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Monday, March 29, 2010

Greeley School District 6 Cuts Government and World Culture Requirements

Greeley Colorado's infamous school district, District 6, has been busy putting the finishing touches on the mountain of financial cuts the Board has declared as needed. It began, if you recall, with a panicked forced contract on teachers to save money, grew into a dire 15% round of emergency cuts, and has ended with an actual 6% shortfall for next year. That shortfall as I stated earlier could have been almost covered with reserves had the reserves not been questionably spent earlier.

In addition to bullying the teacher's union, firing the District's Human Resource Director and replacing him with a her from the inside, the District has taken on the consolidation of "under-utilized" schools according to Mr. Wayne Eads--the janitor turned operations manager. One consolidation move places alternative students together under one roof at Jefferson. Hence forth parents will be happy to know that students who have a low performance academically will now be attending the same school as kids who have violent histories and have already been, or their next stop will likely be, Platte Correctional Center.

Additionally District 6 has removed Government and World Cultural Geography from graduation requirements and made them "electives". Whether or not the school will continue to fund teachers for these courses every term is also "elective". From this year forward students, our future community leaders and citizen voters, may actually be able to get out of high school without learning ANYTHING at all about government process and people from other parts of the world--formally. What a great plan.

In the meantime there is a lovely discussion going around the community that these cuts have been based on the "best guesses" of people like Mr. Eads and a few accounting studies on utilization rates. It has yet to be seen what Ms. Ranelle Lang, the Superintendent does to earn her pay (see earlier posts on Mr. Eads' inflated role in D6), and why educational outcome studies were not used to base the financial cuts upon. It is very easy to surmise without these studies being published, without Ms. Lang standing up in front of the public in an open question and answer forum or appearing in front of D6 teachers, that the whole hoopla this year, following the failed voter initiative, has been a timely recessional scare tactic for cleaning house at D6.

Only problem is the good old boys are still running the show. They just aren't being very transparent about what is happening. They'd do well I suspect in the corporate private world. It is too bad they've been given a public institution to play with.

But nonetheless the Good Old Boy Board and Administration have made some changes and are in the process of shedding thirty-five employees and putting even more propaganda out in favor of themselves and Ms. Lang within the community. No one is talking education outcomes.

And who'd ever guess by the gutting of World Cultural Geography that Ms. Lang had the wonderful relationship, as stated in her Nebraska job interview process, with the local Hispanic community and its leaders. Which leaders would that be Ms. Lang?

Ms. Lang's home town wouldn't take her back so she may well be around now when those educational scores start coming in during the next two years. Only the Greeley Tribune and the lack of community interest will be able to paint those numbers pretty.

Accountability for poor decision making doesn't fall just on the Board. The community willing to roll over and play intellectually dead while all this goes on around them has to take some hit too. This is what happens when politics and ideology are allowed to embed themselves into a community's public institutions. It doesn't matter what the politics are about or whose side they are on--it is deadly to the outcome.

In this case Greeley's kids will pay the price for a very long time and those in the senior community, with few options to leave, will be able to serve as witness as services dwindle away and the various crime rates rise as happens with communities without viable opportunities for their citizens to succeed.

And the crowning cherry on the top of this muddy mountain? The District is buying its textbooks from Texas.


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