Six Pools in Three Schools * UPDATED

Several months ago I addressed the PWC School Board about their plans to build a pool in the 12th high school.  I asked how the annual cost of the pool could be justified when our classes are jammed to the gills, our schools are overcrowded, and our teachers are underpaid.  Over the past several months I’ve acknowledged that there is a need for addition year round indoor pool facilities in our county – that the facilities at Chinn, Dale City, and The Freedom Center are simply inadequate for a community of our size.  As I’ve explained multiple times to anyone willing to listen, I’m not opposed to a pool in the school, just to having the school division manage and pay for it.  To me, pools, and the programs in them like Mom and Me swimming classes or aquatic aerobics, are the responsibility of the Park Authority and not the school division.

I’ve changed my mind.

I don’t think the school division should build pools in the 12th, 13th, and 14th high schools, no mater who manages them or pays for them.

Closed Versus Open Meetings

For the past year I’ve been providing reports on what is discussed at school board meetings. At the start of each meeting the school board certifies in open session that nothing was discussed in closed session that ought to have been discussed in public session.  Several people have asked about this recently, so I wanted to explain this a bit.  My source for this explanation is the Digital Media Law Project’s page on Open Meeting Laws in Virginia.

Say Bye Bye to the 13th High School

Be forewarned.  Word on the street is that the 13th high school might not happen.  Not because of political pressure due to the controversy over the grandiose scale of the 12th high school and its pool, but because the county can’t afford to take on any more debt.

Bonds, Bonds, Bonds, and More Bonds…..

With Prince William County Taxpayers playing the role of the great American Jackalope

This debate over the pool in the 12th high school has opened so many questions and issues, I feel like I’m bouncing all over the place.

On February 19, 2013 Melissa Peacor, the Prince William County Executive, said the following regarding the pool that will be built in the 12th high school, “‘We have one planned for the Chinn expansion, so that would be saving us money”.

I find this rather interesting as one of the primary justifications cited by supporters of the school pool is the fact that Chinn is so overcrowded.  Apparently the PWC Government supports the school pool because they’d be able to put off expanding the pool at Chinn and would save money.  At least, they’d save money on the county side.  The school system would be paying for the debt service on the pool and and costs to operate the pool, so it wouldn’t save the school’s any money.   In fact, without additional funds from the county to pay for pool debt service and operations, our public school children will be paying for the pool with even higher class sizes and fewer resources for classrooms as that money will have to be diverted to debt service and operating the pool.

Taxpayers will be out more money either way.

One would assume that Ms Peacor, Chariman Stewart, the other members of the BOCS who have stated they support the pool, and those BOCS members who have remained silent on the issue of pool, are willing to increase the share of revenue the county provides to the school division to cover debt service and pool operating costs.  However, Ms Peacor’s statements appear to imply that either the county & BOCS hasn’t thought about it, or they plan to take money that would be spent on classrooms and teachers and students to pay for the pool.

Here’s another tidbit.

In November 2006 Prince William county voters overwhelmingly supported the following ballot referendum:

“BALLOT QUESTION: Shall Prince William County, Virginia, contract a debt and issue its general obligation capital improvement bonds in the maximum aggregate principal amount of $27,000,000 for the purpose of paying the cost to provide park improvements including the acquisition, construction, development, and equipping of park facilities in the County?”

$11 million of these bonds were supposed to be used for Indoor Center Expansions, as follows (see here):

This project proposes improvements to Ben Lomond Community Center, which mainly serves the western part of the County, and Chinn Aquatics and Fitness Center, which mainly serves the eastern part of the County.

The Ben Lomond Community Center would expand indoor program space with the addition of a wing, and would add new parent waiting areas,both indoor and outdoor, and a multipurpose room.

The Chinn Aquatics and Fitness Center would expand with a new aquatic pool with training lanes/open swim area, as well as increased multipurpose indoor space for recreation programs.

I don’t know if the improvements at Ben Lomond were completed, but the improvements to the Chinn pool never happened.   So……..

Were the bonds issued?  If so, what were they used for as the improvements at Chinn clearly didn’t happen?

If you’re sending notes to your BOCS member, you might want to ask them about all of this.

Is PWCS Wasting Taxpayer Money?

Is the Prince William County School Board spending our money wisely? I ask this, in part, because of the debate over the pool that will be built in the 12th high school.

Most of us aren’t so wealthy that cost doesn’t play a role in the decisions we make for our families.  When we need a new car, we tend to buy something we can afford that meets our families needs, even though the Maserati would be so cool. We don’t put in granite counter-tops or buy new stainless steel refrigerators unless we can afford them.

I expect that our elected school board members and school division employees will apply the same level of financial caution when they consider spending my tax dollars. The debate over the pool has made me question whether our elected officials are being good stewards of my money.

Until I spoke at the school board meeting last week and raised the issue of the pool, the school division had not admitted that a pool was included in the plans for the 12th high school.  Nowhere on the PWCS web site was there any reference to the pool. Estimates for the cost of building the pool in a school building could not be found on the PWCS web site nor had they been disclosed to the public or the school board. No estimates of the cost of operating the pool have been provided to the public or the school board. No plans for offsetting some of those costs by opening the pool to the public have been provided to the public or the school board. The pool was, and still is, a great big unknown.  It may well be one of the best kept, poorly planned secrets in the county.

I called each of our Board of County Supervisors to ask them about PWCS’s plans to put a pool in a school. Here’s what they said.

The Evil that Schools Do

Anyone who has paid the least bit of attention to education reforms in the past 20 – 30 years knows that rote memorization, or drill and kill, are the single worst things a developing child can be exposed to.   Not only does rote memorization take the joy out of learning, it undermines children’s ability to understand numbers and arithmetic operations.  Teachers forcing children to memorize math facts to automatic recall are committing what can only be characterized as educational malpractice.  In this modern era the focus in education is on deeper understanding, critical thinking, and developing 21st Century skills, not on creating a generation of robots who mindlessly repeat steps they don’t understand.

Too bad those promises aren’t based on actual science.  You know data, from actual studies, conducted by actual scientists and peer reviewed, that show that rote memorization undermines learning.  Because the studies, the actual science and data, show the opposite.

The Journal of Neuroscience recently published a study conducted by two professors of neuroscience from the University of Ontario. The scientists observed something rather amazing during their study:

Students who performed well on the math section of the PSAT showed more activity in brain areas linked to memory of math facts. Those with lower math PSAT scores had less brain activity in those areas and more in areas associated with processing number quantities.

The findings suggest that the high-achieving students knew the answers by memory, while lower-performing students were calculating even low-level problems.

Amazing, isn’t it?  Children who knew their math facts to automatic recall, or rote, did better in math than those who didn’t.  College professors and high school math teachers have observed this for years, but have been scoffed at, belittled, and worse by the folks peddling programs they claim foster deeper understanding and critical thinking.  Turns out the college professors and high school math teachers were right.

I don’t think anything will change as our country has sold it’s soul to the promise peddlers and has spent literally hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars developing techniques employed by these folks to undermine parent opposition to their programs.  Virginia has fully embraced these programs and openly advocates giving calculators to children, starting in kindergarten.

There’s just too much money and too much influence at the highest levels of government for anything to change.

Virginia Virtucon recently noted that students in Prince William County lag far behind students in Fairfax and Loudoun in their performance on the PSAT and in the number of students who qualify as National Merit Scholars.  Virtucon wanted to know why.

Prince William County is run by folks who honestly believe mastery of math facts and the standard algorithms are dangerous as they undermine student learning and critical thinking skills, and they teach that to our teachers.  The science says mastery of math facts and the standard algorithms actually improve student learning.  Virtucon, I think perhaps we’ve found part of the answer to your question.

I don’t expect anything to change.  Education in the United States and Virginia is run by folks who are making money by the boatload selling programs that they claim help students develop deeper understanding, critical thinking, and 21st Century skills.  Unfortunately, what they claim their programs offer will actually leave our children even further behind.  The evil that our schools do will live after them.

Va Dept of Ed Blows Off 60% of Virginia Students

This summer, after receiving a wavier from NCLB’s 100% passing requirements, the VA Dept of Ed established new goals for the percentage of students passing the SOL in all school divisions and public schools in the state.   The new targeted percentage passing was set for the state overall and for groups of students;  groups that are based on race.

The Va Dept of Ed took lots of flack from the public because the pass rate targets for 2013 – 2017 for Black and Hispanic students are lower than the pass rate targets for White and Asian students.   The Dept of Ed was accused of having lower expectations for Black and Hispanic students than they do for White and Asian students.

The VA Dept of Ed responded that the goals don’t reflect lower expectations for Black or Hispanic students as the final goal, 73% passing by 2017, is uniform across all groups. Instead of setting a uniform starting point that didn’t reflect actual pass rates, the Dept of Ed set the 2012 actual pass rates as the point from which annual increases are expected.  The goals for annual increases for Black and Hispanic students, according the the Dept of Ed, will be challenging but are achievable.

Unfortunately the Dept of Ed blew off White and Asian students as they aren’t expected to improve at all.

In 2012, 73% or more White and Asian students passed the state SOLs in every elementary grade level or high school subject tested.  For White and Asian students, who comprise 60% of Virginia students, no increase in the percentage of students passing the state SOLs is expected through 2017.  Here are the actual 2012 pass rates and the 2012 – 2017 targeted pass rates from the VA Dept of Ed for each racial group  Pass Rate Targets & 2012 Actual Pass Rates

According to the Va Dept of Ed, the percentage of Black and Hispanic students passing the SOL exams is expected in increase nearly 20% over the next 5 years, but no increase is expected for White and Asian students.   In these times of scarce resources, with pressure on school divisions to meet state pass rate targets, where do you think the resources will be allocated – to the schools that are struggling to meet the state pass rate targets or the schools that have already met them? If every child deserves an education that helps them achieve the most they can, is that fair?  Wouldn’t it be more fair for the state to expect the percentage of students passing the SOLs to increase in each and every group, not just in select groups?

If you have any concerns with the goals the Dept of Ed has established, you may want to contact your state representatives.

Mythbusting the Common Core

The pressure on Virginia to adopt the Common Core State Standards is intense, with the CCSS’s supporters actively spreading false information, grossly exaggerating it’s success, and misrepresenting who is behind the CCSS. Virginia isn’t likely to last long under such intense pressure, so us plain folk need to arm ourselves with knowledge and share our opinions with our state delegation.

Here’s the first of a series from Truth in American Education debunking the CCSS myths – the myth that the CCSS are “state led”.

Most of our elected delegates in Richmond, I’m sorry to say, are not well informed about the Common Core.  We need to educate them.

Here is a handy dandy one clink link to send an email to all of them.  Below the link is a list of their names and individual email addresses.

DelDBell@house.virginia.gov;DelSLandes@house.virginia.gov;DelCStolle@house.virginia.gov;delrrobinson@house.virginia.gov;DelJYost@house.virginia.gov;DelJMorrissey@house.virginia.gov;DelMKeam@house.virginia.gov;DelDHester@house.virginia.gov

Senators

Richard Black – district13@senate.virginia.gov
Charles Colgan –  district29@senate.virginia.gov
Toddy Puller – district36@senate.virginia.gov
Richard Stuart – district28@senate.virginia.gov
George Barker – district39@senate.virginia.gov

Delegates

Scott Lingamfelter – DelSLingamfelter@house.virginia.gov
Richard Anderson – DelRAnderson@house.virginia.gov
Luke Torian – DelLTorian@house.virginia.gov
Bob Marshall – DelBMarshall@house.virginia.gov
Jackson Miller – DelJMiller@house.virginia.gov
Dave Ramadan – DelDRamadan@house.virginia.gov
Tim Hugo – DelTHugo@house.virginia.gov
Mark Dudenhefer – DelMDudenhefer@House.virginia.gov

The VA DOE Loves Calculators

The VA DOE loves calculators, because arithmetic is hard and having calculators means teachers don’t have to teach arithmetic and the DOE doesn’t have to test for arithmetic fluency.

Trust Nothing You Hear from the Education Establishment

When it comes to education we parents have to trust that the teachers and education administrators in our public school systems won’t do anything that will harm our children.  While I think most of our classroom teachers have our children’s best interests at heart, I doubt everything I hear from the education administrators & bureaucrats.

I’m sorry to say that, but I have seen far too much evidence that the education administrators at the local, state, and federal level are corrupt and will willingly and knowingly lie or distort facts, to trust a word they say anymore.  Unfortunately, debunking their lies usually requires a degree of professional skepticism coupled with a willingness to dig into and understand details, something our elected officials are unwilling or unable to do.

The net effect is that the corrupt liars are setting education policy in this county, state, and country and our children are suffering because of it.