. But his blog and responses are so full of inaccuracies it is hard to know where to begin. There is no quote about welfare and drugs. There is no reprimand by a judge. From what I’ve been told CalPers rules are different than he states. Convicted felons can run for office in California after their term is complete. I have criticized bond spending and in fact voted against several projects. The list of make believe positions he cites go and on and on.
 
I’m happy to discuss all those things publicly with John or Jessica.
 
I do want to express my outrage of dragging my children into the long running political dispute he has with me. I love both my kids. We waited along time for them.
Shewmaker has attacked their names, their schooling and things that we would have stopped had he been a third grader in our classrooms.

When they are adults, I hope we would have raised our children to be able to defend themselves in the court of public opinion, if they choose to be in it. But they are 8 and 5 and don’t deserved to be attacked in cyberspace.
 
John you may not like me, my politics and you may secretly run around lying about me. Have at it. I’m adult and can deal with the malevolent lies from an overly obsessive malcontent.
 
But John, leave my kids alone. A decent person would.

WCUSD Majority Support Tax Increases

At the last meeting of the West Covina Unified School District the board majority, (Jessica Shewmaker, George Fuller and Camie Poulos) voted to support a resolution to support “new revenue sources” to solve the state’s budget problem. The resolution itself contains no effort to streamline bureaucracy or cut out waste in the budget, the only specific solution was “new revenue sources”. In other words tax increases. One board member, who has a history of supporting tax increases claimed he wanted more federal monies, like more federal intervention through NCLB is the answer. Right.

Just so you know some of the tax increases under consideration include eliminating the home mortgage interest deduction, raising taxes on gas, sales tax etc….

While, the Governors budget is a mess and should be defeated or changed, the answer is putting more money in the classroom, not raising taxes on working people.

Convicts to run West Covina Unified?

The new board majority thinks convicted felons, those that have abused their spouse or child and those that leaked information sould be board President. I’m not making this up.

 Three Board members (Jessica Shewmaker, Camie Polous and George Fuller) changed board policy over the last month to automatically rotate the top positions of the board like President, Vice-President and Clerk. On the surface this seems a “fair” way to operate. In practice it hurts the district.

WCUSD recently had a Board President who refused to agendize items the Superintendent needed the board to vote one and micromanaged personnel decisions. It got so bad that the board had a Past president attend meeting to “babysit” him and to ensure that he wouldn’t continue to be abusive.

The Board Majority decided a criteria for clerk.

I moved that we add this to the policy

“This policy applies to all board members unless they have been convicted of a felony, have a restraining order against them in place, committed violence upon a spouse or child, leaked confidential closed session information, or have violated the Ralph M. Brown Act. ”

Obviously, I thought we should have a standard that excludes some from automatic ascension to Clerk and then President. By a 3-2 vote the Board Majority thinks otherwise.

The dirty secret behind the Edison School Renewal.

West Covina’s top performing school’s charter was renewed last week. While the vote was 5-0, the vote doesn’t end the problem with the numbers the district is using. At the beginning the District claimed the the Edison School was costing the district over a million dollars. They and a few board members claimed that this money was coming at the expense of our other students.

From the beginning, I never believed the numbers. The district got there numbers by dividing the total number of kids by all the money and coming up with a number. 

The district could never come up with what the actual costs were. This always puzzled me. If something was costing us over a million dollars, why couldn’t we come up with the proof?

Still the three board opponents of Edison held fast to the district’s logic.  The way I explain the district’s formula is like this. Four people go out to dinner and three of them share a bottle of wine and have a night cap. The one friend doesn’t. At the end they get the bills and say “let’s just divide the total by 4″. That isn’t the fair way to determine a food bill, but is especially not the fair way to figure out school busgets.

The final proof that the figures didn’t add up are in the final contract itself. Edison is going to pay over 500,000 dollars but well short of a million. Yet, the contract says it is “cost neutral”. Huh?

The answer came from the business office that the contractis cost neutral depending on how you allocate the money.

That was the whole point. The original allocation was being used for political purposes rather than being a true indication of what it the school costs.  Funny allocations have no place in WCUSD.

Why a WCUSD Blog?

Why a blog about WCUSD?

It is  pretty simple. I want more people to know what is going on in the West Covina Unified School District. A few weeks ago we had a discussion as a board about televising or webcasting our board meetings. For along time I was concerned about the cost of televising our meeting, but with the new technologies available.  A majority of the board decided that we shouldn’t make the board meetings more available, including board members that claimed during their elections that they were for televising meetings.

I have to think they have some reason not to let the public see the whole story. There simply is no excuse for not making information more available. Last year the board agreed with my suggestion to put our audio recordings of meeting on the web. Unfortunately, hearing a meeting several months or weeks after it happens is not as good as seeing it first hand.

This is my attempt to let voters know what is going on. Everything is of course my opinion only. If you have questions please email them to me and I will answer them.