Thursday, March 1, 2012

Mr. Kach's Flyer

I picked up one of Mr. Kach's flyers at the candidates forum.  They look really good.  I thought I might comment on them point by point.  Anyone out there, feel free to straighten me out with a comment.

According to his flyer, Mr. Kach's contributions are

- Raised discussion of essential 21st Century facility/technology for students.

Yes, he raised discussion of cutting those things.  First the board cut the paper budget because technology was letting the district go more paperless, then they cut the technology budget.   No new laptops this year.   No equipment for the new cable channel.

- Supported new initiatives in SPED to increase achievement

Not quite sure what he's talking about here.  He supported hiring a district Director of Special Education because of the amount of money being spent.   This didn't happen.   It ended up being one responsibility of our newest Director of Instruction, Phyllis Schlicter.   Dr. Schlicter took over for Merideth Nadeau, who was a Director of SPED and got promoted to be one of the Directors of Instruction, where she worked to integrate regular and special education.   Dr. Nadeau was by all accounts excellent, and she quit while Mr. Kach served on the board, but I have no reason to believe anything nefarious was involved -- she ended up as a superintendent elsewhere. 

Mr. Kach voted against, then subsequently for, the middle school to replace 15 SPED paraprofessionals with 3 special educators and a savings of around $60k/yr.

- Contributed comprehensive policy direction to serve Oyster River.

Yes, Mr. Kach provided the impetus to update the board members' code of ethics when his reprehensible tweets made the district a national laughing stock.

He introduced policy that he intended would divide the community and divert attention from the tweets:  the pledge of allegiance, teaching religion in class.

I think superintendent Levesque was so disgusted he recommended the board dissolve its policy committee, which they did.

- Promoted budgetary transparency.

Sure, but Sue Caswell did the work and deserves the credit.  The ABC did a lot of hard work.   Not to mention Mike McClurkin.

- Voted to elect District Superintendent, High School Principal and Curriculum Director.

Why did all these administrators and more (I count seven since January, 2011) leave and need to be replaced over the course of a year?   Did the way the board was acting had anything to do with it?   Fosters quotes Laura Rogers, the high school principal, saying when she quit, "I find the political tension around the school system to be unproductive [and] not in the best interest of the kids."   

The board had to hire two new superintendents because they paid the one we had $185,000 not to work this year.

The board now actually has experience with two superintendent transistions -- and  two lawsuits to go with them.   They were found guilty of having illegal secret meetings during the first, and guilty of using illegal secret ballots during the second.   The state of New Hampshire has found their conduct so egregious that they issued an injunction and they now risk contempt of court and even jail time if they continue their pattern of violating the Right-to-Know law.

The High School Principal search was so bungled by the board that the students had to strike -- to walk out of class and march to the SAU office in protest.   Justin Campbell, the candidate the board denied after an extensive search, was subsequently hired by the top-ranked high school in the state, Hanover High.

- Initiated District's Transfinder Report for transportation inefficiencies

I recall two or three board meetings where Mr. Kach wanted to obtain and operate some bus routing software himself, like an absurd parody of micromanagement.   Eventually they stumbled on the obvious idea of hiring a consultant who, you know, knew something about school bus systems.  Transfinder, I believe, is both the name of the software and of the company who makes it, who also peddles consulting.   They generated a report, and I think some of it was implemented as the Mast Way dismissal time was pushed back 5 or 10 minutes.

- Provided benchmark data for Food Services

Not sure what this one is about.   Mr. Kach usually complains about plans to pay more for local food (I agree with him here).  He's slightly inconsistent here -- sometimes he's on record supporting local food.  One of his tweets was "
SAU#5-NH needs new Supt.;New HS Principal&New Food Ser. Manager".   I think he made good on all three.

On the other side of the flyer Mr. Kach brags about the new superintendent hire -- how he went on the site visit.  This one drives me a bit crazy.  The board was totally against site visits, which to be fair their NESDEC consultant told them not to bother with.  I and a few others wrote letters and made comments and the board came around, at least for the one candidate they settled on.  All but Mr. Kach called "not it" and he went pretty much by default.  But he did go, the visit was indeed worthwhile, and he and really the community as a whole are pretty enthusiastic about the new superintendent.   Kudos, and thanks for listening.

I've really only been paying attention to the board the summer, so there's about a year of Mr. Kach's tenure with which I am not really familiar.   I've indicated above where I'm not sure about things -- hopefully people more in the know (especially Mr. Kach) will fill in the gaps.

- Dean


12 comments:

  1. You are right to question Mr. Kach's support for this Special Education model. Initially, when administration presented this model at the 6/27/11 nonpublic meeting, the motion to elect teachers for the model failed. (3-3 vote, no record for the public of how board members voted) "By motion of Krista Butts, seconded by Ann Wright, the School Board voted to approve the appointment of Alexa Grout, Nellie Dinger and Keith Savage as special education teachers for the 2011-2012 school year. There was a lengthy discussion of this appointment. This motion failed with 3 Yes and 3 No. This issue will be placed on the July 20 meeting for a public discussion."
    It wasn't until a future meeting, with a full presentation by teachers and administrators that the full board finally supported this model. This is just another example of the board's micromanagement, instead of trusting the experience and knowledge of our qualified professionals.

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  2. Thanks for your comment, Jennifer. I must have missed that public discussion. Readers, I retract my comment: "This seemed to be Jay Richard's whim -- I don't recall any kind of public analysis of the benefits." I'll edit the post, but I'll leave this comment here.

    7/20/11 was the tweet SB meeting. I don't recall any discussion of the MS SPED plan -- must've happened at a different meeting.

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  3. Dean, this is your wife speaking.

    I'm glad you let Jay off the hook! There does seem to be support for the new SPED program at the MS. Jay is certainly happy to explain it to anyone, and he offered to give us a tour of the MS and show us how everything is set up, so he's at least prepared to defend the new model. I'm willing to reserve judgement.

    Also, regarding budget transparency: do you mean that the budget was insufficiently itemized before, or that it was secret, or something else? It is true that people are paying more attention to our budget growth of recent years, but this isn't the same as the budget becoming more transparent. I do think Sue did a good job of explaining what is in this year's proposed budget.

    It turns out that it isn't exactly transparent anyway, because it looks like this board KNEW they would spend $185K plus on the superintendent buyout, but they didn't ask for it in a warrant article. Kach tweeted about the district needing a new superintendent (as well as food service manager and HS principal) BEFORE the March elections (on January 18), and Brackett acted immediately after to terminate Colter, right after the elections (that was the language used in the legal documents, by the way). So it looks like they knew they were going to spend our money to fire Colter. They just held secret meetings so that the public couldn't object to it until it was too late. But they aren't going to explain it to us, and they declined to apologize when given the chance. Mr. Kach said his only regret is not hiring a better lawyer (and then he said he was kidding--sound familiar?).

    This doesn't seem like budget transparency to me. It seems like deliberately avoiding public meetings so that public can't see the board spending our money. And of course it was illegal, as the courts ruled. If you are on the SB, you should spend the money allocated in the warrant article on what you told the public you would spend it on. If there is an emergency, you can call a meeting and explain it to the public. As Maria Barth said, these are PUBLIC meetings, about PUBLIC schools. You do the public's business in public. But I'm preaching to the choir!

    Re the benchmark data on food service: perhaps he is referring to his remarks in the last couple of meetings to the effect that Barrington "makes money" on their food service program.

    Good job on your blog!

    XO

    Ruth

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  4. - There was a presentation to the board on a new SPED plan for the middle school. After 15 paraprofessionals had been let go, the board did not approve the hiring of 3 SPED teachers needed to put the initiative in place. Only after another presentation later, when it was presumably pointed out the SPED program would not be in compliance, did the board eventually approve the required teachers.

    - I have heard comments the tweets were before he was on the board. This isn’t true; Mr. Kach violated a policy by tweeting employee information on Jan 18th, before the HS principal and the Food Service Director resignations were announced publicly.

    -I agree with you, the pledge & religion policies came at a very opportune time to divert attention from the tweets. I've noticed many times since; the pledge policy is not being followed at the start of meetings, especially if the meeting is not being recorded. Why enact a policy if you are not planning on following it?

    -There's a policy for replacing board members who resign, the board voted to suspend that policy after Ann Wright resigned instead of following it. This didn’t make sense to me; she was willing to fill the position. She only resigned at that date in Jan. to ensure her position would be eligible for voters to choose her replacement for the following year.

    -I feel there is less transparency in quite a number of things. The Operations, Policy, and Academic Affairs Committee’s use to be committees that were posted and the public could attend. In the past, if you were interested in any of those issues you could attend a meeting to learn what was being worked on. Those committees are no longer board committees, I assume Mr. Levesque wanted to stop the micromanaging.

    -On May 25th, Mr. Kach voted, no, to allow Mr. Colter to select an interim High School Principal and he instead voted to hire a search firm to start the 2nd principal search. Then on June 1st after many in the community pointed out the problems with such a late principal search he then voted to allow Mr. Colter to select an interim principal, Mr. Colter selected Mr. Allen. The $600+ paid to the search firm while not a lot, was still wasted money.

    -I personally don’t think the fact that all these administrators have left and need to be replaced is something to brag about.

    - The Data Manager position would have helped with making & generating reports for the Transfinder software and assisting the administrators with data for decision making.

    -On 4-6-11, Mr. Kach voted, no, on offering a retirement incentive to teachers, he didn’t want to pay them money to not work. But then he paid a superintendent to not work for a year.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4cFH-k2668&feature=plcp&context=C3f50ddaUDOEgsToPDskJv7R9Yvg8Ia1YyW5gbZawo

    -During the daytime candidates forum a question was asked about board members not responding and coming in to visit the high school at the request of the students. Mr. Kach said the high school was not welcoming before and now this year it is. The invitations the students had extended was this November, with these same students and principal.

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  5. - There was a presentation to the board on a new SPED plan for the middle school. After 15 paraprofessionals had been let go, the board did not approve the hiring of 3 SPED teachers needed to put the initiative in place. Only after another presentation later, when it was presumably pointed out the SPED program would not be in compliance, did the board eventually approve the required teachers.

    - I have heard comments the tweets were before he was on the board. This isn’t true; Mr. Kach violated a policy by tweeting employee information on Jan 18th, before the HS principal and the Food Service Director resignations were announced publicly.

    -I agree with you, the pledge & religion policies came at a very opportune time to divert attention from the tweets. I have noticed many times since; the pledge policy is not being followed at the start of meetings, especially if the meeting is not being recorded. Why enact a policy if you are not planning on following it?

    -There is a policy for replacing board members who resign, the board voted to suspend that policy after Ann Wright resigned instead of following it. This didn’t make sense to me; she was willing to fill the position. She only resigned at that date in Jan. to ensure her position would be eligible for voters to choose her replacement for the following year.

    -I feel there is less transparency in quite a number of things. The Operations, Policy, and Academic Affairs Committee’s use to be committees that were posted and the public could attend. In the past, if you were interested in any of those issues you could attend a meeting to learn what was being worked on. Those committees are no longer board committees; I assume so Mr. Levesque wanted to stop the micromanaging.

    -On May 25th, Mr. Kach voted, no, to allow Mr. Colter to select an interim High School Principal and he instead voted to hire a search firm to start the 2nd principal search. Then on June 1st after many in the community pointed out the problems with such a late principal search he then voted to allow Mr. Colter to select an interim principal, Mr. Colter selected Mr. Allen. The $600+ paid to the search firm for that 1 week, while not a lot, was still wasted money.

    -I personally don’t think the fact that all these administrators have left and need to be replaced is something to brag about.

    - The Data Manager position would have helped with making & generating reports for the Transfinder software and assisting the administrators with data for decision making.

    -On 4-6-11 a motion was proposed to offer an early retirement incentive to bring down the qty. of long term higher paid teachers. Mr. Kach voted, no, he didn’t want to pay them money to not work, but then he paid a superintendent to not work for a year.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4cFH-k2668&feature=plcp&context=C3f50ddaUDOEgsToPDskJv7R9Yvg8Ia1YyW5gbZawo

    -During the daytime candidates forum a question was asked about board members not responding and coming in to visit the high school at the request of the students. Mr. Kach said the high school was not welcoming before and now this year it is. The invitations the students had extended was this November, with these same students and principal.

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  6. Thanks for the comment, Ruth. Budget transparency is usually defined as the full disclosure of all relevant fiscal information in a timely and systematic manner. It would include things like more detailed itemization -- I haven't looked at old budgets, so I can't really say firsthand this is the case, but it seems to be the general feeling.

    The district administration seems to have made progress on "timely" -- at least that's my impression from various comments from SB meetings. If you know you had a big expense coming up (like a superintendent buyout) budget transparency would dictate that that expense be disclosed in the budget, so in that particular case the board was indeed less than transparent.

    Getting at the real issues usually requires further analysis. Budget transparency helps if it makes the data available. Are our costs too high because of a low student teacher ratio? Because of SPED? Buses? Fuel? With a sufficiently transparent budget you can at least start to answer these questions.

    Stephanie, thanks for you comment. It's a fascinating history lesson. That "not welcoming" comment seems bizarre -- probably meant to be a swipe at the former principal and superintendent.

    I'm surprised Mr. Kach didn't support early retirement plans -- it's a common way to try to bring down costs. Perhaps he thinks it's in not the interest of the kids to cut experienced teachers. Perhaps he thought his supporters would not tolerate even a temporary expense to bring down long term costs.

    I think the lesson is if you try to reduce costs without a plan, especially without a plan that has the support of the community, you end up causing upset while achieving little in the way of reductions. Given the public's participation in the deliberative session and warrant elections, it would seem obvious that you need the public to "buy in" if you want your initiatives to go forward.

    I would say the outline of a plan has begun to emerge -- cut staff through attrition, attract more tuition students, fix the heat. My off the cuff impression is it's not enough. The district has a double problem trying to bend the cost curve: enrollment is declining, which can be mitigated by tuition students (but probably not eliminated as it's a statewide trend), so you have to cut just to keep cost per student constant. And further cuts would be required to get cost per student to approach state norms. It's not a happy thing to plan for, but the district can do better than the one word plan of the current board: cut.

    - Dean

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  7. Someone posted on youtube Mr. Kach's statement about why he won't encourage older teachers to retire. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4cFH-k2668 The reason is indeed what I speculated - he thought giving teachers $20,000 to retire is not a good way to make friends with his neighbors.

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  8. An additional comments on the Spec Ed Model, the initial presentation was on May 11th. Administrators and staff generally put alot of thought and planning into these things, esp. when it involves decreasing staff. Mr. Colter & Meredith Nadeau should get credit for saving the district money, not Mr. Kach, this plan came about under their leadership.

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  9. I could comment on a number of things you have said, Dean, but I'll just focus on one. First, I'd like to thank you for the blog. You offer some helpful information at a critical time to our community.

    You write that the board and the community as a whole are pretty excited about Jim Morse as our new Superintendent. I am used to being in the minority, so when I say that I am not very excited, I hope this time I am wrong. But Jim Kach and I have never agreed on much. While he is a pleasant enough fellow, there is probably not another board member I have disagreed with more. Certainly on personnel issues, he and I differ. The business administrator, Justin Campbell, buying out Howard Colter's contract, and many teaching positions decided in non-public - he and I voted differently. He and I voted differently on whether to cut 500K from an already almost flat budget, and he was the sole dissenting vote to hire a consultant to investigate the culture of distrust and disrespect in our leadership (see board minutes 9-21-11).

    When I served on the search committee for the HS Principal last spring, I was very impressed by Justin Campbell. So were the rest of the search committee, the parents who met him, the students, our staff. This obviously meant nothing to Mr. Kach because he voted against hiring him. Now Justin Campbell has been hired as the Principal at Hanover HS. So when Jim Kach says he was impressed by Jim Morse because he went on a site visit should I be impressed? As I said, Jim and I don't agree on much, so my inclination is to say no.

    I also know that the screening committee only interviewed Mr. Morse once (as opposed to the two interviews the search committee put the principal candidates through last spring). It makes no sense to me why the Board vetted superintendent candidates less than we vetted principal candidates. After their process, Mr. Morse stood out from their relatively small candidate pool. I can see that. He is charismatic and smart. But he is retiring, and in one of his "Superintendent Blogs" he wrote about why he was retiring and he stated that it was because his wife was also an administrator (she is an Asst. Superintendent) in Newport, Maine (way in the middle of nowhere), and life had been hard living that way.

    So the board is hiring another superintendent from Maine who is at retirement age, who will be living apart from his family and only setting, what I can assume, are temporary roots here. Sounds a lot like Mr. Levesque is some ways. Is this what we want? Is this what we need? I am not disparaging Mr. Morse, but I had hoped we would be getting more than another short-term Superintendent.

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  10. Thanks for your comment, Ann, and for your incredible service on the board during a difficult period. I and many others thought it was a real loss for the district when you resigned. I'm hoping when the TEAM (Tom, Ed, Al and Maria) gets elected they can pick up where you left off. I should mentioned to everybody that whenever I say the board did this or that thing that I didn't like, you were almost always a minority of one trying to stop it.

    I went to twelve meetings with or about the new superintendent candidates. Dr. Morse seemed the most competent of the three. Like you I was concerned that he was less committed to stay a while than the other two candidates. Then I thought it might not be so bad. We may be in for a few rough years, and the superintendent's bound to ruffle some feathers. After a few years the superintendent may just burn out, or wear out his welcome. It seemed pretty likely that whoever we hired might not last too long, so I decided not to count Dr. Morse's lack of commitment too much against him.

    So, despite the problems with the search I am guardedly hopeful that Dr. Morse will be what we need, at least for a few years.

    About Maine & Vermont superintendents: There seems to be a interesting dynamic where New Hampshire superintendents are retiring so there are lots of vacancies. But Maine has been consolidating districts, so they have a surplus of superintendents. Both Maine and Vermont will pay you your pension once you retire from working for the state, so these
    guys see an opportunity to move to New Hampshire where there are lots of jobs, and where they can collect a salary as well as their Maine or Vermont pension.

    - Dean

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  11. Stephanie, blogspot for some reason marked one of your comments as spam. I just noticed this and restored it.

    - Dean

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  12. Re: No equipment for the new cable channel.

    I sat in the technology director's and media head's budget presentations.

    Did you know that much of the $40,000+ requested for "the new cable channel" was to pruchase wiring, connectors, and equipment that would allow live, high-definition broadcasts from multiple locations within the high-school? Perhaps Mr Kach thought - as did the board - that what amounts to an "HD upgrade" was a purchase that might not be necessary, right now, in the midst of a recession, declining tax revenues, and increased local funding burdens handed down from the state and federal govenments? This is just the first year's cost in a five-year plan for providing HD content for the new channel.

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