This blog usually receives 10-20 monthly visitors from Washington, DC — primarily from Congressional offices and special interest groups — so nothing seemed unusual until I checked this month’s service provider detail. “OMG!” was my first thought…and I probably can’t post what my second thought was…LOL!

I immediately followed with a flurry of clicks to verify a few more details and confirm its authenticity. I now have further validation to a phrase I use quite often in discussions about education — it all begins with the power of one.

A huge “thank you” goes to my fellow cyber-colleagues Dr. Fred Baldwin (Carlisle Area School District) and Mr. Jim Butt (Cheltenham Township School District). I greatly appreciate your constant support and encouragement — and eagerly look forward to November!

Reprinted by permission of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, Copyright © 2010, All Rights Reserved.

Noteworthy highlights:

Item D – Facilities
1. Discussion and action on proposal for custodial services for Weisenberg Elementary School for the 2010-2011 school year.

Item E – District Finances
1. Approval of final 2010-2011 General Fund budget and supporting tax levies for Northwestern Lehigh School District as follows:

a. Budget Expenditures – $36,932,065.00

b. Local Tax Levies:

• Real Estate Tax – 50.66 mills (1.25 mill increase)
• Earned Income Tax – 1% (net .5%)
• Real Estate Transfer Tax, Act 511 – 1/2% for each of 4 townships
• Local Services Tax – $10
• Amusement Tax – 10%/not to exceed 40%

NEW — Agendas now include clickable links to discussion items.

This document reflects updated information received on Tuesday, June 15, 2010

The Class of 2010 is comprised of 193 graduating seniors including: Valedictorian, Alexander W. Masetti, Jr. and Salutatorian, Ramzy T. Burns. The class officers are: Ramzy T. Burns, President; Olivia K. Danner, Vice President; Lauren A. Gradwell, Secretary; and Joseph K. Hall, Treasurer.

Northwestern Lehigh High School — Class of 2010

Advisors: Mrs. W. Ann Way & Mrs. Tracy Smoyer
Motto: “These are our moments, these are our times, let’s make the best out of our lives.”
Colors: Black & Gold | Flower: Gerber Daisy | Song: “Our Lives” by The Calling [see video below]

Addition to Ceremony: Prior to the presentation of the diplomas, senior Brittany A. Kittle addressed fellow classmates and the audience with a special recognition and tribute to the loss of their beloved classmate, Shaunice Jarjous. In honor of her memory, the graduates have chosen to donate their remaining class funds to her Memorial Scholarship Award.

In you were unable to attend the ceremony, a copy of the commencement program is included below:

This bill parallels the anticipated “fix” [and I that word loosely] by “kicking the can further down the road”, rather than addressing the significant issues of the looming pension crisis. Gov. Rendell endorsed this “solution” [and only a politician would deem it this] in his proposed 2010-11 state budget. It’s funny how politicians appear to develop short-term memories around election time [see below].

We should reduce the benefit level. We should reduce when those benefits accrue. We can’t afford it. It’s going to break school districts and the state. It was a giveaway. Interestingly, everyone got upset at the [2005 legislative] pay raise. The pay raise cost the taxpayers about 1/500th of what this [2001] pension grab is costing. And no one got mad at Gov. Ridge. No one got mad at the Legislature back then. I guess it’s because the impact is phased in over so many years. But this is a tsunami compared to the pay raise.

Governor Ed Rendell (during an interview with the Morning Call)

An actuarial note attached to this bill by the PERC (PA’s Public Employee Retirement Commission) estimates the higher costs in later years will far outweigh the contribution reductions in the earlier years – to the tune of an astonishing $52 billion MORE to achieve this “cost smoothing” over the next 30 years. See pages 10-11 of the document below.

Again, this legislative “solution” is projected to cost $52 billion more than the total amount of the current PSERS and SERS pension crisis already!

The following graphs are from “HB 2497 and the Pension Rate Spike”, prepared by PSERS & SERS upon request from the House Democratic Caucus, detailing the impact HB 2497 would have on the employer contribution rate spike and plateau facing both state pension systems. Note: Click on the images to enlarge them.

HB 2497′s Projection of Employer Contribution Dollars

HB 2497′s Projection of Total Employer Contribution Rate

HB 2497′s Projection of Unfunded Liabilities

HB 2497′s Projection of Funded Ratio

More information on HB 2497

Regarding PSERS, the bill re-amortizes all of the unfunded actuarial accrued liabilities of PSERS over a 30-year period using level percentage of pay amortization payments and extends from five to ten years the asset smoothing period beginning July 1, 2011. The bill also proposes to fund any increases in accrued liability enacted by legislation after June 30, 2010 over a ten-year period using level percentage of pay amortization payments. For the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2010, HB 2497 establishes the total employer contribution rate as the final contribution rate of 5.0% of the total compensation for all active members, plus the premium assistance contribution rate.

The bill also imposes “collars” on the rate at which employer contributions may rise from year to year, establishing temporary collared contribution rates for fiscal years July 1, 2011, July 1, 2012 and on or after July 1, 2013, that if the contribution rate is more than 3%, 3.5% and 4.5%, respectively, of the total compensation of all active members greater than the prior year’s final contribution rate, then the collared contribution rate must be applied and equal to 3%, 3.5% and 4.5%, respectively, of total compensation for all active members. For all other fiscal years in which the actuarially required contribution rate is less than the collared rate, the bill establishes the final contribution rate as the actuarially required contribution rate, provided that the final contribution rate is not less than the employer normal contribution rate.

HB 2497 was amended by the committee to insert technical changes and also to allow any active member in the SERS, who was previously an active member of PSERS, to elect to become a multiple service member no later than 365 days after becoming an active member in SERS.

Source: PSBA’s Office of Governmental and Member Relations, Weekly Legislative Update, June 10, 2010

As it appears the Governor and Pennsylvania lawmakers are heading toward another showdown and missed deadline on the annual state budget – for a staggering 8th year in a row – maybe they could spare a few minutes of political posturing and try to learn something from “down under.”

Pennsylvania’s fiscal picture continues to grow grimmer. State Rep. Samuel Rohrer (R-Berks), minority chairman of the House Finance Committee, summed up matters thusly: “If Pennsylvania were a private company, it would be staring bankruptcy in the face.  The truth is that we now have debts that exceed our ability to pay – the definition of insolvency.”

To cover last year’s budget deficit, among other shell games, the Governor and General Assembly exhausted the MCare Fund. The Commonwealth Court, however, ruled this year that financial move was illicit, and that the state must pay back $800 million. Add this to a $1.2 budget shortfall, and PA faces a $2 billion hole. To make matters worse, if Congress does not extend the Federal Medical Assistance Percentages (FMAP), which Gov. Rendell counted in his proposed budget, Harrisburg will be short another $850 million.

Stunningly, Gov. Rendell and many legislators want to increase state spending by 4 percent.

Source: “PA’s Fiscal Picture Grows Dimmer”, The Commonwealth Foundation, June 7, 2010

The Senate Education Committee is scheduled to consider a number of bills this week, including bills that would extend the life of the mandate waiver program and that would mandate a two-third affirmative vote on the school board for property tax millage increases.

Pennsylvania – Senate Bill 250

SB 250, sponsored by Sen. Jake Corman (R-Centre) simply removes the sunset date of June 30, 2010 from the current Education Empowerment Act, Act 16 of 2000. This would have the effect of continuing the current mandate waiver program. It would also have the effect of continuing the remainder of the current statute, which includes accountability standards for school districts, many of which have been overridden by the provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act, and the takeover of the Harrisburg School District by an empowerment board named by the city’s mayor. An amendment to be offered by Sen. Mike Folmer (R-Lebanon) would allow school boards to furlough professional employees for economic reasons.

Pennsylvania – Senate Bill 553

SB 553, sponsored by Sen. John Rafferty (R-Montgomery) simply requires any property tax millage increases to be approved by two-third majority of a school board. The bill would take effect in 60 days; therefore, it would become necessary to have 6 votes to approve millage increases, effective for the 2011-2012 school year, should the bill become law.

Pennsylvania – Senate Bill 1321

SB 1321, sponsored by Sen. John Wozniak (D-Cambria) would require all school districts of the second, third or fourth class within a county to consolidate all administrative functions. Under the bill, these would include but not be limited to: payment of payroll obligations, financial accounting and reporting and purchasing and contracting with insurers, vendors and others. The governing body of the county would appoint a single county superintendent for all schools within the county and may appoint a solicitor and such other appointees and employers as it may deem proper in carrying out the provisions of the bill. Each school district within the county would pay a pro-rata share of the expenses based on the percentage of the district’s employees as compared to all the school employees in the county. This bill is scheduled only for discussion and not for vote.

Source: PSBA’s Office of Governmental and Member Relations

A few days after my post on May 1st, I received the following email from a parent in northeastern Pennsylvania. While I have received dozens of communications like this previously, this particular email offered a true sense of self validation in helping to make a real difference…even beyond the landscape of Northwestern Lehigh School District.

Mr. Fisher,

I happened upon your website www.prideandpromise.com and really would like to commend you on a well organized site that addresses issues so pertinent to all residents, students, and taxpayers in PA. I would truly appreciate and enjoy the opportunity to speak with you about the site and also about the issues you cover.

I reside in Northeastern PA and have been active as a taxpayer and parent in my school district’s discussions about finances and education. I am in the process of working with a group of other residents interested in more transparency and fiscal responsibilty within our district, given the current economic climate. After seeing the resources you have made available to residents in your area, I would love to see that type of resource available to our residents. Unfortunately, right now the school website is lacking and school board meeting agendas, notes, and budget proposals are not available unless you physically go to the school to review the information there.

I have seen other districts in PA such as Pennsbury and your site that disclose so much more information that I really feel like our area is behind and citizens are left in the dark. One other area I really took away from some of your posts is the actions that your school board is taking to address the PSERS crisis (specifically the letter to legislatures that your district sent asking for guidance and assistance with the upcoming pension increases). I feel like our board is not doing a lot if anything to address the dire circumstances the rates will create. (Unless of course, it is happening behind the scenes, although I doubt it, considering many of our school board directors have family employed as teachers in the district.

Well, now that I’ve given you a brief overview of my interests, I do hope that we can get in contact. And again, my congrats to you on a great website and the proactive discussions you advocate and approach.

Sincerely,
MH

[Note: I have purposefully removed the author's name and contact information]

As you can probably guess – I was very eager to take advantage of this great opportunity to learn more on public input and perception. Our conversation lasted nearly two hours. During our dialog, it was clearly evident that some of my reasons for wanting to serve as a school board member were quickly reinforced.

Active and engaged stakeholders are a very important asset to any organization. Parents, students, teachers and community members NEED timely and concise information to issues that affect them and their school districts. Collectively, they WANT proactive communication…and they MUST “feel” engaged and a collaborative part of the process.

To start – transparency must become MORE than just a convenient buzz word for today. This initiative must be the foundation of district-wide commitments to developing policies and procedures to help open the doors to promote greater understanding and advocacy.

In building these strong alliances, technology-enabled stakeholders REQUIRE a new level of information access that has historically not been a part of the culture in public education. Now more than ever, technology infrastructure must be fully leveraged to create a searchable archive of information and applicable data. And any notion of our public’s perception to existing dead-ends and narrow, one-way streets filled with roadblocks must be completely eliminated.

We must continue to diligently transform any outdated ideologies into the necessary attitudes of customer service and fiscal responsibility to all our shareholders.

Here are a few suggestions from Benjamin DeGrow, Education Policy Analyst at the Education Policy Center in Golden, Colorado:

1. Easy to find. Users should be able to find a link to the database of expenditures directly from the local education provider’s website.
2. Detailed. Each expenditure should be attached to a unique record that at minimum includes: The transaction amount;  the transaction date;  the recipient’s name and address (if employee payroll is included, workplace addresses should be used to provide reasonable privacy), to ensure clear identification;   the name of the budget fund;  the budget fund’s associated revenue sources, to help determine whether an expenditure was funded by local and state taxes, federal grants, private grants, or user fees;  and the purpose of the expenditure, so local education providers can explain once and avoid misunderstandings.
3. Free to use. An “open” format ensures the user can access all available expenditure data without having to purchase additional software. To meet this criterion school agencies can export files into a free XML or CSV format, and upload the files to the online database for citizens to access.
4. Searchable. A structured format ensures the user can find and sort expenditure data by relevant category details. Searchability is a highly important feature that distinguishes a user friendly online database from a descriptive PDF uploaded and posted online.
5. Regularly updated. Since school districts and other education providers typically prepare financial reports for monthly board review, an update of expenditure data each month is entirely reasonable.
6. Available notifications. Local education providers easily can create RSS feeds or similar mechanisms to which users may subscribe for automated notifications of data updates.
7. Archived data. Expanding information technology capabilities will continue to enable low cost data storage. Expenditure data should not disappear, but should be kept in place permanently.

It’s time to unlock the vault.

The Pennsylvania Senate will reconvene on Monday, June 7, 2010. Their current agenda includes a second consideration for SB 1192, Printer’s No. 1871 (Sponsors: Picolla, Dinniman, Browne, Earlle, Rafferty, Williams, Boscola and Alloway).

Unquestionably, all eyes of an array of public education groups and advocates will be clearly focused upon Harrisburg; as deliberations begin to take place on this proposed reauthorization of PA’s Education Empowerment Act.

SB 1192 - An Act amending the act of March 10, 1949 (P.L.30, No.14), known as the Public School Code of 1949, further providing for definitions; and providing for empowering the Department of Education, school districts, schools and parents of school children to undertake measures necessary to improve the academic performance of students.

Scroll down to page 41 to the start of the major changes:

Pennsylvania Senate Bill 1192

The Good

• The bill attempts to deal with the schools and districts that are struggling the most.
• The bill includes charter schools and vocational-technical schools in the reform system.
• The bill contains long lists of education reforms that could help many schools and districts.
• The bill addresses options for parent and community involvement in improving public education.
• The bill allows districts to form their own charter schools rather than using outside companies.

The Bad

1. The bill does not provide any additional funding or resources to pay for and sustain reforms and does not fix the unfair property tax system. Most failing schools are in districts that have been under-funded for decades and have very high property taxes that drive away businesses. Ironically, revisions to the bill made in April now give extra funding for six of the current empowerment districts but ignore the fiscal needs of the hundreds of additional schools and districts that would fall under the control of the bill.

2. The bill would lower the standards and make it easier to place individual schools and school districts under the Empowerment Act.

• Currently, the Act uses a two-year average of both reading and math test scores and targets districts (not individual schools) with more than 50 percent of all students failing both tests (scoring “below basic”).
• SB 1192 would incorporate most of No Child Left Behind’s adequate yearly progress system of measuring school and district performance. The NCLB system looks at whether different subgroups of students – not just all students averaged together – score below state targets. A school would fall under the Empowerment Act if too many students failed the test – 44 percent failing in math or 37 percent failing in reading – by scoring at either “basic” or “below basic” levels.
• The U.S. Congress is expected to make major changes to NCLB in 2010 or 2011 that will impact these standards and requirements. Revisions to SB 1192 made in April would make it somewhat easier for the proposed empowerment system to interact with the expected changes to NCLB. But SB 1192 remains committed to using only student test scores to measure school and district performance, rather than multiple measures that better reflect student outcomes.

3. The bill would place hundreds of schools and dozens of school districts under the Empowerment Act. Currently, the Act only applies to whole districts, not individual schools.

4. The bill would look back in time and apply reform mandates based on past failures over many years. Schools and districts would be graded based on the number of years currently in school improvement and corrective action status under No Child Left Behind.

5. The bill would end the currently appointed boards for Chester-Upland and Harrisburg, return day-to-day management to the local elected school boards, and require all management and reform decisions to be initiated, amended, or approved by the new Statewide Control Board.

The Ugly

6. The bill would give state officials power over all of the schools and districts coming under the Act, even schools and districts failing for just two years.

• The PA Department of Education would have legal authority to order the reforms it wanted at hundreds of schools and districts under the Act. Local officials could not override the decisions of the Department.
• The improvement plans for schools and districts could be amended by the Department, without the consent of local officials.
• A Statewide Control Board appointed by the Governor and the Senate leader would write the reform plans for and have final authority to amend and approve the management decisions of locally elected school boards in districts failing for nine or more years (beyond the fourth year of “Corrective Action II”). The time period would start running based on NCLB status from 2001 to date.
• This means that the Senate leader and the Governor, who appoints the Secretary of Education and other Department officials, would essentially run all of the schools and districts subject to the Act.

7. The bill would treat Philadelphia differently than the rest of the state. No changes would occur to the current governance structure or reform systems.

8. The bill would strongly encourage the operations of failing schools and districts to be turned over to charter school companies or to private education management organizations. The Pennsylvania Department of Education and the new Statewide Control Board would have the power to impose these changes or even to close the school or district. This could have the immediate effect of taking many schools out of their districts and taking the teachers at these schools out of their unions.

9. The bill allows local school officials to hand-pick parents to participate on school improvement teams and does not allow parent elections. In contrast, teachers would be elected by their peers to the improvement teams.

10. The bill does not give students a voice or a role in the school reform process.

Source: Education Law Center

Earlier this week, I received a copy of the following letter [below] from several statewide education advocacy groups through a legislative email distribution group for school board members.

This document originates as joint statement from the AFT Pennsylvania, Education Law Center, Education Voters of Pennsylvania, Good Schools Pennsylvania, Media Area Branch of the NAACP, Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators, Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools, Pennsylvania League of Urban Schools, Pennsylvania School Boards Association and the Pennsylvania State Education Association.

The following spreadsheet of districts and schools and was prepared by the Education Law Center to illustrate the potential impact of SB 1192.