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Keystone
State Education Coalition
PA
Ed Policy Roundup September 2, 2016:
Summer’s
Fading; Charter Conversation Warming Up
Southeastern PA Regional 2016 Legislative
Roundtable: William Tennent High School (Bucks Co.) SEP 22, 2016 • 7:00 PM -
9:00 PM
Auditor General DePasquale slated to be Keynote
Speaker
School
Leaders from Northampton, Lehigh, Bucks, Montco, Chesco, Delco and Philadelphia
Counties encouraged to attend.
More
info & Registration: https://www.psba.org/event/2016-legislative-roundtable/
COUNCILWOMAN GYM, POWER TO HOST CITY HALL
EVENTS TO SUPPORT FAIR FUNDING FOR PA SCHOOLS
SEPTEMBER 12: SING-IN; SEPTEMBER 13: FAIR
FUNDING LAWSUIT HEARING
Philadelphia
City Council
More
info and RSVP: http://phlcouncil.com/fairfundinged
The74 by MARK KEIERLEBER mark@the74million.org mkeierleber September 1, 2016
When Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf announced a new division within the state education department last week geared specifically to help and improve the state’s charter schools, both charter advocates and skeptics were surprised. They didn’t know the announcement was coming, and even less what to expect. The news dropped during a moment of intense scrutiny for the commonwealth’s charter school sector, though Executive Deputy Secretary David Volkman said planning for the new four-person team has been in the works since 2015. There was the John Oliver sketch on HBO’s “Last Week Tonight”, which placed a spotlight on fraud and financial mismanagement by charter operators, including in Pennsylvania. There was a report by the Pennsylvania School Boards Association outlining a need for more strict accountability and transparency in charter schools. And the state auditor general, a leading skeptic in Pennsylvania’s charter school debate, released an audit that criticized the state’s “faulty” charter school law and the state education department’s “inconsistent, confusing, and conflicting” process to handle payment disputes between charters and local school districts.
Perhaps hitting closest to the new division’s focus, however, was a federal tax fraud case. On the same day the governor’s office announced the change within the education department, the founder and former CEO of a Pennsylvania online charter school pleaded guilty to diverting more than $8 million from the school.
Why
Philadelphia charter schools have sparked recent controversy
Daily Pennsylvanian By CHARLOTTE LARACY August
31, 2016
Charter schools, a mainstay in
Philadelphia and other big cities, have become one of the few national issues
embraced by politicians on both side of the aisle, including President Barack
Obama, Mitt Romney, Cory Booker and Donald Trump. But recent
studies by civil rights organizations like the NAACP and a scathing piece by
comedian John Oliver on HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” have questioned the
effectiveness of charters nationally. The Movement for Black Lives, a group of
50 organizations assembled by Black Lives Matter, recently called for a
moratorium on charter schools, stating they have worsened segregation by
how the schools choose and discipline students. Seventy percent of black charter
school students nationally attend “intensely” minority charter schools, about
twice as many as the number of intensely segregated black students in
traditional public schools, according to a 2009 study by the University of
California, Los Angeles’ Civil Rights Project. Graduate School of Education
professor Sigal Ben-Porath said charter schools often perpetuate
segregation in Philadelphia in the hopes of closing the achievement gap, but
result in a “back to basics” style of learning that focuses on improving
standardized test scores and less on art and music.
Why are national civil rights groups
calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion?
NAACP and Movement for Black
Lives point to concerns over transparency and management
The notebook by Darryl Murphy September
1, 2016 — 8:04am
As students prepare to head back
to school in Philadelphia, the often-contentious public conversation
about charter schools has reignited, with calls for a moratorium on their
expansion by both the NAACP and the Movement For Black Lives coalition. Both
organizations contend that charter schools are part of an effort to
privatize education at the expense of poor, urban Black and Latino communities. The groups complain that
charters divert funds from schools that need them, lack transparency,
and lack community involvement. This approach, according to the NAACP’s
resolution passed in August, “puts students and communities at risk of
harm, public funds at risk of being wasted, and further erodes local
control of public education.” To become
policy, the resolution would require approval by the NAACP's national
board in the fall.
In recent years, charter schools
have become a hot-button issue because they are privately managed, but funded
with public dollars. Those looking for reasons for the controversy need to
look no further than Philadelphia, where charters and the School District must
share a pot of money inadequate to the city's educational needs.
National Education Policy Center by Bruce D. Baker, Gary Miron December 10, 2015
This research brief details some
of the prominent ways that individuals, companies, and organizations secure
financial gain and generate profit by controlling and running charter schools.
To illustrate how charter school policy functions to promote privatization and
profiteering, the authors explore differences between charter schools and traditional
public schools in relation to three areas: the legal frameworks governing their
operation; the funding mechanisms that support them; and the arrangements each
makes to finance facilities. They conclude with recommendations for policies
that help ensure that charter schools pursue their publicly established goals
and that protect the public interest.
Four major policy concerns are
identified:
1. A substantial share of public
expenditure intended for the delivery of direct educational services to
children is being extracted inadvertently or intentionally for personal or
business financial gain, creating substantial inefficiencies;
2. Public assets are being
unnecessarily transferred to private hands, at public expense, risking the
future provision of “public” education;
3. Charter school operators are
growing highly endogenous, self-serving private entities built on funds derived
from lucrative management fees and rent extraction which further compromise the
future provision of “public” education; and
4. Current disclosure requirements
make it unlikely that any related legal violations, ethical concerns, or merely
bad policies and practices are not realized until clever investigative
reporting, whistleblowers or litigation brings them to light.
Guest Column: The other side of the
virtual charter school story
Delco
Times By Tillie Elvrum, Times Guest Columnist POSTED: 09/01/16, 9:54 PM EDT
Tillie Elvrum is president of the
Washington, D.C.-based PublicSchoolOptions.org, a national alliance of parents
that supports and defends parents’ rights to access the best public school
options for their children.
A recent guest
column in your paper by Lawrence Feinberg about public virtual charter
schools was filled with half-truths that have been regurgitated time and time
again. We really aren’t surprised, then, that lawmakers in Harrisburg are
pursuing funding cuts for these schools that serve as a lifeline to children
across Pennsylvania. So let’s address
his points and examine public virtual charters with a more fair perspective. Virtual schools spend money on advertising:
Pennsylvania state law requires virtuals to be statewide schools open and
accessible to all students, no matter where they live. However, school
districts don’t allow virtual schools to contact their students. Until
districts change this unfair policy virtuals will be forced to spend money on
advertising to satisfy the law. For-profits
are unique to virtuals: This defies common sense and is laughable. The $14
billion textbook industry isn’t giving away its curriculum for free to school
districts. Things like school construction, supplies, desks, and food services
are paid to for-profit companies. Singling out one company over another isn’t
painting a clear picture.
Post Gazette Letter September 2, 2016 12:00 AM
By TILLIE
ELVRUM, President, PublicSchoolOptions.org,
Colorado Springs, Colo.
The writer is a former Pennsylvania cyber charter school parent.
The writer is a former Pennsylvania cyber charter school parent.
The Post-Gazette’s Aug. 28
editorial “Charter School Caper” once again shows your editorial
board’s bias against charter schools. In it, you call for more supervision of
charters and cite Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale’s call for an
overhaul of the state’s charter school law. Meanwhile, those of us in the
charter school community are still awaiting your editorial that will call for
reforms in traditional public schools in the wake of the Penn Hills audit done
by Mr. DePasquale earlier this year. In
his Penn Hills audit, Mr. DePasquale found the district had an $18.8 million
deficit, according to the Post-Gazette, and called the findings “shocking” and
among the worst in his time as auditor general.
And let’s put to rest the idea that virtual charters are a financial
drain on districts. Of Pennsylvania’s 1.7 million students in public schools,
only about 40,000 attend virtual schools. State spending on virtuals amounts to
less than 1 percent of all public school spending in the state. Oversight of virtuals is something parents
take great pride in, too. The great thing about charter schools is parents have
the ultimate accountability. If we don’t like the school, we can choose to go
elsewhere. That’s how it should be all for public schools. It’s common sense
that seems to go ignored by many, including the Post-Gazette.
Letter to the Editor: Auditor General got
it wrong on charter schools
Delco Times Letter by Dr.
David Clark POSTED: 09/01/16, 9:54 PM EDT
Dr. David Clark, Chief Executive
Officer, Chester Community Charter School
To the Times:
The school choice movement in
Pennsylvania has been the victim of such continual and unjust maligning that I
am, regrettably, no longer shocked to read the fictional accusations spewed by
many of our commonwealth’s policymakers. Indeed, when Auditor General Eugene
DePasquale recently accused Chester Community Charter School of improperly receiving
lease reimbursements, it was not simply another falsehood in the long and
abusive pattern, but a reprint of assertions debunked years ago. When the Auditor General released his novel
of a report on charter schools back in 2013, even the Pennsylvania Department
of Education dissented and stated the lease reimbursements to CCCS were fair
and, in fact, an element of the charter school law dating to 2001. They are an
essential element of the funding formula created by the charter school law — a
formula that allows public charter school students to be funded at a mere 65
percent to 75 percent of what is going to other students in the same districts.
Yet for reasons unclear to me,
the Auditor General recently rereleased these same flawed findings.
The Great Charter Schools
Debate
With charter school legislation on the ballot this year,
the fight between the pro-charter and anti-charter faithful is reaching a fever
pitch. Here’s what you need to know.
By Rachel Slade | Boston
Magazine | September 2016
This fall, it’s going to get ugly in Massachusetts. We’re
prepping for a projected $30 million public fight with all the attendant
invective and hyperbole, so keep the kids away from the TV. That’s what I hear
again and again as I travel from the State House to Roslindale schools, from
noodle shops in Jamaica Plain to downtown nonprofits, Brighton coffee shops,
Harvard professors’ offices, and drab union halls in Dorchester. The proverbial
poo’s gonna fly, people warn me. And none of this has anything to do with
Trump’s comb-over. In November,
Massachusetts voters will decide whether the Department of Elementary & Secondary
Education (DESE) can raise the cap on the number of charter schools allowed, or
increase enrollment in existing charters in underperforming districts. If the
referendum is approved, the city of Boston—which currently has 27 Commonwealth
charter schools that operate independently of the district and educate about 14
percent of the student population—will likely see an increase in charters over
the next several years. It’s an advance that charter advocates firmly champion
but opponents see as another little push in the direction of a very steep
cliff.
Lower Merion school tax hike brought down
by aviation lawyer
Inquirer by Kathy Boccella, Staff Writer Updated: SEPTEMBER 2, 2016 —
1:08 AM EDT
To those he has vanquished in
court - the aviation giants that have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to
his crash-victim clients, the critics he has sued for libel, and most recently
the Lower Merion School District, ordered this week to revoke a tax hike - it
may come as a surprise that lawyer Arthur Alan Wolk loves puppies. "She's the sweetest thing on the
planet," Wolk said, fussing over his new 13-week-old golden retriever
during a phone call Wednesday from his vacation home in Del Mar, a beach town
near San Diego. The pup is a replacement
for his beloved Boo, who died March 1 at age 9. "I'm still grieving for
her," said Wolk, 72 and semiretired. He wrote about Boo's early years in a
book, Recollections of My Puppy, and donated the proceeds to the
Philadelphia Animal Welfare Society. Yet
the persona Wolk projects in a courtroom is less playful golden than pugnacious
pit bull - an image he has underlined with the lawsuit against the Lower Merion
school system, a taxpayer victory thought to be unprecedented in Pennsylvania.
Wolk, who lives in Gladwyne, argued that the district misled township residents
into believing a large tax increase was needed to avoid a deficit this year
when school officials were actually hiding millions in surpluses.
Read judge's order to kill school tax hike
Inquirer by Joseph
N. DiStefano, Staff Writer @PhillyJoeD Updated: SEPTEMBER 1, 2016 —
4:51 PM EDT
As Kathy Boccella reported in Thursday's Inquirer, Montgomery
County Judge Joseph A. Smyth "ordered the Lower Merion School District to
revoke this year's tax hike, saying the district misled taxpayers by projecting
large budget deficits to justify raising taxes... when it actually had socked
away millions." Read Judge Smyth's
decision, in a case brought by Gladwyne lawyer Arthur Wolk and two other
taxpayers, here: http://media.philly.com/documents/08-30-16+Decision+re+Pet+Inj+Relief.pdf
Editorial: School boards get lesson in
economics
Delco Times Editorial POSTED: 09/01/16,
9:53 PM EDT | UPDATED: 38 SECS AGO
A ruling by a Montgomery County
judge this week should send shivers down the spine of every school board member
in Delaware County – and the rest of the state as well. Judge Joseph A. Smyth ordered the Lower
Merion School District to rescind the 4.4 percent tax hike it enacted, and told
it any hike must be capped at 2.4 percent.
But he actually said a lot more than that. Basically, the judge agreed with
lawyer Arthur Wolk, who filed a class-action lawsuit against the district and
its budget practices last February. In short, Wolk believes the district was
“cooking” the books. And the judge
agreed with him. The judge said the
district was misleading taxpayers by projecting big deficits, thus
necessitating tax hikes, at a time when it actually was stashing away huge
budget surpluses. And he says it’s been doing it for years. Of course, the school district sees it
differently and vowed to appeal the ruling. We wouldn’t expect anything else.
Ruling that overturns property tax hike
could trigger additional legal challenges
FOX43 POSTED 5:52 PM,
SEPTEMBER 1, 2016, BY FELIX RODRIGUES LIMA
HARRISBURG, Pa. - A recent court
ruling overturning an exemption granted by the Pennsylvania Department of
Education to a school district could prompt taxpayers in other parts of the
state to file similar legal challenges, education experts said Thursday. The ruling by a Montgomery County judge
overturned a property tax increase exemption that the department granted to the
Lower Merion School District, saying it had plenty in reserves to cover the
costs that required a tax hike. It is under appeal in Commonwealth court. Under state law, the exemption can be granted
to districts that show their current budget cannot cover additional costs for
pensions and special education. The ruling reverts Lower Merion's property tax
increase back to 2.4 percent, the maximum allowed under state law. "If you have big sums of money
accumulated in reserves and you're also requesting more from taxpayers, that's
where things don't add up," James Paul of the Commonwealth Foundation,
which supports the ruling, said. Education
officials called the ruling unprecedented, saying it's the first time they can
remember a judge taking this kind of action on a tax increase imposed by a
school district.
In Philly schools, attendance up
Inquirer by Kristen A. Graham, Staff Writer Updated: SEPTEMBER 2, 2016 —
1:08 AM EDT
More Philadelphia public school
students are attending school most of the time, Superintendent William R. Hite
Jr. said Thursday. Almost 4,000 more
students were marked present 95 percent of the time in the 2015-16 school year
than reached that mark in the prior year, Hite said at a news conference. The percentage of city schoolchildren showing
up for school 95 percent of the time jumped to 42 percent, from 39 percent in
2014-15 and 38 percent the year before. Philadelphia's schools, like many
urban districts, have historically struggled with chronic absenteeism. Hite
said the percentage of students who miss more than 10 percent of school days
was down by 10 percent. District officials could not immediately make the
actual figures available.
Attendance rising at Philly schools
WHYY Newsworks BY AVI WOLFMAN-ARENT SEPTEMBER 1, 2016
School attendance is up in
Philadelphia, at least according to the school district’s preferred metric. About 4,000 more Philadelphia students
attended school 95 percent of the time last year, the district said Thursday. During the 2015-16 school year, 42 percent of
district students attended school 95 percent of the time. That’s up 3
percentage points from 2014-15 and 4 percentage points from 2013-14. “Nothing is more critical than our young
children attending school,” said Superintendent William Hite. “When children
attend school, they learn to read.” An array of research —
including at least one study conducted in
Philadelphia — shows strong ties between school attendance and student
outcomes. Most states and districts track a statistic known as "average
daily attendance," which calculates the total number of students against
the total number of school days. Under Hite, the district has focused instead
on students reaching the 95 percent threshold. The superintendent believes that
figure does a better job showing how many students miss a significant chunk of
the school year.
Which
Lehigh Valley schools have the best graduation rates?
By Eugene Tauber The Morning Call September 1, 2016
If the primary function of a
school is to educate students for 13 years, the primary proof of its success is
the high school diploma. The
Pennsylvania Department of Education tracks graduation rates for each high
school and school district. Graduation rates, like most education statistics,
are not as simple as they might appear. There are students moving from building
to building and district to district. The state attempts to track all this
using a “cohort” of students that is attributed to each school. This report is
based on the five-year cohort report for 2014-2015. The national graduation rate is
currently 82 percent according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
In Pennsylvania the rate is 87.1 percent. Of the Lehigh Valley’s 17 districts,
four of them fall below the state average: Easton, Bethlehem, Pen Argyl and
Allentown, in descending order.
Lancaster Online Editorial by The
LNP Editorial Board September 2, 2016
THE ISSUE: The School District of
Lancaster is appealing a federal court ruling allowing refugee students to
attend McCaskey High School instead of an alternative school. Six refugees had
filed suit against the district, which places students who are 17 and older with
limited credits in an accelerated program so they can graduate by their 21st
birthday. All six students fell into that category. (One student was never
enrolled.) The policy is not unique to refugees. But the refugee students in
this case said learning at the alternative school was “impossible.”
Qasin Hassan and the others fled
places and living conditions most of us would have a difficult time
reconstructing in our worst nightmares. Hassan,
now 17, left his home country of Somalia after terrorists murdered his father. He is here now, in Lancaster, fighting for
what he thought came with the privilege of American citizenship — a decent
education. And he is not in the fight alone.
Hassan is among six refugee students who sued the school district this
summer. In their suit the students said
the district failed to meet its legal obligations by delaying or denying them
enrollment, and subsequently placing them in an alternative school where
language barriers made it “impossible” to learn.
Lancaster Online by TIM BUCKWALTER | Data
Journalist September 2, 2016
Lancaster County has more than
83,000 students in elementary through high school, and 16,000 of them —
or nearly one in five — attend a private or parochial school. That’s according to data from the state
Department of Education, which tracks enrollment at public and private schools
statewide. It’s no secret that the
county has an array of private schools, but it may surprise some that there are
more than 300 of them, due in large part — but not solely — to the
county’s substantial
and growing Amish and Mennonite populations. Over nine years, private school enrollment
here grew by about 5 percent (800 students), even as public school enrollment
ebbed by about 5 percent (3,700 students), an LNP analysis of state data finds. The number of private schools increased by
about 30, from 280 to 310, during that time.
Most of the county's private schools are small. All but 33 have fewer
than 100 students. Average enrollment is 51, and the median is 28. The figures are for 2014-15, which is the
most recent year for which private-school data is available. There were 67,619 public school students here
and 15,943 in private schools that year.
“School Solicitor Daniel Fennick has
written to Tribune Direct asking who authorized the mailer and to the Bethlehem
postmaster asking to a file a complaint over someone posing as the school. When Petrillo resigned, she raised concerns about
"unethical" practices and Atiyeh's involvement with the school and
its board. Atiyeh, who last week hung up on a reporter, has refused to discuss
the matter.”
Inside look: Check out Innovative Arts
Academy on Tuesday
By Sara K.
Satullo | For lehighvalleylive.com Email the author | Follow on Twitter on
September 01, 2016 at 2:27 PM, updated September 01, 2016 at 2:40 PM
Innovative
Arts Academy Charter School is holding an open house Tuesday, Sept. 6
-- the day it was set to open for the school year. The fledgling Catasauqua charter school postponed
its school start date to Tuesday, Sept. 12, after its CEO Loraine
Petrillo quit
Aug. 25 amid ethical concerns about the school's finances and
relationship with its landlord Abe Atiyeh, who owns the school at 330 Howertown
Rd. The school's board of trustees appointed
Steve Gabryluk as CEO on Tuesday night. Gabryluk, a longtime teacher
and administrator in the Pennridge School District in Bucks County, is a
well-known name in Lehigh Valley basketball circles, having coached for many
schools.
By Janice Crompton / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette September 2, 2016 12:00 AM
More than 100 low-income and
minority students at West Mifflin Area High School have enrolled for the first
time in Advanced Placement classes this school year. That’s because of an initiative aimed at
increasing the availability of more rigorous curriculum to a broader spectrum
of students. As one of only 50 districts
nationwide to participate in the program — called the Lead Higher
Initiative — West Mifflin Area will be honored this month. Created in April, the initiative is
consortium of nonprofit organizations and is sponsored in part by Google.org,
which provided $1.8 million in seed funding to spark the program. Its goal is
to increase access to Advanced Placement and other challenging curriculum
by100,000 low-income students and students of color over the next three years.
Lehigh Valley Ramblings Blog Wednesday, August 31,
2016
Blogger's Note: This is a continuation of a series on gerrymandering in
Pennsylvania. Yesterday's
story was an explanation of the problem. Today's entry is a review of
bipartisan legislation aimed at ending the practice. Tomorrow, Common Cause's
Barry Kauffman has some suggestions on what you can do. On Friday, I'll let you
where some other local legislators stand on this issue. Democrat Lisa Boscola is without question very popular in her state senatorial district. Her constituents may actually love her. The leaders in the state house and senate? Not so much. "I swear, if there was a bridge you could build to New Jersey, they'd put me there," she only half-jokes. That bridge might be under construction right now. Boscola is the prime sponsor of a senate bill (SB484) that would eliminate gerrymandering in Pennsylvania by establishing an independent citizens' commission to draw the boundary lines for Congressional and state legislative seats every ten years. A companion bill in the state house (HB 1835) has been offered by State Representative Dave Parker, a Republican from Monroe County. Both Boscola and Parker were among the panelists at Friday's crowded gerrymandering conference at the Unitarian Universalist Church.
Teach the Teacher
Highly valued and well-educated
teachers are the backbone of successful school systems around the world.
US News By Deidre McPhillips | Data
Reporter Aug. 11, 2016, at 9:00 a.m.
Students, parents and
policymakers may want to invest in some apples before heading back to school
this year and be sure they're nice and shiny before handing them to teachers on
the first day. Teachers, more than most
other aspects of a child's classroom experience, are key to determining a
child's educational outcomes, said Brendan O'Grady, senior vice president of
corporate and financial communication at Pearson, an international education
publishing firm. When it comes to predicting success in school, more important
than class size, mandated instruction time and other measurable factors is a
"culture of education in which the teaching profession is held in very
high regard," he said. A panel of
experts noticed the connection between qualitative societal attitudes toward
education and quantitative performance when consulting with Pearson on The Learning Curve,
an international study of education systems done in conjunction with The
Economist's Intelligence Unit.
What
Kids Wish Their Teachers Knew
New
York Times By DONNA DE LA CRUZ AUG. 31, 2016
When Kyle Schwartz started
teaching third grade at Doull Elementary School in Denver, she wanted to get to
know her students better. She asked them to finish the sentence “I wish my
teacher knew.” The responses were
eye-opening for Ms. Schwartz. Some children were struggling with poverty (“I
wish my teacher knew I don’t have pencils at home to do my homework”); an
absent parent (“I wish my teacher knew that sometimes my reading log is not
signed because my mom isn’t around a lot”); and a parent taken away (“I wish my
teacher knew how much I miss my dad because he got deported to Mexico when I
was 3 years old and I haven’t seen him in six years”). The lesson spurred Ms. Schwartz, now entering
her fifth teaching year, to really understand what her students were facing
outside the classroom to help them succeed at school. When she shared the
lesson last year with others, it became a sensation, with the Twitter hashtag
“#iwishmyteacherknew” going viral. Other teachers tried the exercise and had
similar insights. Many sent her their students’ responses.
Education Week Politics K12 Blog By Alyson Klein September 1,
2016 at 4:00 PM
Republican presidential candidate Donald
Trump told an American Legion convention Thursday that he wants school
children to regularly say the pledge of allegiance, and learn patriotism. He's
also recently said the nation could use the money it spends on undocumented
immigrants on school choice.
The 2016 Arts and Education Symposium will be held on October 27 at the Radisson Hotel Harrisburg Convention Center. Sponsored by the Pennsylvania Arts Education network and EPLC, the Symposium is a Unique Networking and Learning Opportunity for:
·
Arts Educators
·
School Leaders
·
Artists
·
Arts and Culture Community Leaders
·
Arts-related Business Leaders
·
Arts Education Faculty and Administrators in Higher Education
·
Advocates
·
State and Local Policy Leaders
Act 48 Credit is
available.Program and registration information are available here.
Southeastern
PA Regional 2016 Legislative Roundtable: William Tennent High School (Bucks
Co.) SEP 22, 2016 • 7:00
PM - 9:00 PM
PSBA website August 25, 2016
Take a more active role in public
education advocacy by joining our Legislative Roundtable
This is your opportunity for a
seat at the table (literally) with fellow public education advocates to take an
active role in educating each other and policymakers. Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, along with
regional legislators, will be in attendance to work with you to support public
education in Pennsylvania. Use the
form below to send your registration information!
2016 National Anthem Sing-A-Long - September 9th
American Public Education Foundation Website
The Star-Spangled Banner will be sung by school children nationwide on Friday, September 9, 2016 at 10:00am PST and 1:00pm EST. Students will learn about the words and meaning of the flag and sing the first stanza. This will be the third annual simultaneous sing-a-long event created by the APEF-9/12 Generation Project. The project aims to bring students together – as the world came together – on September 12, 2001.
PA Supreme Court sets Sept. 13 argument
date for fair education funding lawsuit in Philly
Thorough
and Efficient Blog JUNE 16, 2016 BARBGRIMALDI LEAVE A COMMENT
Registration
for the PASA-PSBA School Leadership Conference Oct. 13-15 is now open
The conference
is your opportunity to learn, network and be inspired by peers and
experts.
TO REGISTER: See https://www.psba.org/members-area/store-registration/ (you must be logged in to
the Members Area to register). You can read more on How to Register for
a PSBA Event here. CONFERENCE WEBSITE: For
all other program details, schedules, exhibits, etc., see the conference
website:www.paschoolleaders.org.
The Early Bird Discount Deadline has been Extended to Wednesday, August 31, 2016!
PA Principals Association website Tuesday, August 2, 2016 10:43 AM
To receive the Early Bird Discount, you must be registered by August 31, 2016:
Members: $300 Non-Members: $400
Featuring Three National Keynote Speakers: Eric Sheninger, Jill Jackson & Salome Thomas-EL
PSBA
Officer Elections Aug. 15-Oct. 3, 2016: Slate of Candidates
PSBA members seeking election to
office for the association were required to submit a nomination form no later
than April 30, 2016, to be considered. All candidates who properly completed
applications by the deadline are included on the slate of candidates below. In
addition, the Leadership Development Committee met on June 24 at PSBA
headquarters in Mechanicsburg to interview candidates. According to bylaws, the
Leadership Development Committee may determine candidates highly qualified for
the office they seek. This is noted next to each person’s name with an asterisk
(*). Each school entity will have one
vote for each officer. This will require boards of the various school entities
to come to a consensus on each candidate and cast their vote electronically
during the open voting period (Aug. 15-Oct. 3, 2016). Voting will be
accomplished through a secure third-party, web-based voting site that will
require a password login. One person from each member school entity will be
authorized as the official person to cast the vote on behalf of his or her
school entity. In the case of school districts, it will be the board secretary
who will cast votes on behalf of the school board.
Special note: Boards should be
sure to include discussion and voting on candidates to its agenda during one of
its meetings in September.
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