Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Quote of the Day from Middletown




"This is really going to impact the quality of education in the district, I don't know how we are going to continue." - Middletown Board of Education Vice President Dan Skelton

Quoted from the Asbury Park Press while refering to the additional $2.1M school budget cuts imposed on the Middletown School District by the Town Committee.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Then get off the Board and let someone who can deal with it take over. He does not belong there.

Anonymous said...

At least Dan has experience working in education in our school district. I suspect that he actually attended a school board meeting before he was elected to it, unlike some of the current members.

The TC has recommended eliminating two administrators, one at North and one at South. Did they specify who would was going to take over their duties? Did they recommend specific people or positions? Did they determine that their jobs were not important? Both schools have two assistant principals for discipline. Perhaps the TC decided that only half the students need to be paid attention to. Maybe the assistant principals could just look at every other student that gets written up by a teacher. Or perhaps they can follow up on half the bomb threats with the police. The point is, what criteria did the TC use to suggest these cuts? Who on the TC has the expertise to tell the superintendent how to do her job? Do ANY of the members have ANY experience in education at all?

Or, as I suspect, were the recommendations purely political? Were they simply responding to the same uniformed voters that elected them and also have no concept of the importance of administrators to the educational process?

They suggest that they can save $230,000 by eliminating two administrators at $130,000 each. This simply is not true. The administrators are tenured in the district. They will simply bump a non-tenured administrator out of a job as the super shuffles people around to accommodate the change. And if the person that they bump is tenured as a teacher in the district, they will become a teacher again. The net effect will be eliminating a non tenured teacher to make room for the demotion of the administrator. So the actual savings by eliminating the two administrator’s positions will be the salary of two non-tenured teachers at the bottom of the pay scale, maybe $100,000 total, not the $230,000 they suggest.

Was this miscalculation a result of the Townships committee’s lack of knowledge of how the school system works? Or was it an intentional misrepresentation of the facts to placate the uniformed? As far as I am concerned, it’s unfortunate either way.