Broward School Board redistricting/incumbent-protection racket set to get first dose of public criticism tonight in Hollywood. Just don't say racial whitewash & Beachside Montessori together aloud or Ann Murray's head will explode. Both are Ann Murray's idea of success stories! LOL!!
"Ann Murray could not be reached for comment despite messages left at her office..."
Hell, this despicable woman won't even answer reasonable questions posed to her when she's sitting right in front of you at a public meeting that's supposed to inform the public.
She is such a disaster for this county's school children and this part of it in particular.
Wait until you see the upcoming videos I have of her sitting stone-faced at Supt. Robert Runcie's Listening Tour visit to Hollywood Hills High School and repeatedly refusing to answer questions posed to her by Hallandale Beach residents.
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Broward Schools Press Release
School Board Redistricting Steering Committee
Schedules Public Hearings and Mapping Workshops Although proposed changes to School Board member districts will modify the geographic areas for single member districts one through seven, countywide seats eight and nine will not be impacted. Map revisions also will not affect attendance boundaries and student transportation. The Redistricting Steering Committee has scheduled three mapping workshops to be held in each of the District’s south, central and north administrative areas. These workshops will provide instruction, requirements and assistance to those who wish to create a new School Board member district map for consideration. The first of three mapping workshops will be held on Monday, March 26th at 5:30 p.m. at McArthur High School, Auditorium (6501 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood). The 2011-2013 redistricting project provides for extensive public participation through a series of seven public hearings – one in each of the seven districts throughout the county – to inform community members and receive public comment. The second in a series of public meetings to inform the public about the process for drawing new School Board district map alternatives will take place on Thursday, March 29th from 6 – 8 p.m. at the Kathleen C. Wright Administration Center, Board Room (600 SE Third Ave., Fort Lauderdale). For more information about the redistricting process and dates and locations of future public hearings and mapping workshops, visit:(www.broward.k12.fl.us/ |
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South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Broward School Board protects incumbents, fails to redistrict for 2012 elections
By Anthony Man, Sun Sentinel
9:27 PM EDT, March 22, 2012
One criterion Broward School Board members are unabashedly using to redraw district boundaries: saving their own jobs.
"Protection of incumbents" is one of the seven principles board members have said should be used to remake district boundaries for electing the School Board to take into account the latest Census results.
Though it's not illegal, and incumbent protection has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, plenty of people are displeased.
"We all know that's the unwritten rule in redistricting. But someone put it in black and white?" asked Kevin Tynan, a former Broward Republican Party chairman who served a year as an appointed School Board member and lost a 2010 campaign for a full term. "That's so wrong."
Civic activist Charlotte Greenbarg — president of the Broward Coalition of 200 homeowners associations representing 150,000 people and an appointed member of three School District advisory committees — termed it "bizarre."
Tynan, Greenbarg and Carol Smith of the League of Women Voters of Broward County are also concerned about the School Board's failure to redraw the political boundaries for seven board members in time for the 2012 elections. The two other board members are elected countywide.
District boundaries are normally redrawn every 10 years to reflect population changes as shown by the Census. Instead of redrawing boundaries for elected members' districts for the 2012 elections, the Broward School Board is delaying until 2014.
The state is redrawing districts for the Legislature and Congress in time for this November's elections. The Broward County Commission and the Palm Beach County School Board have already completed their redistricting.
Board members' district boundaries have no impact on where students attend school. The delay means unequal representation for residents in decisions affecting the county school system because the populations in the existing districts are so out of whack. District 2 in southwest Broward has 45,700 more residents than it should. District 5 in central Broward has 20,300 too few, and District 7 in the northeast part of the county is short 16,500 people.
As long as those inequities aren't remedied, the School Board is pretty clearly violating the principle of one-person, one-vote handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Tynan, a lawyer, said the board is "lucky" it hasn't been sued.
"It's something they needed to do. There's no excuse," he said.
The School Board was blasted in a February 2011 report from a statewide grand jury looking into corruption which found the board was so lacking in leadership that it deserved to be abolished.
Scott Spages, a Davie political activist, said the School Board's redistricting priorities will do nothing to improve its reputation. "This School Board has ranged from criminal to dysfunctional, and it just further speaks to the issue of them being dysfunctional," he said.
Both Spages and Greenbarg said they couldn't understand how the School Board bobbled a task that other Florida government bodies have managed to complete. After all, they said, the 2010 Census and need to redistrict in keping with its results weren't exactly secrets.
"Redistricting isn't rocket science," Greenbarg said. "They should have done it the first opportunity they had to put the numbers in the computer and get the districts."
Michael Rajner, chairman of the School Board's Redistricting Steering Committee, referred questions about the timing of redistricting and the incumbent-protection mission to board members.
School Board Chairwoman Ann Murray could not be reached for comment despite messages left at her office on Wednesday and Thursday. Laurie Rich Levinson, the vice chairwoman, said she wasn't happy with the failure to redraw districts in time for the 2012 election.
She said she raised the matter at workshops with other board members in August and September, but that district staff balked, arguing that it would be too difficult to redraw the map by the end of 2011. State law requires setting school board boundaries in odd-numbered years.
"In retrospect I think there should have been more pushing to go out and get it done when everybody else managed to go out and get it done," she said.
The Census Bureau provided population information in April. The Palm Beach County School Board held hearings around the county and adopted its new districts in November. The Broward School Board appointed its Redistricting Steering Committee that month. The seven criteria the board told them to use: compactness and contiguity; preservation of political subdivisions, communities of interests, prior districts and incumbents; and compliance with federal Voting Rights Act requirements for creating districts that help elect members of minority populations.
Though disappointed by the delay in redrawing the map, Rich Levinson, who was elected to the school board in 2010, said there's a positive element to what's happening now. The series of public hearings the redistricting steering committee plans around the county means process will be "very thorough and transparent," he said.
Details on 11 hearings and workshops planned by the Redistricting Steering Committee at SunSentinel.com/
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WPLG-TV, Miami
Bob Norman's Blog
Has school brought segregation to Hollywood?
Published On: Mar 24 2012 01:25:20 PM EDT Updated On: Mar 24 2012 01:31:53 PM EDTI saw former Broward School Board Member Jennifer Gottlieb at a kids' event not long ago and she mentioned that the controversial school she helped build in her city of Hollywood, Beachside Montessori Village, was rated third-best in the state for FCAT scores.
I thought about saying, "Yeah, it's amazing what $20 million in taxpayers' money can do."
Read the rest of the post at
http://www.local10.com/news/
And be sure to read my friend Charlotte Greenbarg's comments below it!
Some of you will recall that in an email earlier this month, I shared with you the URL to the Westside Gazette story that Bob Norman notes above re Bethune Elementary, the day after it first appeared.
February 22, 2011 photo by South Beach Hoosier.Further, I not only haven't forgotten the joke of a public meeting that Jennifer Gottlieb and Ann Murray had on Hollywood Beach on February 22nd last year at the Hollywood Beach Culture & Community Center, following the devastating final report of the grand jury that so many of us hoped ended with some more people in hancuffs.
I haven't forgotten how pitiful it was to watch the organized group of brainwashed Beachside Montessori Moms in attendance cheer Gottlieb and Murray's serial lies, spouting their Kool-Aid nonsense that denied the self-evident reality of how the school came into being and how it came to be the particular way it was - racial whitewash.
February 22, 2011 photo by South Beach Hoosier.
February 22, 2011 photo by South Beach Hoosier.(Yes, the same two School Board members from next-door Hollywood who couldn't be bothered to attend the long-in-the-planning event at the Hallandale Beach Cultural Center four months later in June on the longstanding funding/physical problems at Hallandale H.S., where the parents and taxpayers got a chance to vent as well as hear from some of the original litigants in the successful lawsuit against the Broward Schools to end the unequal funding.)
Csaba Kulin, Catherine Kim Owens and myself were the only objective people from HB in attendance in Hollywood to see the entire dog-and-pony show, which sadly, only Channel 7 bothered to cover, despite the opportunity to ask two people with some real culpability for the whole sordid mess to explain in their own words what happened.
I would have liked to have been able to link or post the Channel 7 video with then-7 reporter Reed Cowan interviewing Murray, and her patently absurd alibis and claims that persuasive information was coming soon that would make the public see the Board's side of everything and agree with them, but unfortunately, it is no longer available on their website -though I have it saved on my computer.
(Cowan is now at KSNV-TV, Channel 3, the NBC affiliate in Las Vegas. Quick, someone tell http://www.sfltv.com/ )
Disappearing TV news videos are a blogger's perpetual lament, of course, as well as for anyone seriously interested in public policy, and yet it's become a depressingly familiar routine at South Florida TV stations.
Unfortunately for me, that includes a few rare stories I've seen in the past eight years down here that actually paint an accurate picture of government financial funny business and government agencies run amok, ones that I'd love to keep permanent links to on my blog for everyone to see, some for the very first time.
But once they're taken off the station website, they're never to be seen again except on a demo or portfolio reel for some future employer.
Unfortunately for me, that includes a few rare stories I've seen in the past eight years down here that actually paint an accurate picture of government financial funny business and government agencies run amok, ones that I'd love to keep permanent links to on my blog for everyone to see, some for the very first time.
But once they're taken off the station website, they're never to be seen again except on a demo or portfolio reel for some future employer.
Sorry, no Jen-Jen for you today!
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