Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Teacher pay and foreign language cutbacks are also concerns as Fairfax County School Board looks for another $30 million in reductions for next year's budget.
If push came to shove, Jane Lipp would give her right kidney to keep an instructional coach at her school. The principal of South County High School, which has a 49 percent minority population, said that's the kind of sacrifice she'd make, drama aside, to keep a position that's been 'instrumental" in helping her teachers push the school's diverse student body to succeed. More than a dozen of the 40 speakers who addressed the school board Tuesday night in a public hearing about Fairfax County Public Schools' budget spoke about the role coaches play in the day to day lives of teachers and students, including their help toward narrowing student achievement gaps. The public hearing comes as the school board prepares to adopt a $2.5 billion …
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Karen Garza, currently a superintendent in Texas, will likely become the next leader of Fairfax County Public Schools.
A "strategic planner, a systems thinker, a stellar manager, and a highly effective communicator" is how the Fairfax County School Board described Karen Garza, the Texas superintendent leaders announced as their preferred candidate for superintendent Wednesday. Garza, who for the past four years has led the 30,000-student district of Lubbock, Texas, will assume the role pending final negotiations and a board site visit to the Lubbock Independent School District (ISD). She will become the system's first female superintendent as she takes the place of current Superintendent Jack Dale, who retires June 30. Garza was selected from 47 applicants for the position, and came out ahead of the 18 other candidates who were interviewed largely because…
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Debate heats up as school board weighs community and staff recommendations before coming school year.
Two weeks after a community committee detailed 52 recommendations to overhaul discipline practices systemwide, Fairfax County Public Schools staff has presented its own proposal for policy changes. But the plan leaves out two programs some see as key to a years-long push for reform — sparking a debate Monday on what role both groups would play in how the system moves forward. Staff leaders backed many of the ideas put forward by the 40-member Ad Hoc Community Committee on Student Rights and Responsibilities, including initiatives to make the discipline handbook easier to understand, keep students in school as they appeal a suspension and give principals tiered, age-specific approaches to a range of offenses. But staff members said they …
Monday, April 8, 2013
School board agrees on a number of measures to re-evaluate teacher workday, but associations say teachers "need relief now."
Fairfax County School Board members agreed Monday on four initiatives to address the system's years-long teacher workload issue, including the creation of a committee charged with returning to the board with recommendations on reducing teacher time demands by the end of the month. But the board did not agree on specific actions to relieve teachers in the short term, as teachers associations and some school board members had hoped. More analysis and discussions, they said, are "not enough" — and continuing for much longer without concrete action will begin to impact student achievement, if it hasn't already, they said. "I'm not happy. ... This has been the No.1 issue in my tenure," Michael Hairston said of his time as president of the …
Saturday, April 6, 2013
Fairfax County school board to talk with next round of candidates in coming weeks as Superintendent Jack Dale prepares to retire.
The Fairfax County School Board will continue to narrow its field of superintendent candidates in the next two weeks as it prepares to name a new system leader by May. At its meeting Thursday night, the school board approved a motion to discuss, consider and interview candidates for the division's superintendent "at one or more undisclosed locations" between April 5 and 19. Outgoing Superintendent Jack Dale announced in 2011 his plans to retire June 30 of this year. Last fall, the board selected Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates — the same consulting firm that found Dale in 2004 — to lead the current search process. While the board has focused more on community engagement in this search than in the one it used to hire Dale, it decided to…
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Tuesday's community dialogue asks residents, community groups for their budget priorities.
Have something to say about the Fairfax County Public Schools budget for Fiscal Year 2014? Tuesday is the first chance of several over the next two months to share your perspective. The community dialogue, which begins at 6 p.m. in the Gatehouse Administration Center Cafe in Falls Church, is an effort revamped this year to be more inclusive of all residents — not just specific county groups. School board member Ryan McElveen (At-large) said last year, the school board invited community groups to a similar dialogue, setting them at a roundtable for a budget presentation and then breaking them into two groups tasked with forming a list of budget priorities. This year, the board is inviting specific community groups as well as the community …
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Board members wrestle with community surveys, system expansion as they give nod to staff study, which will be completed in June.
The Fairfax County School Board is continuing to weigh what advanced academics mean in the system, authorizing a scope of study Thursday night it hopes will provide better information about how and where services are delivered now — both in the county and across the country — and how that might improve in the future. The study was spurred by a discussion last fall on whether the school system should expand its Advanced Academic Program Centers, a move many vocal parents said needed further analysis and community dialogue. While the board voted in January to expand the centers to three additional elementary schools this fall, to relieve overcrowding, they stopped short of expanding across about a dozen and a half more elementary and middle …
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
In town hall meeting with school board members Monday, teachers ask for solutions to workload and morale issues that, after half a decade, are as "worse as they've ever been."
Dan Hale has been a teacher in Fairfax County Public Schools for 20 years, but he’s never felt or seen his colleagues as overwhelmed as they are today. He used to know his students as readers and as writers, he says; now he only knows them as bits of data or ECART scores; pacing points and percentages. And after spending far more than eight hours at school, he leaves (with work in tow) thinking ‘What am I doing tomorrow?’ — planning time in the context of the school day, he says, is nearly nonexistent. The story was one of many shared by a few hundred teachers Monday night at a town hall sponsored by one of the county’s largest teachers unions, an effort to better connect school board members with teachers and workload issues that have …
Friday, February 15, 2013
Senate Committee Kills ‘Tebow Bill’ on Thursday night, but some Patch readers think proposal should be voted into law.
Virginia's Senate Education and Health Committee shot down a bill Thursday that would have allowed home-schooled students to participate in public schools’ sports teams. Committee members killed House Bill 1442 — also known as the “Tebow bill" — on a 7-8 vote, shelving it for the remainder of this legislative session. But should the bill have reached the full Senate floor? In a Patch blog post, Fairfax County School Board member Ryan McElveen highlighted the defeat of the bill as one of the three most important actions residents could advocate for this session as Richmond pressed on with what he called an "educational extremism." The school board voted to advocate against the proposal, McElveen wrote, "because, in short, the bill would …
Friday, February 8, 2013
Members vote to increase request in county transfer to fund field custodians, remedies to achievement gap issues.
The Fairfax County School Board approved an advertised $2.5 billion fiscal year 2014 budget Thursday that asks county supervisors for $3 million more in their annual transfer to the system, to fund field custodian positions and add more part-time advanced academic resource teachers in elementary schools with high risk populations. That request comes on top of a 5.5 percent increase ($92.4 million) in funding from the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors — for a total transfer of $1.77 billion — already in the proposal Superintendent Jack Dale unveiled last month. The 10-2 vote sends the spending plan to the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. Fairfax County Executive Ed Long will release his budget Feb. 26. Board members passed three …
Gail Ritchie
9:08 am on Thursday, May 16, 2013
The best way to counter ignorant, hateful, inaccurate information is to provide accurate information. So: 1. Instructional coaches are 11-month employees, so their salaries reflect an additional month of salary. Many of us are long-time employees, so some of that salary reflects longevity and years of experience (from which all the teachers and students at our schools benefit). And FCPS … more ›