Newspapers and the view from Amay James

If you get angry when a blog item isn't full of hard-hitting news and analysis, please click away now. I figure I've spent enough time with spreadsheets and officials to bask in an occasional feel-good moment.

And if "community helper day" at Amay James Prekindergarten Center doesn't make you smile, there may be no hope for you. A parade of 4- and 5-year-olds came through dressed as doctors, construction workers, soldiers and scientists (you'd think one kid could have put on a trench coat and a hat with a press card in it, but no). My favorite: A boy in military camouflage who told me he wants to be a veterinarian, but he'd also like to be Spiderman.

My props were pretty feeble next to the uniformed pilot with a model plane, the landscapers who were potting pansies and the police who pulled their squad cars into the parking lot. Just for fun, I brought an American Girl miniature version of a manual typewriter. It brought nostalgic smiles from several teachers, but none of the kids could identify it. A camera? A cash register? A robot?

Several knew what my laptop computer was. The really depressing part? They had a harder time identifying a newspaper. Most gave me blank looks, though a few said they'd seen their parents reading one of those.

"My daddy does," one girl said eagerly. "In the bathroom!"

Any cynics who kept reading may be wondering: With the roughly $22 million Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools spends on Bright Beginnings prekindergarten facing scrutiny in 2011, was this a CMS plot to win me over?

I'll admit to being a sap for cute kids. Further, I'll admit to this bias: I'd like to see every one of those children have the best possible shot at becoming doctors, pilots or Spiderman (by 2023, that may be a better career path than newspaper reporter).

Maybe I've still got my rosy shades on, but I think most of us agree on that. Caring about kids doesn't preclude differences of opinion about the best way to reach them with the money that's available. A robust debate about that is coming, and I'll be right in there trying to tease out the facts.

Televising CMS budget meetings

Joni Trobich, president of the Mecklenburg PTA Council, recently sent the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board a plea to televise or otherwise record upcoming budget sessions. Not only are tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of jobs in the balance, but Trobich says the stakes are even higher: "We risk civic unrest, and deep racial and economic division in our community over decisions that are not understood by the public."

Many of the board's budget talks will take place during regular meetings, which are televised and videostreamed on the CMS Web site. The next one, on Dec. 14, falls into that category.

But the board has also scheduled four special work sessions in 2011, which will not be available unless CMS finds about $10,000 or comes up with another plan for taping, airing and streaming. Board member Tim Morgan has suggested pulling from board members' travel allowances, but several of his colleagues balked at spending any public money to televise budget-cutting sessions.

Trobich has some ideas (read the full note below). I'm intrigued by some blog comments suggesting CMS use students. I'm sure that's not as easy as it sounds, and I suspect it can't be done for free. But it seems like the right combination of motivated students, tech-savvy faculty and business partners could do the work while giving students some marketable skills.

 Here's what Trobich has to say:

To our School Board Members;

Today I write not as president of the PTA Council, but as a citizen very interested in education policy. It is critical to the well-being of our city to make all "open" school board meetings available to the public. To continue the policy of only televising "regular" board meetings is actually endangering the peace and civic engagement of our community.

I know of your efforts to engage the public in the comprehensive review; I know that significant efforts were made in the summer, and our community did not respond adequately. We are somewhat spoiled here in Charlotte; we take our "world class" schools for granted, and many of us do not take the trouble to get involved until something happens that affects our school or our household.

In the past, when school cuts were announced and the public was caught unaware, we could go back and see the proceedings of meetings, and we could watch the replay of the meetings (including the budget work sessions where all the important factors in the decisions were discussed) on channel 3. This fall, when school closings were announced, parents, staff, and community leaders felt blindsided, and had no way of going back to the discussions to find the reasoning behind the decisions. Without this background, even those trying to understand were not able to understand why these ideas made sense.

Please do something to keep the public informed as to these decisions; I have been in attendance at many of the budget work sessions, but there are huge numbers of citizens that cannot attend due to work obligations, and still want to understand the process. I recorded and transcribed one of the budget work session meetings and sent it out to our PTAs; it took days (and nights) to accomplish this, and I cannot do that on a regular basis.

Please consider the following possibilities:

• Provide a digital audio recording of the proceedings of every open meeting that is not televised. A member of the public who is interested in what happened at the meeting could view the powerpoint presentation, provided on the board website, and listen to the digital recording and understand the reasoning behind the proposals. It should be posted immediately after the meeting is concluded. The advantage here is that it is very cheap and does not require special expertise - a digital recorder with USB connection can be purchased for less than 50 dollars which will create a very good quality recording that can be posted as a file on the website.
• Provide a video recording (as we did before) available on the board website and run it on Channel 3. The obligation to inform the public is certainly worth the tiny amount of funds that is required.
  
• Provide a software transcription of the audio recording of the meeting immediately on the website afterward, with the disclaimer that the method used may produce less than perfect quality, and is provided to allow immediate review of the meetings proceedings by members of the public who could not attend.


• Use a "Flip" camera to provide a video of the meeting. Although it would not be the quality we are used to, we are in a different budget climate than ever before, and the public will understand that. It would be far more informative than the naked power point presentations that we have now, and better than an audio recording alone. Again, this is a very cheap option. A Flip camera which will produce a video tape instantly for Youtube costs less than 130 dollars, and is available at dozens of stores in Charlotte immediately.

Without doing a better job of informing the public, we risk civic unrest, and deep racial and economic division in our community over decisions that are not understood by the public. I believe we have only seen a tiny fraction of the unrest that will occur unless we do this differently.

Thank you for your service to our community. Although I have disagreed with many school board decisions over the years, I have never felt that decisions were made based on "back room" agreements, or were being made arbitrarily without insightful discussion.

All of our citizens should be assured that these wrenching decisions are based on reasonable discussions of costs and benefits to the community, and that they are invited to participate.

Sincerely,
Joni Trobich
Mecklenburg PTA Council

Civil rights and the news from Raleigh

Update at 2:50 p.m.: Turns out the projections for Wake's teacher cuts come from a state report that lays out projections for all districts. Read that report here. I'm posting a story shortly, but quirks in our software make it easier to post a link from the blog than from a news item.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will hold a national education summit in Raleigh this weekend, with a focus on school resegregation. National President Benjamin Todd Jealous is scheduled to speak Friday evening, with a Saturday panel on "Reversing Resegregation."

This lands, of course, at an interesting time for our state. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is grappling with huge budget cuts, which drove a recent decision to close several schools in African-American neighborhoods in 2011. The U.S. Education Department's Office of Civil Rights is still weighing how to respond to complaints -- the total was at seven as of yesterday evening -- that those closings and other student assignment changes are unfair to black and Hispanic students.

Wake County Schools, which just became a majority-minority school system, is going through turmoil as a new school board majority prepares to shift to a neighborhood-based assignment system, scrapping the longstanding system that used family income to promote school diversity. CMS crossed the less-than-half-white threshold many years ago (currently about one-third of students are white), and beat Raleigh to the punch on the shift to neighborhood schools.

It's always interesting to check the News & Observer's education page. Among the other highlights from up the road: The Wake school board is preparing to interview finalists for superintendent, and officials are projecting huge classroom hits based on the likelihood of state budget cuts for 2011.

And there's a fascinating piece about the turmoil ahead for North Carolina's largest district, a title Wake claimed from CMS a few years ago.

Free ride to Harvard?

There's an e-mail making the local rounds saying that Harvard University has just decided to offer free tuition to students whose families earn less than $60,000 a year.

You haven't seen a news story because the decision was actually made about five years ago, according to Harvard's financial aid office. A staffer said the office is getting calls from across the country, as the e-mail has gone viral.

The basic information is sound: Students who are admitted pay nothing if their family income is less than $60,000. There's a sliding scale for incomes from $60,000 to $180,000.

The catch is you still have to get into Harvard, and that's no easy feat. But the message is a good reminder that extraordinary students may be able to get a top-notch private education without taking on a massive debt burden. A growing number of such schools, including Davidson College closer to home, have shifted to covering financial need with grants instead of loans, saying it helps them get the best students regardless of family wealth.

CMS's extra teachers: Do the math

"Weighted student staffing" is a crucial part of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools' strategy for helping disadvantaged kids. It's going to play prominently in tough budget talks that lie ahead.

That's a challenge. Weighted student staffing involves -- pause for a collective shudder -- math formulas. That makes it tough to understand, and even tougher to explain in the limited space of a newspaper article designed for people reading quickly.

I've been fudging through the early budget articles with a vague description of extra teachers based on school poverty. My colleague Eric Frazier did an excellent job Sunday describing how high schools that don't get much help from weighted student staffing are seeing some class sizes balloon.

Unfortunately, while the data on class sizes was correct, we fumbled the description of the weighted student staffing formula.

It's important for people to understand this calculation going into 2011 budget. I figure blog readers are a good place to start; you're likely to stick with it and even suggest ways to make it clear to less dedicated readers.

Weighted student staffing starts with the premise that schools get teacher positions based on enrollment. Assuming a ratio of one teacher per 25 students (actual ratios vary from 1:22 to 1:29.5, depending on grade level), a school with 1,000 students would get 40 teachers paid by the state.

CMS uses county money to provide more teachers for disadvantaged kids. Lunch subsidies to low-income families are used as a rough measure of disadvantage (yes, I know there are questions about those numbers; that's a whole different topic). Each child who qualifies for lunch aid is counted as 1.3 students in the CMS formula.

So consider two schools with 1,000 students each. School A has a 20 percent poverty level, or 200 low-income kids. (Twenty percent is low by CMS standards; that's where South Charlotte Middle landed last year.) School B has 80 percent, or 800 kids.

School A is tallied as having 60 extra kids, based on multiplyng those 200 by 1.3. That would net about two more teachers.

School B gets credit for 240 extra kids, or almost 10 more teachers.

Why care? Because CMS is pumping $48 million a year into putting just over 800 additional teachers into schools based on that formula. They're not exclusively in high-poverty schools, as the example above shows, but most of them are.

Starting at the Dec. 14 meeting, the school board will start studying ways to cut roughly $100 million from the 2011-12 budget, which they'll vote on in May. That $48 million is sure to get scrutiny.

As controversial as it was to close buildings, many would say it's far more important to keep good teachers with kids. Brutal choices are looming. That means those of us who care about kids and taxes will need to pay close attention -- even if that means dealing with math formulas.

Update: TV or not TV?

Update: Board member Tim Morgan raised the question of televising budget work sessions today (see discussion below if you're new to this post). Superintendent Peter Gorman said it would cost about $2,000 to tape a three-hour session, air it on CMS-TV and webstream it.

Several budget discussions will take place at regular meetings, which are already televised. Four special sessions are slated, the first in mid-February. Gorman suggested a total tab of $10,000 to allow for run-on meetings.

Trent Merchant, Rhonda Lennon, Joyce Waddell, Richard McElrath and Joe White immediately weighed in against spending the money. Morgan said he'd be willing to give up some of his travel money to cover the cost, and Eric Davis told Gorman he'd talk to board members and get back to him.

For what it's worth, $10,000 from a billion-dollar budget is roughly the equivalent of a person who makes $100,000 spending $10. But even a relatively small expense carries big baggage these days.

If you feel strongly about it one way or the other, you might want to let board members know soon. And of course, feel free to keep posting suggestions here.
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Original post: This is far from the toughest decision facing the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board, but let me pose a puzzler:

The board is staring down huge budget cuts in 2011.

Members just took a beating over public engagement in the first round of cuts, which included closing schools. Among the complaints: Vast amounts of vital information were presented during special meetings held in the middle of weekdays, when few could attend.

On Friday, they'll start another round of meetings -- again, with a special midday session at a little-known location (1 p.m., CMS Leadership Academy, 7920 Neal Road).

They already eliminated CMS-TV as part of this year's budget. They're still paying freelancers to tape and televise the twice-monthly regular meetings. But they don't televise work sessions and public forums.

Should they?

On one hand, it would be ironic and no doubt unpopular to approve an additional expense going into a long season of budget cuts. Superintendent Peter Gorman fought to keep CMS-TV, but board members decided there was no way to preserve that while laying off teachers.

On the other, CMS has an $18.6 million reserve fund carried over from last year's budget. I don't know the cost for more meetings to be taped, televised and webstreamed, but it'd be pocket change compared to that sum.

Other things being equal, I'm a big fan of making public meetings public, especially when so much is at stake. The Observer can report only a small fraction of what goes on in long board meetings. Broadcast media get even less. CMS posts a lot of documents and PowerPoints, but it's nearly impossible to get the full meaning without hearing the discussion.

Gorman says the board is likely to discuss the question of televising special sessions.

So what do you think?

Racing for reform

I recently posted an item raising the question of what role Charlotte-Mecklenburg school closings might play in North Carolina's quest for federal Race to the Top money. I cited a memo from Chief Accountability Officer Robert Avossa noting that the deadline for CMS's report to the state had been extended from Nov. 8, the day before the board's school closing vote, to Nov. 10, the day after.

Avossa rightly took me to task for asking the question without calling him to get an answer. The deadline was extended for the board's vote, he said this week, but it had nothing to do with impressing the feds to get  money. North Carolina's $400 million and CMS's $15 million share of that have already been locked in, he said.

So why did CMS need to report information about school closings and changes? Even though the money has been awarded, the federal government demands to know what changes are planned for the lowest-performing 5 percent of the state's schools. Districts must choose from a prescribed menu of options, which includes closing.

CMS has 15 schools on that list (see below), including four the board voted to close. Avossa and his crew needed to wait for the board to weigh in before being able to accurately report what would happen. For instance, the fate of Waddell High was up in the air until late that night.

Here's the "bottom 5 percent" list Avossa sent; he notes that the first 12 qualified based on pass rates on state exams and the final three because of graduation rates. I've added any changes to those schools that were approved Nov. 9.

1. Billingsville Elementary.
2. Bruns Avenue Elementary (becoming preK-8).
3. Druid Hills Elementary (becoming preK-8).
4. Reid Park Elementary (becoming preK-8).
5. Sedgefield Elementary.
6. Thomasboro Elementary (becoming preK-8).
7. Walter G. Byers Elementary (becoming preK-8).
8. Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle.
9. Hawthorne High School.
10. Pawtuckett Elementary (closing).
11. Bishop Spaugh Middle (closing).
12. J.T. Williams Middle (closing).
13. West Charlotte High.
14. West Mecklenburg High.
15. E.E. Waddell High (closing).