Showing posts with label Broward County School Board. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Broward County School Board. Show all posts

Thursday, February 22, 2024

Tonight's important Broward Schools outreach mtg. re Broward Supt. Licata's plan to close 5 schools/sell property within a year, with 3 in SE Broward on the prospective chopping block because they are less than 70% capacity

Today's blog post is a follow-up to my blog post of WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2023, titled,

Torey Alston's call for "Major reform" now by the Broward County School Board is 100% correct -and 100% long overdue
https://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2023/11/torey-alstons-call-for-major-reform-now.html



I also tweeted about that post here, https://x.com/hbbtruth/status/1729940297038078417?s=20





This was me on Twitter this past Sunday afternoon, plus the predicate tweets from BCPSCanDoBetter and Alexander Russo highlighting the Chicago Sun-Times account of what happened when the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) closed 50 schools throughout the nation's third-largest city.


Chicago Sun-Times

To report on the impact of Chicago’s mass school closings, we turned to neighborhood residents.
While City Hall and Chicago Public Schools put roadblocks in the way of reporting for the Sun-Times and WBEZ series, people who lived near the closed schools opened up with their stories.

By  Lauren FitzPatrick, 
December 28, 2023, 10:00am EST


Will be interested to see who among SE #Broward elected officials/candidates fm #HollywoodFL #HallandaleBeach participate @ 3rd of 3 #BCPS' mtgs re under-enrolled schools Thurs. @ Flanagan HS @ 6 pm.  Spies tell me few of Usual Suspects @ either City Hall attended. 🙄


Re Thursday's important mtg. re under-enrolled Broward schools, Supt.'s plan to close school/sell property of 5 within a year, with 3 in SE Broward on possible chopping block because they are less than 70% capacity: Hallandale High School, McNicol Middle School and Hollywood Central Elementary School.

There's a good but-not-perfect graph that was on a popular Broward public policy Facebook page that showed reasons that some Broward parents give for why they have -or may- pull their kids from the system. 

The official number given for so-called "lost" BCPS kids in the past 20 years is 58,000, but I suspect it is considerably higher since the very people who were NOT polled actually are the ones I'd like most to hear from in such a poll to know the truth: parents who fled Broward county ENTIRELY, and did not know of the poll.

Concerned Citizens of Broward County


Though this particular Facebook page is much more useful than most things online that have a South Florida emphasis, the truth is that is very noticeable that at certain times of the week -say on Sunday mornings and around midnight on weeknights Monday thru Thursday- it tends to have indignant and angry posts that are VERY heavily weighed and biased towards the long term interests and goals of the Broward Democratic Party and its activist allies, principally, teachers and their union friends, the Broward Teachers Union -the BTU.

The BTU expects that all Broward School Board candidates it endorses and who get elected to be faithful puppets and to always think as exactly as they are told, especially regarding salaries and pay raises.
That is, they believe that the answer to every problem in the school system, including why has Broward County lost 58,000 students over the past 20 years, is because teachers were not paid enough. Which is preposterous of course.
You can see for yourself below how their comments condescendingly dismiss all parents answers to simple questions about why they pulled/may pull their kids from the BCPS system, IF the answer isn't simply giving more $ to teachers.

We all know that parents in Broward County are NOT removing their children from the public schools and voting with their wallets/purses and feet by moving simply because of the level of salary individual teachers earn each year. Especially in a county where because of the efforts of Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida legislature, the starting salary of a teacher in Broward County is $50,000, plus benefits, regardless of how poorly a teacher they may prove to be in their first year.

Here are the responses to the graph above, which make my larger point. 


Reality = Broward taxpayers interested in both solid academic improvement and financial efficiencies KNOW BCPS buildings and land WILL be sold, so the belief among self-serving, politically- driven #BTU and its members that honestly think that the number of teachers will or should remain the same is... DELUSIONAL. 
I'm NOT a fan of BTU's B.S.

As for tonight, I'm out-of-town, so I will NOT be able to attend the meeting in Pembroke Pines at Flanagan, the HS that my nephew graduated from 20 years ago.



Miami Herald
'Tough conversations': Broward school district hosts its first input event on school changes

Jimena Tavel, Staff Writer
February 12, 2024

While scrolling social media Wednesday night, Cathy Curry, 61, saw a list of the most under-enrolled schools in Broward County Public Schools and one caught her eye: her alma mater Hallandale High School, the same majority-Black school that, in 1974, she and her mother marched in protest to get the district to open.

She saw that the district could close it because it's operating at only 64% of its capacity. She panicked.

"I was so hurt I couldn't sleep," Curry, who graduated from the high school in 1980, told the Miami Herald.

The following day, on Thursday, she decided to attend a district event on the topic at Fort Lauderdale High School. That was the first of three events that Broward school district officials have planned to seek community input on a plan to close or repurpose at least five out of the district's total of 239 schools in the 2025-2026 school year. They say the district must make changes because it has lost about 58,000 students in the past 20 years.

Instead of holding a traditional town hall Thursday, district officials held small-group conversations.

First, Superintendent of Broward Public Schools Peter Licata briefly explained why the district needs to affect at least five schools. Then officials split the roughly 150 in-person attendees inside the school's auditorium - and the about 200 who tuned in to the live stream online - into eight groups and directed them to different areas such as classrooms and the cafeteria. They assigned a facilitator to lead and survey each group using an artificial intelligence platform called ThoughtExchange.

Facilitators asked each group two questions using ThoughtExchange and then led a discussion about all of the groups' answers, which they could see and rate up or down online.

The first was, "When the District decides to close or combine schools, what should we think about the most. What considerations are most important and why?"

Some of the answers included bus schedules and transportation concerns, the well-being of children, maintaining or improving the quality of the education, increasing targeted programs for specific careers in the future, the overall fiscal impact to the district and the classroom sizes.

The second question was, "How can we make changing schools a positive experience for students, teachers, and the community to help our schools become the best they can be?"

Those answers featured statements like "infrastructure is key," "increasing mental health for students," and "pay the teachers a decent wage."

The first question upset Curry.

"To see that felt like the decision is already made, and it's disingenuous to gather the community here," she said.

Zoie Saunders, the district's chief strategy and innovation officer, was facilitating Curry's group and apologized for that. She later told the Herald that the original question was too long and in the editing process, it lost some clarity.

"I completely acknowledged that was a mistake," Saunders said. "We'll try to wordsmith that question for the future."

Overall, Licata, who walked in and out of all of the group settings, told the Herald after the event that he thought it had gone well.

"I thought tonight was pretty good," he said. "We had some really good conversations; we had some really tough conversations. ... It was the first night. We're going to redirect some things, fix some things. We are going to address what people have said. We're listening."

Complaints with format, use of AI

Others in Curry's group raised concerns about the district's logistics for the event.

Narnike Pierre Grant, the mother of a Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School freshman and the chair of the school district's diversity committee, said she disliked being divided into small groups.

"I wasn't happy with the format. I don't think it was conducive for the people in this district," said Pierre Grant. "When they were advertising it, they made it feel like a town hall, and that's not what it was. It was hard for people who aren't technologically savvy."

In response, Licata said the district never called the event a "town hall meeting." The official district web page and the flyer describe the events as "Community Conversations." But he acknowledged that the district can hammer that point more in the future.

Overall, he said he understands that there's a history of mistrust in the school district and that that might affect some perspectives.

"We know we have to build trust. This is new to this district, and I'm new to this district. It will take time," he said.

Similarly to Pierre Grant, one of the teachers who attended Thursday, Erica Hansinger from Western High School in Davie, felt that the district could have surveyed people at home instead of in person. And that the use of AI didn't foster "deep, raw conversations."

After the group members answered the two questions, they got to up-vote or down-vote other attendees' ideas. At the end, the platform produced a "summary" with conclusions about what the people said, which the facilitator read out loud.

"That's not the way to engage the community," said Hansinger, who's been teaching for 20 years. "I was baffled. It was bizarre."

After the group stopped looking down at their devices in Hansinger and Pierre Grant's group, they started chatting. A woman shared that she had experienced trauma back in 1995 when the district rezoned some schools and she lost all of her friends; she said she didn't want her own children to experience that, too.

"Her story touched me," Hansinger said, pointing out that the woman wouldn't have been able to share that emotion and those details online on ThoughtExchange and that the format possibly hindered others from sharing their own tales.

In response to that, Saunders said the district decided to use the platform to collect more data and spark ideas. She said that it's not over-relying on its results, as it will also consider other factors when deciding what schools to change: factors including enrollment, neighborhood demographics and the condition of each facility.

The next two district events will take place at 6 p.m. Thursday at the J.P. Taravella High School at 10600 Riverside Dr. in Coral Springs and at 6 p.m. Feb. 22, which is also a Thursday, at the Charles W. Flanagan High School at 12800 Taft St. in Pembroke Pines.


https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article285429077.html

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

In light of U.S. Appeals Court ruling against President Trump's use of Twitter and Blocking people, when can we expect Broward School Board to publicly say when it'll conform to the spirit and letter of the law? Don't hold your breath!


Above and below, July 13, 2010 photo by me, looking south at the Broward County Schools HQ, 600 S.E. Third Avenue, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

In 2016, quite out-of-the-blue, I received an interesting Tweet from someone I'd never met or ever heard of before, Angela Greben, a San Jose, California resident. Among other things, Angela really hates government agencies and officials who seem to not think twice about violating norms (or even laws) about public records and transparency and what the public is entitled to expect in the way of access to public information. 

Her tweet caused quite a ripple after I wrote about it and what I thought it represented.
Though I've never spoken about it before, despite all the dozens of prior blog posts I'd written here about the feckless School Board, her tweet, and actually seeing that list of Blocked people, with my name on top of it, caused me to receive lots of email from concerned people all over Broward County, South Florida and points north and west whom I'd never heard from before.
People who shared my own misgivings about the bad conduct of the scandal-plagued and mis-behaving Broward County School Board.

That is to say, the Broward School Board as a collective entity, as well as it ragtag collection of constituent members and superintendents, and their army of supporters and flacks.

For you newcomers, take a look at this post from earlier in the year:
Culture of Corruption & Incompetency by Feckless Broward School Board, General Counsel Barbara J. Myrick & Supt. Robert Runcie in a Nutshell.
re The special Grand Jury impaneled by the Florida Supreme Court via Gov. Ron DeSantis investigating feckless Broward County Schools & its School Board: 
Broward education activists & taxpayers want you to make sure that Broward Schools General Counsel Barbara J. Myrick is one of first persons grilled. 
She has a LOT to publicly account for, as does nearly every School Board member

Yes, the whole cast of charcters at Broward Schools have been a frequent and popular target of my fact-filled blog posts and fact-based Twitter barbs ever since I started the blog twelve years ago, and then, finally got a Twitter acount under the nom-de-guerre @hbbtruth

Yes, as in Hallandale Beach Blog + Truth, because that's what this blog is all about in the end. 
Revealing the truth so that the public knows what is reality and what is, you know, Fake News.

To my own eternal regret and embarrassment, I was rather late to the Twitter party, especially given my ENFP personality, who I am in the scheme of things locally in this part of southeast Broward and the sheer volume of history I know as well as the number of knowledgeable and influential people I know who know even more than I do, including about the Broward School system's history, track record, and its various roster of players over the years, who've shared what they know with me.
People like Charlotte Greenbarg, for instance.

"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."
- Winston Churchill

So, as to that part above about having "enemies"... For those of you who are newcomers to the blog, I've been writing fact-filled, analytical blog posts about the serial corruption, incompetency and fecklessness by the Broward School Board on a whole array of issues for the past twelve years.

And, I've also written about them with regularity as well on my popular South Florida Twitter handle, @hbbtruth, since October of 2013, often buttressing some other person's good point with facts, or, necessarily throwing some cold water on someone via cold hard facts who wants us to believe something that can't be believed by anyone who knows anything about common sense or human behavior.

Trust me, there's a good reason that so many activists, personalities, elected officials and members of the South Florida or Florida press corps that you know and trust are Following me on Twitter and reading my latest post on this blog, which can net anywhere between 15,000 and 90,000 page views a month, depending upon the subjects du jour and the time of year, with, not surprisingly, "the season," October thru April being highest readership numbers for the blog.


That means not just accepting whole what is written in South Florida newspapers or on websites or seen on TV, but of my actually going to meetings all over Broward County -and especially in Hollywood and Hallandale Beach- and meeting other concerned and curious Broward citizens and taxpayers who wonder about the same things I do: ethics, accountability, public oversight, conflicts-of-interest and power plays by certain parties and groups within the Broward education Establishment and the people who support it in the Broward business community, who make lots of money on the school system as contractors and vendors for projects needed and wasteful.

So, I have seen first-hand the incriminating reports and the damning photos and the files that have been so much in the news since 2007 surrounding the culture of corruption.

As you might imagine, that sort of consistent public questioning of elected officials and administrators and a willingness to publicly challenge people personally to substantiate and back up what they say leads to lots of things.

On the one hand, it means that many people throughout Broward who make education one of their chief concerns -regular citizens, public officials as well as many local print/TV reporters and columnists- know from personal experience that when I say something, that I not only know of what I speak, but can also personally produce the incriminating evidence, or, know the very people who can produce it so that the public finds out the truth.

That sort of effort over a dozen years also creates all sort of friction with people who are supposed to be working FOR the public, including numerous past and current elected Broward School Board members, administrators and their staffs, who do NOT like seeing the truth being publicly discussed in a logical and reasonable way.
And even worse, discussed in print where anyone can see the facts and not have to accept their own particular spin on things.

So that kind of effort is why I was on the Top Ten list of people whom the Broward School system has been BLOCKING on Twitter since 2016, as the Angela Greben tweet above makes clear.
Yes, I wear they're BLOCKING of me like a gold medal, and proudly so.


















Yesterday we all learned that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit had finally ruled in a case that has been featured dozens of times in U.S. news media over the past few years, issuing a unanimous opinion that President Trump has been violating the U.S. Constitution by blocking Twitter users who criticize or mock him.

Plaintiffs Buckwalter, Cohen, Figueroa, Gu, Neely, Papp, and Pappas (“Individual Plaintiffs”) are social media users who were blocked from accessing and interacting with the Twitter account of President Donald J. Trump because they expressed views he disliked.  The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University is an organization alleging a right to hear the speech that the Individual Plaintiffs would have expressed had they not been blocked.  The Plaintiffs sued President Trump along with certain White House officials, contending that the blocking violated the First Amendment.  The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (Buchwald, J.) found that the “interactive space” in the account is a public forum and that the exclusion from that space was unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.  We agree, and, accordingly, we affirm the judgment of the District Court.

that he engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination by utilizing Twitter’s “blocking” function to limit certain users’ access to his social media account, which is otherwise open to the public at large, because he disagrees with their speech.  We hold that he engaged in such discrimination and, consequently, affirm the judgment below

The ruling leaves open lots of other interesting questions, like whether this will also apply to other federal, state and local elected officials, governments or agencies?

Read the court's opinion for yourself:







So in thinking about all of this yesterday, I knew that someone needed to ask a reasonable question to someone at the Broward School Board about its past history of Blocking concerned Residents like me on Twitter, given that South Florida's news media has not exactly jumped on this sort of story to the extent that I and many other civic activists believe they should have.

So, I thought of whom the most reasonable person was on the School Board whom I could ask.
That was an easy call.

It certainly isn't the feckless, foul-mouthed and Runcie-supporter who represents Hollywood and Hallandale Beach, Ann Murray, long a target of public criticism here on my blog and on my Twitter handle DOZENS of times when she has repeatedly and publicly engaged in misdirection and misrepresented both herself and her long track record of inaction, inadequacy and logrolling. 

Because of the demographics of this part of Broward, our area should have an outstanding person on the School Board representing us. Someone who is known for their savviness, public demeanor, scrupulous ethics, their reliable, hardworking nature, and their willingness to admit when they are wrong and adjust their thinking to new facts and new realities.
None of which are qualities that have ever been associated with Ann Murray.
We could do SO MUCH better than Ann Murray, who was narrowly re-elected last November.


Given what I wrote about her last Friday on the blog and had earlier tweeted about her, it clearly wasn't going to be Dr. Roslind Osgood, now was it?

Mystery solved at Broward School Board! The Doctor did it! New York Times revealed that Broward County School Board member Rosalind Osgood used her African-American college sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, as a conduit to mobilize supporters of Supt. Robert W. Runcie at BCSB meetings earlier this year debating Runcie's future



In the end, I decided I'd use Twitter to ask School Board member Lori Alhadeff, someone who actually led the charge in March to make Supt. Runcie publicly accountable, to his one of his bosses, even though many of the School Board members defer to him so much on policy issues and decisions at meetings that you can well be forgiven for thinking that they work for him, not the other way around.
But not her.

What Lori Alhdaeff wants doesn't seem like too much to ask for: she wants the truth, positive results and to end the reign of the faceless School bureaucrats who seemingly can never be held to account publicly, no matter how bad things get and have already gotten.
That's something and someone worth supporting, especially under the horrific and unique circumstances that led her to running for the School Board last year.
Her pain is real and omnipresent.




I'll keep you advised on what I hear about this, since we all know that unless they are pushed or shoved, there are far too many members of the South Florida press corps who simply are NOT going to see this issue for what it truly is.
A sign that for many people in government in South Florida, i.e the Broward School Board and the Supt. Runcie, there are rules for some people and special rules for special people.
And they think they are special people.

No, the law has to apply to everyone if it is going to be both respected and followed.
No special rules for special people.
Period.



Wednesday, April 18, 2018

So here we are, South Florida, now in 2018, asking the very same kinds of questions as 2014: Supt. Robert W. Runcie - What happened to the 💰💰💰? What happened to the #SchoolHardening at #Broward #Schools that taxpayers/parents were promised? Where ARE the actual #results? #SoFL


So here we are, South Florida, now in 2018, asking the very same kinds of questions as 2014: Supt. Robert W. Runcie - What happened to the 💰💰💰?
What happened to the at that taxpayers/parents were promised? Where ARE the actual ?
Continued inability of Schools & Supt. Runcie to take public criticism, respond appropriately;











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