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Friday, October 4, 2013

Tests over literacy, Superintendent Vitti hides behind the budget

At a town hall the super said principals had a choice and they (middle and high schools) took somebody to help with all the testing, can you imagine that, there us so much testing that we need a full time person to be in charge of it, rather than librarians.

From the Times Union: One Mandarin High School student asked why her library, which she uses most mornings, doesn’t have any help inside anymore.

The School Board had given middle and high school principals a choice: Fund a media specialist or a test chair, who would help with standardized testing.

“Without any exception, every middle and high school principal said ‘I’d rather have a test chair,’ ” Vitti said. “Every budget is about decisions, and hard ones, and that’s the decision that we made.”


Vitti is both right and wrong, yes every middle school and high school principal chose a testing coordinator, which should be a condemnation to the era we find ourselves in, over a librarian and we do have to make priorities, but he should not blame it on the budget especially when we have tens of millions of dollars we could be using hidden in the couch cushions at the ivory tower on the river.

We have both needs going unmet and the money to meet them.

3 comments:

  1. Let Dr. Vitti keep his 7.5% reserve. Since we have 2000 additional students, and FTE is about $6,700 (http://stateimpact.npr.org/florida/2013/03/29/house-speaker-on-proposed-budget-education-is-the-big-winner/), he should receive conservatively an additional $13,000,000 in state funding. Why can't that prize be used to fund media specialists?

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  2. Definitely a sad state of affairs that each school needs a full-time "Testing Coordinator", something assistant principals used to handle! And, if this position is really needed, why did the choice have to be between that & a media specialist? Are the Testing Coordinator's housed in the media centers? What do they do in between testing periods?
    Did anyone get the impression from the Mandarin High student's question that students are using that Media Center before school with no staff present? I thought students always had to be supervised while in school!

    A bit of good news - Sandalwood High put their media specialist back in the Media Center!

    ReplyDelete
  3. So based on Vitti's response (throwing the principals under the budget bus)....
    What if the principals were given the choice of having only one of either a bookkeeper or a resource officer....
    Who would pay the bills?

    ReplyDelete