District 150 needs to be taught a lesson

You know, for a moment there last month, I had hope.

The administrators who run Peoria School District 150 wanted to cut 45 minutes out of the schedule at all of Peoria’s primary schools. They also wanted to fire part-time teachers of music and art. The savings is about $650,000. They rushed to get the change on the agenda for the May 5 school board meeting.

Thanks to a lack of media coverage at that time, it looked like it was going to be approved.

Then I ran into some friends, who were livid. I wrote about it on PeoriaPundit.com. Then other bloggers wrote about it. Then WHOI picked up the story. Some school board members showed up at a meeting of concerned parents.

And for a while it looked like the stink being raised would prompt the school board to wise up and find some other way to make the cuts they needed (the Edison Schools contract project and the bloated administration itself come to mind).

And that’s how things stood when I submitted last month’s City Beat column.

Of course, the board finally met, they sat there, quietly while parent urged them to reconsider this drastic action. And then the board voted to cut the school day and to cut the teachers of art and music.

And, thus, the insurrection began.

This is the tipping point. Much like the Stamp Tax was the last straw for colonial Americans, this decision convinced Peorians that their city will never have a decent school system with the current administrators and the current school board. They either have a badly warped idea of what constitutes a quality education, no idea how to provide a quality education, or they simply are too driven my personal agendas to be allowed to remain employed or in office as the case may be.
There’s a group of parents, and their leader is Diane Vespa. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll say right up front that she’s a friend of mine. She and her husband have advertised on my blog. She’s ramrodding this band of revolutionaries that we’re going to call (unofficially) “District 150 Watch.”
At their first post-decision meeting. At that meeting former Dunlap Superintendent Bud Collier — who in the past has acted a “facilitator” between the City of Peoria and District 150 — urged the rebels to not get all upset and angry, that there may be some room for compromise and that D150 Superintendent Hinton wants to meet with the parents.

Then Hinton told the Journal Star that he’ll meet with the parents, but he doesn’t see how in the world he can change his mind because there is absolutely no room for cuts anywhere else and besides, cutting a full month’s worth of face-to-face teaching time is just the thing to improve education in Peoria.
Naturally, the parents are pretty much convinced they were lied to, whether it was by Collier or by Collier passing along a lie from Hinton.

So, the parents are considering their options. Most certainly, they will try to recruit a candidate to replace Mary Spangler, who announced she won’t run for re-election in 2009. They also are investigating what needs to be done to change how school board members are re-elected. Obviously, staggered terms in which only a handful of board members come up for re-election at a time, combined with inexcusably long five-year-terms, makes it to hard to accomplish change, and actually discourages good candidates from running against this band of misfits.

And they want to get the Peoria City Council involved. The mayor’s office can be a great bully pulpit. Failing that, well, it’s not out of line to suggest a city takeover of the school system. Paul Vallas made it work for Chicago schools. There’s no reason that legislation couldn’t be introduced giving the council control over the school district.

Why should it be the city’s business to run District 150? By what definition of “city business” is quality schools NOT the city’s business? Peoria is making inroads into the crime problem. But if parents leave Peoria because D150 doesn’t offer adequate primary school education, they the city’s tax base will erode. I can see property values drop as young families all over the city — including the 5th District — opt to leave.

By this time next month, we’ll see if District 150 finally ‘gets’ that they made a bad decision. Maybe next month’s column will be about a different topic.

I hope.

Meanwhile, you can read updates to this story at:

www.peoriachronicle.com

www.peoriarocks.blogspot.com

www.peoriapundit.com

WHOI provides the best TV news in Peoria

I once had an editor tell me that the education beat is the most important job in the newspaper. More than any other form of government, the local school district affects more people in more ways than any other. Do a good job of covering schools, and you serve your readers.

It seems the fine folks at WHOI learned this lesson well.

I’ve been sensitive to schools news coverage because I’ve been closely following media coverage of District 150’s decision to cut 45 minutes from all primary school schedules. HOINews has provided the best broadcast coverage along all three TV stations. Many times, there is more than just one story originating from District 150 or some nearby school district. Usually, when TV news talks about their great coverage of schools, they’re talking about puff, feel-good pieces. Not these guys. They were looking into the school day cuts, and found that some district 150 schools aren’t providing the amount of physical education required. And then they did a follow up.

Why the quality coverage. Perhaps it’s a matter of having the time to devote to local coverage. WEEK and WMBD (which are fine stations, believe me) don’t have commitments to provide news out of Bloomington/Normal (WMBD does WYZZ’s newscast for them and WEEK has a partnership with the Pantagraph that suck up precious minutes of their newscasts).