Betty Burney and the school board refuse to ask the right questions

Some in the community have criticized the board as being too top heavy, but Burney said a recent study showed the opposite to be true.

According to an Education Resource Strategies study last year, Duval spends 6 percent of its pre-K-12 operating dollars on leadership and central operations management. In comparison, districts in Washington and Atlanta spend 15 percent and 12 percent, respectively.

No Mrs. Burney this once again shows you and the board refuse to ask the right question.

First let me say anything from Education Resource Strategies should be taken with a grain of salt. They compared us to Charlotte and said we had too many schools and should consider closing some. Well where our population might be similar, the sizes of our city are radically different. One of Jacksonville’s greatest gifts is also a detriment as we are about three times bigger in land area than Charlotte is.

Now to be honest I would not be surprised if the amount of money we spent on our leadership and central operations budget is relatively low but the thing is the study didn’t tell us how much we spend on total district staff and certificated personnel not in the class room and I am confident in saying the cost of that is high.

My first year at Ed White we had one academic coach and four administrators. My last year at Ed White we had five coaches and six administrators. That’s an addition of six certificated people not in the classroom (actually it was 8 because we added a small learning community coordinator and an I.B. coordinator too, inversely our librarian was put back in the classroom). You know what else happened our enrollment had decreased by about 400 kids. Extrapolate this out to 177 schools and the figure is probably dizzying.

Let me finish with a joke that is pretty common in Duval County. How many district people does it take to put on a training? Six, two to read a power point and four to sit around looking board, working on their nails and taking personal phone calls.

The school board doesn't want to know what is happening in our district.