After An Educator's Journey
Out of the classroom & into the universe
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Once upon a time, I taught 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders. Now I’m retired and working on new ventures.
Category: Local Education
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Budget season is going full tilt in Lowell and the outlook is definitely not very palatable. The School Department is running on fumes: no K-8 libraries this past academic year, proposed cuts to fine arts positions, proposals to cut services for students in guidance, behavioral supports, Special Education. Who knows where it will end? Well,…
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When I first met my mother-in-law, I was totally fascinated by the organization she used to allocate family finances, the system we fondly refer to as the “envelop system”. My mother-in-law would take an amount of money each week, break it down into smaller portions, and put each portion in its own coin-sized manila envelop…
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There is so much to digest from last evening’s Funding Forum. So I’m just going to start with one aspect of Massachusetts school funding – the poverty level calculations. Here’s a bit of recent history. In 2014, the year prior to when I retired, the poverty level in Lowell overall was 75.1%. It was called…
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As almost everyone with a stake in public education knows, Massachusetts funding of Public School education is in dire need of updating. Since 1993 when Education Reform and the Foundation Budget calculations were developed, there has been little done by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to update the funding formulae and account for changes in costs…
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This morning I spotted an article in the NYTimes, A Beginner’s Guide to Getting Into Podcasts. Podcasts are au courant these days and it seems as if everyone is starting one. Hey, maybe that explains why my partner-in-podcasting, Mickie Dumont and I have one. Around the time that the Janus Decision was handed down by…
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The Lowell Public Schools has a racially and ethnically diverse student population. This chart generated by Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) gives some insight into that. The teaching workforce, however, looks like this: While the school building administrators (Principals and LSAA) looks like this: With all the research – Google to find…
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About two weeks ago, the Massachusetts Legislature failed once again to update school funding formulae known as the “Foundation”. In my opinion, this is not only a huge disappointment, it is a disservice to students, families, and public schools in 351 cities and towns across Massachusetts. Here in Lowell, the erosion of school services and…
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We are about a week beyond the Foundation Budget Review Commission (FBRC) disappointment. Last evening, as I listened in to a conference call sponsored by Mass Education Justice Alliance (MEJA), this question was posed: What we are missing because of underfunded schools? When I left active teaching in 2015, I know that underfunding was impacting…
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Lowell appears to have established a personnel practice that is not, in my opinion, a winning strategy for attracting, and more importantly, keeping the best administrators to serve a large and complex school system. The last two School Superintendents in Lowell had tenures lasting 3 years. When these former administrators first were appointed, the…
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