The Observation Deck

That ranking is meaningless without important supplemental information such as the demographics of the students and families served.

Grace O'Malley wrote:That ranking is meaningless without important supplemental information such as the demographics of the students and families served.

I agree, Grace!

Unfortunately, not everyone understands the facts and data behind these rankings. Not even our City Hall leaders.





For example, the above photo was taken by Jim O’Bryan during my 2011 meeting with Ward 3 Councilman Shawn Juris at the Root Cafe wherein Shawn was explaining to me why the Lakewood City Schools should be required to turnover its property tax revenue to the City of Lakewood if the school district doesn’t rank excellent or better. Shawn didn’t get it either.

Yet another reason to keep City Hall away from running the Lakewood City Schools!

Matt

Matt - That cup makes your hand look huge!

Corey

Shawn Juris,

Please tell us if you did in fact suggest that the Lakewood City Schools should turn over their property tax revenue to the city if the district doesn't rank "excellent" or better.

Did you suggest that? Please explain.

(quoth Mr. Markling: "For example, the above photo was taken by Jim O’Bryan during my 2011 meeting with Ward 3 Councilman Shawn Juris at the Root Cafe wherein Shawn was explaining to me why the Lakewood City Schools should be required to turnover its property tax revenue to the City of Lakewood if the school district doesn’t rank excellent or better.")

Betsy Voinovich wrote:Here's my question: Is the contract that our Lakewood City Schools' teachers have unusual when compared to other school districts?

How does it compare to say Rocky River, Fairview Park or Cleveland?

Thank you. I think as we get closer to a levy, and educated population is necessary.

Betsy Voinovich

There are a lot of differences.

The most interesting is that the draft copy of the Lakewood contract is 228 pages long. The contract for Brecksville City schools is 58 pages long.

Here is an interesting item from the Lakewood contract:



A. The elementary teacher's continuous work day shall not exceed seven and one­ half
(7-1/2) hours (including lunch) within the hours of 8:00a.m. and 4:00p.m. Assignment of teachers
to classes beginning before 8:00 a.m. and ending after
4:00p.m. will be voluntary. There may be circumstances, due to scheduling, where the
principal has the right to assign when the teacher's seven and one-half (7-112) hour day shall
begin and end; however, no teacher may be assigned a starting and ending time two years in a
row. The teacher shall establish his/her daily time schedule pattern by the end of the previous
year. This daily schedule pattern may be changed in consultation with the principal. The
daily schedule may be occasionally altered by notifying the principal. In no case
shall the teacher's normal work day begin fewer than fifteen (15) minutes before his/her
first assigned student contact responsibility or end fewer than fifteen (15) minutes after his/her
last assigned student contact responsibility. A teacher may request to be excused early by the
building principal. Each elementary principal will designate one day per week on which
flex time will be suspended and all teachers will work from 8:00a.m. to 3:30p.m. Said designated
day will be the same day of the week throughout the school year. The resulting 8:00a.m.- 8:45a.m.
time period will be scheduled by the building principal with the intent of reducing
meetings and inservices that would otherwise occur outside the contract day.

B. The teacher's daily contact time with students shall not exceed 5-1/4 hours, plus homeroom
time. During this time, the classroom teacher (a classroom teacher has responsibility for all
subject areas other than those taught by specialists) shall have a daily average of forty
(40) minutes of planning time over a ten (10) day cycle. Kindergarten teachers will have a daily
average of twenty (20) minutes of planning time over a ten (I0) day cycle, during the time the
students are in session in addition to the time from II :30 a.m. to 11:50 a.m. each day. Every
effort will be made to provide media specialists a daily average of forty (40) minutes of
planning time over a ten (I 0) day cycle, but a guaranteed daily twenty (20) minute planning time
will be assigned by the building principal. The building principal will schedule a daily average
of forty (40) minutes of planning time over a ten (1O) day cycle for music/art/physical education
specialist teachers. Should one­ and-a-half or doubled music/art/physical education classes
be unavoidable, the teacher of the class(es) shall be compensated as follows: classes of
thirty-eight (38) to fifty (50) students shall be compensated at $300 per class; classes of fifty­
one (51) to sixty (60) students shall be compensated at $400 per class.. In an exceptional
circumstance where a class would exceed sixty (60), a per student stipend of $1.00 per student
per day shall be paid to the teacher. This stipend will be paid in the first paycheck in June if
the teacher submitted the Compensation for One-and-a Half or Doubled Music/Art/Physical
Education Classes form (Appendix KK) by May 1st Any teacher who voluntarily directs a choir(s),
with the approval of the appropriate administrator, shall receive a $200 stipend per choir
per year in the first paycheck in June. An uninterrupted lunch of forty-five (45) minutes will be
provided. Teachers will not be required to have any student contact......

The Brecksville contract calls for an 8 hour day INCLUDING LUNCH. I find that odd. Does your eight hour day include the lunch hour or is your 8 hour day really 9 hours? And are school districts misleading the public when they say they have instituted an 8 hour day when the work day is really 7 hours long?

Bill Call wrote:
There are a lot of differences.

The most interesting is that the draft copy of the Lakewood contract is 228 pages long. The contract for Brecksville City schools is 58 pages long.

[/quote]


Bill,

Once again, your post is erroneous and misleading. The 58 page portion of Brecksville's contract is what was just negotiated this summer. If you look at Brecksville's website, you'll notice there are several .pdf documents. One is the "Current Agreement." The 58 page file you mention contains only the changes that were made to the current agreement. It is NOT the full contract. Their Current Agreement is 218 pages.

While we are comparing Lakewood to Brecksville, you might have noticed that the base salary for Lakewood teachers is $36,184, while the base salary for Brecksville is $39,786. Funny that you didn’t mention that.

A teacher’s lunch is typically based on the school’s schedule. At the high school level, in both Lakewood and Brecksville, teachers have a 40 minute lunch that is scheduled during student lunch periods. (Class periods are 40 minutes long at each high school.) Most of the teachers I work with, work through their lunch and/or eat at their desk in their classroom. Except for the occasional day that I run out for lunch, I typically spend 5-10 minutes eating lunch. Should teachers not get a lunch? Should their lunch be outside of the school day?

None of us can respond for Mr. Berdine. If you are that concerned about why he supports an 8 hour work day in Brecksville, perhaps you should call him. He likely had very little to do with this issue. (Negotiations began in the spring, Mr. Berdine’s started August 1, and a tentative agreement was reached on August 22nd.) He may have also noticed that teachers in Brecksville are paid more.

I don’t really expect a response here as you still haven’t responded to my previous comment regarding another of your erroneous and misleading posts. If you are going to make such strong accusations about our school district, you should have accurate facts to back them up, but should also admit to your mistakes. If you truly want what is best for Lakewood students and taxpayers, you need to stop cherry-picking and start presenting relevant, unbiased, and accurate data.

IMO, formed after years of reading Bill Call posts, he does not have the best interest of the students at heart. Bill's agenda is UNIONS. He despises them. He truly believes they are the root of all evil.


Bill Call cannot be unbiased about it at all. If the city, the schools, or anyone has any sort of issues, he wants to blame it ALL on the unions. Because teachers belong to a union, its natural for him to accuse the teachers and place the blame on THEM, rather than look objectively at the issues and see what other matters complicate them.

Personally, I ignore him, but I applaud the teachers who post here to set the record straight. Some readers may not know Bill's history and ASSUME all that he posts is factual or true.

Good luck keeping up with him. He's relentless in his obsession.

Here's a simple question for you Bill, is it your contention that teachers don't work enough? A simple yes or no will suffice, but if you'd like to further expound upon how you arrived at this conclusion I'd love to hear your vision and expertise.

One of the conceits of so-called "country music" is that they sing for a whole lot of regular people.

So when Dolly Parton sang about working "9 to 5," I believe she must have been singing for a whole lot of regular people.

Even if you don't like "country music," it's hard to deny that "9 to 5" is a common idiomatic expression referring to a standard, normal work day.

By my count--and I am an educated man, though not half the number cruncher that is Bill Call--working "9 to 5" adds up to an eight-hour day.

Do Dolly Parton and all those fans of "country music" fit a sandwich in there somewhere?

Grace O'Malley wrote:IMO, formed after years of reading Bill Call posts, he does not have the best interest of the students at heart. Bill's agenda is UNIONS. He despises them. He truly believes they are the root of all evil.

None of that is true.

I admire the LTA. They are a fierce competitor that secures the best deal possible for Lakewood teachers. My beef is with the people who run the Lakewood school system.

When they were asking for the last levy they never mentioned that nearly $6 million of the money collected would be used for retirement bonuses. I don't think that was a good use of those funds.

The administration agreed to pay 85% of the 100% increase in health insurance costs and have agreed to keep a policy that has virtually no deductibles or co pays. I don't think that is a good use of tax dollars.

The district has lost its excellent rating and is unlikely to ever attain that rating again unless adapts to the new reality. I don't see any evidence that they are willing to do that.

It's the job of the teachers union to get the most money possible from the people of Lakewood. It's the job of the administration to represent the interests of the students and people of Lakewood. The LTA is doing its job and the administration is not.

[quote="Bill Call"]

The district has lost its excellent rating and is unlikely to ever attain that rating again unless adapts to the new reality. I don't see any evidence that they are willing to do that.

The reason that the district is now in continuous improvement is a result of the performance of a total of 24 students on the state tests. Christine Gordillo explained that "because the district had two student subgroups (with a total of 24 students in these subgroups)that did not meet federal benchmarks (or AYP) for the No Child Left Behind Act for 3 straight years, by law our district could not be rated any higher than "Continuous Improvement."

Anyone who claims that there is no evidence of concerted and continuing efforts to work with students who have not met AYP is woefully ignorant about the reality of what is happening in the Lakewood City Schools.

The district has lost its excellent rating and is unlikely to ever attain that rating again unless adapts to the new reality. I don't see any evidence that they are willing to do that.

In my futile attempt to have Bill Call answer anything, I'll try a few new ones pertaining to this classic example of "Callsian" thinking.

1. Why do YOU think the district lost its excellent rating?
2. What is the "new reality" and how does it relate to your response in question 1?
3. What would you do or have done differently to change our district's rating?
4. What evidence would you need? It seems like facts, data, and lived-experience of professionals aren't enough, so what is?

Bill, it would be really useful if you'd just answer our questions. As someone who has run for a seat on the school-board, and may again, it might be useful for you to clarify some of the more mysterious statements you've made in this thread.

Bill, in the context of pitting the teachers' union against "the people who run the Lakewood school system" (and right before casting their roles as an adversarial battle over whether the teachers get more money), you said:

"The district has lost its excellent rating and is unlikely to ever attain that rating again unless it adapts to the new reality."

First, your whole post portrays what is at best a myopically narrow view of the role of the school administration and teachers' union.

Second, I can only assume that by "Adapting to the new reality" you mean something about insurance premiums and scarce tax dollars. That's the specific financial issue you talk about in your post.

How does the the schools' overall rating--shaped by a couple dozen students from very challenging sub-groups, despite 9/10 schools rating effective or excellent, how is that impacted by insurance premiums?

Please explain how your tax, or insurance, or pension issue would help the schools improve those sub-group test scores and get that excellent rating back. What would that do for the performance of a couple dozen kids?

Also:

I've still got questions about the standard 8-hour work-day, as defined idiomatically and in song as "working nine to five." I have to believe that Dolly Parton and most of her hard working subjects get to take a lunch break, perhaps even a "lunch hour." Because "9 to 5" describes a finite period of time, I have to assume that said lunch break actually cuts into that eight hour day. Do you know if this is true?

Is Dolly Parton properly supervised and supported?

When I worked, in more than one setting, we worked 8 hours and had a half-hour for lunch, so we were at our workstations for eight hours, and were paid for eight hours. At one place, we originally had an hour for lunch, but agreed to change it to a half hour so we could go home earlier.

We referred to 9 to 5 as banker's hours, and those who worked those hours typically got an hour or more for lunch, so they actually worked seven or fewer hours.

If you really think a song by Dolly Parton is in any way authoritative, please give me a call; I have some lakefront property in Parma I can get you a deal on.

I didn't vote for Bill Call, but I think he is right in asserting that when the unions say they are doing something for the benefit of the children, they lie.

Bill Call provoked this discussion with his willful ignorance of (I don't mean he doesn't know, I just mean he ignores) all aspects of the school administration's job, except for their negotiations with the teacher's union . . . and further, willfully ignores every part of that negotiation beyond how to save the most tax money.

Bearing that in mind, if what you'd like to discuss is the credibility of Dolly Parton when she sings about working "9 to 5," well, OK then.

I don't advance Dolly Parton as an authority on the workday, actually. She's just an observer. That song is not prescriptive: it is descriptive. It takes advantage of what was, by the time she wrote the line, an already well-worn idea in popular culture. The line works because even before she wrote it, "nine to five" already sounded to most people like a regular work day.

Indeed, she wrote that in 1980. Six years earlier, Rush released its debut album with the song, "Working Man," with the following lyrics:

Well I get up at 7 a.m.
And I go to work at nine. 
I got no time for livin'. 
Yes, I'm workin' all the time. 

It seems to me 
I could live my life 
A lot better than I think I am. 
I guess that's why they call me, 
They call me the workin' man. 

They call me the workin' man. 
I guess that's what I am. 

So I get home at five o'clock, 
And I take myself out a nice, cold beer. 
Always seem to be wond'rin' 
Why there's nothin' goin' down here. 

It seems to me 
I could live my life 
A lot better than I think I am. 
I guess that's why they call me, 
They call me the workin' man. 


The lines that stick out there are that the singer "go(es) to work at 9," and subsequently that he "get(s) home at five o'clock." Let's forget about the fact that he probably had some travel time between leaving work and "getting home at five."

Here again, the work day takes place in an eight-hour period. Presumably there is some amount of time in the middle of that period for the working man to eat something. Of course what I'm talking about is "lunch."

You can Google this, Will. I did not make it up. Neither did Dolly Parton. Indeed, the idea was well worn even before the hard rocking power trio "Rush" put that fine track on their debut album.

Incidentally, I know a few lucky people who got to hear Rush at the Q last night. On a school night, no less.

But getting back to the lyrics, it's also worth noting that the singer laments that he's "got no time for living" because he's "working all the time." He feels that way in the context of "go(ing) to work at 9" and "get(ting) home at five." Of course all of us already know that working 9 to five is not "all the time." But to the working man, it feels that way.

Now, before you go off calling the members of Rush a bunch of socialists because they come from Canada, remember they are darlings of the libertarians and conservatives, and have credited Ayn Rand as an inspiration.

I do not know if Rush has ever been properly supervised or supported.