Live Within Your Means

The following letter to the editor appeared in the Union Leader on March 21st. 

‘Live within your means’ is message that Croydon sent

To the Editor: Ransom or budget? This was the question posed at the annual Croydon school board meeting. Would we pay the $1.7-plus million demanded by the school district, or would we give the district a budget and instruct them to work with it?

On March 12th, Croydon voters presented a true “live within your means” budget to the school. The 2022 Croydon School budget allocates $10,000 per student, or $800,000 total. Adjusted for inflation, this number exceeds per-pupil spending across the state for most of our history.

Meeting this budget may be challenging, but it represents an incredible opportunity.

Cutting waste on this scale cannot be accomplished through minor changes. Our district can and must reinvent itself to deliver quality education at a sensible cost. Today, countless private and charter schools are meeting this cost target. Not long ago, public schools did the same.

To longtime Croydon residents, shrieks of “impossible”, “can’t be done” and “people don’t want it” are nothing more than unimaginative déjà vu. We started down the path of school choice back in 2006 to this defeatist chorus, sung by many of the same actors.

Today, Croydon school choice is a reality. It is used by many residents, some of whom actively opposed this same choice program only a few years earlier. Croydon forever changed education for the better. We can do it again today.

JIM PESCHKE

Croydon

School Board Meeting Tonight

Croydon School Board budget meeting tonight.

Cathy
Spelling errors, grammar errors, misuse of homonyms and typos are left as an exercise for my readers.

School Board Meeting Next Wednesday

Don't forget to mark your calendars school board meeting January 19th, 2011.

Cathy
Spelling errors, grammar errors, misuse of homonyms and typos are left as an exercise for my readers.

School Board Meeting Tonight is Cancelled

No School Board Meeting tonight, it has been cancelled because of the snow.

Cathy

"We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause." - Horace Mann, first secretary of education in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts

SAU Meeting and School Board Meeting this Week

Just a reminder there is a SAU meeting Tuesday night and a School Board Meeting, Wednesday night.







Cathy
Spelling errors, grammar errors, misuse of homonyms and typos are left as an exercise for my readers.

School Districts Influenced By National Groups

School policies are made by school boards. School boards even in small towns are influenced by the National School Board Association. Jim was asked several times to join the National School Board Association and to go to State School Board Association Training, he declined. Local control is a myth. See below the email from the National School Board Association to Jim.

You really should be visit the National School Board Association's website to see the agenda they are promoting, their agenda is not that far off from the NEA's and AFT's agenda.



Cathy
Spelling errors, grammar errors, misuse of homonyms and typos are left as an exercise for my readers.

Ten New Year’s Resolutions for
School Board Members

10. Get in shape by developing an obesity action plan for your district. Studies have shown that healthy children have less absenteeism, concentrate better, and perform better on tests. Make sure your policies and practices support healthy options and physical activity for all students.

9. Get organized by reviewing your district policies. The New Year is a great time to make sure your policies are current, especially those on hot topics like bullying, which will be a focus for the Department of Education in 2011. You can turn to your state school boards association for policy guidance and support should your district need assistance.

8. Learn something new, like how technology can improve student and community engagement. Professional development opportunities, conferences, and webinars offered by your state association, the National School Boards Association, and NSBA’s National Affiliate program can show you how.

7. Identify additional funding sources. With today’s tight budgets, every dollar counts. Take advantage of grant services like GrantsQuest, free to NSBA National Affiliates, to discover funding opportunities for your district and get grant writing tips.

6. Save money on district purchases. Buying cooperatives can save your district time and money by streamlining the procurement process and negotiating volume discounts for participants. Many are free to join and give rebates based on purchases. If your state association does not offer one, consider a national program like the BuyBoard Cooperative Program.

5. Improve your relationship with your school board team. Start the year off right by clarifying roles and responsibilities for every member of your team. The Key Work of School Boards guidebook and training programs, offered by your state association and NSBA, provide tips for developing a good working relationship.

4. Discover best practices in school governance. Your state school boards association’s publications and NSBA’s American School Board Journal , included in NSBA’s National Affiliate benefits package, highlight success stories from public schools which may be applicable to your district.



3. Connect with school board colleagues from across your state and the nation. Conferences and social networks offered by your state association and NSBA provide great opportunities to learn how your colleagues are coping with the challenges of public education today.

2. Become a champion for local school board governance. With the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act on the horizon, now is the time for you to speak up for local school board governance. Add your voice to your state school boards association’s and NSBA’s National Affiliate districts who are calling for the end of unfunded federal mandates and the return of local control.

1. Join NSBA’s National Affiliate Program. Working with and through your state school boards association, NSBA’s National Affiliate program advocates for increased federal funding and local school board governance, provides resources and information, and offers professional development opportunities to help your district succeed. A complete list of benefits is available at www.nsba.org/na. Enroll your district in the National Affiliate program today and make 2011 the best year ever.

The Problem with Newport is Greed

This past week there was an Area Agreement Meeting in Croydon. As usual Newport showed their true colors, they were doing everything possible to derail the process and gave excuses left and right for their failures. Just stop the games Newport. Most parents will end up sending their children to Newport in the end. But please show us that Newport is capable of being compassionate and let those parents who want to send their children elsewhere if they so choose. Be a good neighbor, show us you are not greedy, let the area agreement just end. Will Newport continue to be a selfish greedy neighbor or will they let Croydon parents decide what is best for their own children?

Cathy
Spelling errors, grammar errors, misuse of homonyms and typos are left as an exercise for my readers.

Funny the Quote of the Day could be applied to Newport as well - "And I use the word ‘trapped' and I use it directly. They are trapped by an educational bureaucracy, they are trapped by a selfish, self-interested, greedy school union that cares more about putting money in their own pocket, and the pockets of members, than they care about educating our most vulnerable and needy children." - Governor Christie

The following piece appears on American Thinker. There are great links associated with this story please go to the American Thinker to view the links.

Governor Christie slams public teacher unions
Greg Halvorson
He's done it again. Governor Christie of blue-turning-red-because-of-him New Jersey, made every American who loves leadership misty-eyed. Speaking to the Federation For Children in Washington D.C., the good governor tore into public teachers unions with customary resolve. For your pleasure:




"Parents and children who are being failed by a public schoolsystem whose costs are exorbitant and whose results are insulting deserve a choice. We don't have to look far around the country to know that vouchers and experiments in school choice are working, that they're producing results.

In D.C., those in that program are now reading 19 months ahead of their peers outside of the program. This isn't a coincidence, we know it's not a coincidence. We know that there's over five-million children trapped in over ten-thousand failing public schools around America.

And I use the word ‘trapped' and I use it directly. They are trapped by an educational bureaucracy, they are trapped by a selfish, self-interested, greedy school union that cares more about putting money in their own pocket, and the pockets of members, than they care about educating our most vulnerable and needy children."

He went on to say that in America's largest cities half of all students don't graduate high school. Citing an example, he pointed out that New Jersey tax-payers spend $24,000 per/student, per/year in Newark on what he said is an "absolutely disgraceful public education system."

"Our children deserve the best education they can get, no matter who is giving it to them," he said, "and it should not be restricted to public school teachers from a public school union that cares more about what they're paying for their health insurance than they care about whether the kids in our cities are graduating. That's disgraceful."

What isn't disgraceful is this marvelous leader. Governor Christie knows the way out.

School Board Association or Just Another Puppet Group of the NEA/AFT?

As a board member, I view organizations claiming to represent school boards with deep suspicion. How is it possible to advocate for "school boards" on the state, nevermind the national level? The purpose of a school board is to promote the interests of their electorate. How can we expect the wishes of Croydon to align with say, Plymouth or Nashua? In the dog-eat-dog world of state redistribution of education dollars, one cannot expect harmony of values among New Hampshire's many communities.

A watered-down organizational position could allow such a group to encompass the diverse makeup of our state. Regrettably, this is not the case. The New Hampshire School Board Association's Policy Manual (http://www.nhsba.org/documents/pdfs/Policy_Res_Manual_2009.pdf) encapsulates the key values of this particular group. Among these:

- Section I: Total opposition to school choice, including vouchers, tax credits or any form of support to non-government school systems. (As their first policy statement, this is quite telling.)

- Section II: Support for the "adequate education" mandate embodied in the Claremont and Londonderry rulings. Opposition of any efforts to reverse these decisions. Section E is code for an education income tax.

- Section IV: Increased regulation of charter schools.

- Section V: Relaxed restrictions on expenditures by local school districts.

- Section VII: Weakening of AYP standards.

- Section VIII: Mandatory kindergarten. Increased mandatory attendance from 16 to 18 years old.

These values read as if cribbed from the NEA/AFT wish list. This is either an astonishing coincidence, or good old-fashioned Astroturf. I suspect the latter.

In any case, New Hampshire's 1.3 million citizens have substantive differences of opinion on these issues. All should have equal representation from their school boards. If these policies represent the will of a majority of New Hampshire school boards, then these school boards are neglecting their responsibility to the public.

In particular, no school district should be using tax dollars to support these organizations. I do not yet know whether Croydon or Newport does, but it is worth finding out.

So what brought this up? I received an email from the National School Board Association soliciting interest in a "Technology and Learning" conference in Phoenix. (ie. Computers and Internet, as if jet engines, microwave ovens, and vaccines are not "technology") More effort on results instead of expensive tools would be appreciated.

The end of the email really made me want to puke. It had a paragraph-long virtual apology for holding the convention in Phoenix, Arizona.

Jim Peschke

School Board Meeting Tonight

There is a school board meeting tonight at the Croydon School House.

Valley News Writes an Article about Jim.

Jim and I have been fighting for education reform and education spending reform for about 7 1/2 years now this is the most fair and most complete article we have seen written about us in that time. It is so nice to see a reporter without an agenda and one that just reports the facts. I will be kudos to Alex Hanson and the Valley News. I will let the story stand on its own without commentary.

Cathy
Spelling errors, grammar errors, misuse of homonyms and typos are left an exercise for my readers.

The following piece appeared on the Valley News.

Unlikely Member of the Board
By Alex Hanson
Valley News Staff Writer
At Croydon's annual School District meeting in March, Jim Peschke took a firm stance against the school budget, urging his fellow citizens to vote it down.

Peschke also opposed an amendment to add $5,000 to the budget so the Croydon Village School could afford to send its pupils to the library and the skating rink in neighboring Newport.

“This amendment's definitely going in the wrong direction,” Peschke said. “We need to find ways to cut the spending and keep the taxes to a reasonable level,” he added. Peschke voted against the amendment and against the budget, both of which were approved by sizable margins.

If he had been sitting among the public, Peschke would have been a mere gadfly -- a smart, articulate and persistent opponent of higher spending on education. But he was sitting at the front of the room with the other two members of the Croydon School Board, a position that gives him an unusual platform for his message.



Elected last year, Peschke, 43, is perhaps the most unlikely school board member in the Upper Valley, if not in the Twin States. He oversees a public school, but his wife, Cathy Peschke, home-schools their two children. He was a tax-fighting libertarian before moving to Croydon a few years ago, and Cathy Peschke writes a blog that regularly takes to task school spending, teachers' unions and the Obama administration.

His presence on the School Board has produced consternation among Croydon parents and school supporters who don't quite know what to make of either Peschke's views or his vehemence.

“I don't know a lot about Jim other than that he doesn't want the taxes to get raised and that he's going to cut whatever he thinks needs to be cut,” said Kim McKinney, a Croydon resident with two school-age children.

But Peschke has galvanized those residents who want above all to see their property tax bills go down and who felt as if their views had gone unheard. And as the chairman of a committee about to start reassessing the decade-old agreement under which Newport educates Croydon children in grades four through 12, he is in a position to influence the district's future.

Above all, he has brought a wider debate about education taxes and policy to an unlikely place -- a small town with a one-room school.

“It's like they're taking a battle to Croydon that doesn't exist here,” said George Caccavaro, chairman of the Croydon School Board.

***
As anyone who has ever sat in on a local school board meeting can attest, most board members are parents of children in the school the board oversees.

“It becomes the norm, because they have the most vested interest,” said Winton Goodrich, associate director of the Vermont School Boards Association. Vermont has 1,488 school board members, and Goodrich estimated that there were only three or four home-schooling parents among that number. (The New Hampshire School Boards Association did not return messages left at its office in Concord.)

Peschke's status as a home-schooling parent and a vocal opponent of school spending cuts both ways.

“He has no stake in the final product, as far as what we offer in the Croydon School District,” Caccavaro said. “Sometimes, I think he looks at our public education program just as a taxpayer.”

But Croydon resident Dave Shackett, who spoke up during the annual meeting to suggest the town study whether to close its school and send all of its children to Newport, said he likes having Peschke on the School Board. “My position on the man is that I'm so glad that someone is finally on the School Board who doesn't have his children in the school,” and is willing to cut spending, Shackett said in an interview.

Peschke is aware of how supporters of higher school feel about him, and he's unrepentant. “It's been hinted,” he said, “that I have no right to be on the board because I have no plan to send my children to public school.” His response? “You can strip me of my say if you're willing to relieve me of my tax liability.”

But Peschke said he also hears from people who cheer him on, who felt their opinions were being disregarded. “That is wonderful motivation,” Peschke said.

Caccavaro, who is in his eighth year on the School Board, is a public education veteran. His wife teaches in Newport and his father is the longtime business manager of the Mascoma Valley Regional School District and was on the Claremont School Board. Still, he said having Peschke on the board adds a dimension to its deliberations. “I respect where he's coming from. He's a voice that hasn’t been heard at least since I’ve been there.”

Which is not to say that it's easy to sit next to Peschke at meetings. At first, Caccavaro said he took Peschke's views personally, but now takes them more in stride.

“My approach has been, it can either be a constant battle … or we can decide to work together,” Caccavaro said.

***
Peschke spoke out against school taxes when he and his family moved to Croydon in 2007, but the battle began in earnest in March 2009, when he won a School Board seat over a write-in candidate. Just days after his election, Peschke led a successful drive to cut the school budget by more than $65,000. (Initially, he proposed a cut of $132,000, but scaled it back.) Croydon's yearly school spending broke $1 million just a few years ago, and is now around $1.3 million.

But the budget cuts didn't work quite as planned. Even at the 2009 meeting, Caccavaro explained that the cuts to items such as tuition and services in School Administrative Unit 43, which covers Croydon, Newport and Sunapee, couldn't be made. Instead, the budget cuts affected Croydon's own school, which this year serves 27 pupils in grades K through three.

“He really just made more or less blind cuts,” said Matt Wittasek, a Croydon resident who ran as a write-in candidate against Peschke last year. “When it came down to it,” said Wittasek, whose wife won election to the School Board this year, “a lot of those areas were justified or required by law.”

Croydon's little red school was forced to cut staffing. The head teacher doubled as a special education teacher, Wittasek said, and classroom aides were cut. Wittasek proposed the $5,000 increase in the school budget at this year's meeting after talking with families in town about the school's needs.

As the last working one-room school in the state, and one of the last in the country, the Croydon Village School is a point of pride for residents. An image of it adorns the signs at the entrances to the village on Route 10, and aside from the Town Hall, which the school uses part-time, it is the only public building at the village center.

The turnabout at this year's meeting -- at which the amendment to increase the school budget passed overwhelmingly -- is a sign that the town is engaged in debate and political action on education, at least about Croydon's small school. “We tried to do more work this year,” before the annual meeting, Wittasek said of parents and other school supporters.

The atmosphere at the most recent Croydon School Board meeting, on April 14, attested to the increased tension. Peschke peppered school officials with questions. He was polite, even self-deprecating, but insistent. During a lengthy conversation about the school's math textbook, Peschke made clear where his allegiances lie, with parents and against the state and other higher authorities.

“I couldn't give a hoot in hell about the NECAPs,” he said about the New England Common Assessment Program, the school testing designed by New Hampshire, Vermont and Rhode Island to measure student progress. The acronym is pronounced “knee-cap.”

“Would you be satisfied if we have third-graders bomb the NECAP,” he said, but develop a solid grounding in math?

School officials use the NECAP results to see how their kids are doing, said Marilyn Brannigan, interim superintendent for schools in Newport, Croydon and Sunapee. The math textbooks, which have frustrated parents, aren't the problem, she said. “We as educators aren't helping our children learn sufficiently,” she said.

The discussion was intense, but participants professed themselves pleased to be talking about education. “That's my biggest frustration in eight years on the School Board is that all we talk about is money,” Caccavaro said.

When Peschke started on the board, meetings weren't always so collegial.

“Marilyn Brannigan and I don't argue as loudly as we used to,” Peschke said later. But that doesn't mean Peschke is starting to see things the way his fellow school officials do. Everyone is frustrated with mandates and requirements handed down by state and federal law, but Peschke seems eager to buck the regulations.

“I certainly get the urge sometimes, because I think the whole system is rotten to the core,” he said. Being on the School Board hasn't softened his stance on the issues he holds dear, or made him look more kindly on public schooling. “If anything, I have less respect for how things are done than ever before,” he said.

***
Morals often come up in conversation with Jim and Cathy Peschke about their views on education.

“Forcing one person to bear the burden of educational costs for another is not only a moral question but a major threat to personal liberty,” Cathy Peschke wrote on March 14 on the blog she maintains under the banner of Citizens for Reasonable and Fair Taxes. The Peschkes founded CRAFT in Harvard, Ill., to fight a referendum to build a new school and subsequent votes to raise school taxes. When they moved to Croydon in 2007, they started a new blog, called Citizens for Reasonable and Fair Taxes-Croydon (croydoncraft.blogspot.com).

When they started CRAFT, in 2003, the Peschkes were fed up with frequent votes on school spending and tax increases. “I told myself, ‘If they do this again, I'm going to do something about it,' ” Jim Peschke said in an interview.

When CRAFT entered the political fray in Illinois, “What was surprising to me was how many ordinary people were waiting in the wings,” he said.

What troubles Peschke the most about public education in general is “poor value. They spend too much and we get too little,” he said.

The remedy for this state of affairs, Peschke said, is to put parents in control of their children's education. Parents should be able to choose how and where their children are educated. Families without the means to pay for schooling would be issued vouchers.

“The government would support you, and you'd still get to choose,” Peschke said. “I consider it a fundamental civil rights issue” that parents aren't able to make such choices today. If public schools were forced to compete on a level playing field (that is, without government backing and mandates), the cost of education would decrease dramatically, he said.

Cathy Peschke expresses this idea another way on their blog: “Education is a privilege not a right. The only right one has when it comes to education is the right of a parent to educate their own children as they see fit.”

“I completely and wholeheartedly agree with her on that point,” Jim Peschke said. Children don't have a right to an education, he said; their parents have a right to pursue an education on their behalf.

The Peschkes chose to home-school for a variety of reasons, one of which was clear during an interview in White River Junction. Peschke, his 5-year-old daughter Anastasia in tow, had driven up to have lunch with some former colleagues. During the interview after lunch, Anastasia took some work out of her backpack and started in on it, without prompting. Home-schooling allows her to follow her interests, Peschke said.

“We do more or less what we want. That's the point,” he said. “If today she wants to learn geology and tomorrow she wants to learn math, that's what we do, and we get a lot more value out of that.”

***
As she does most days, on a recent Wednesday afternoon, with her 2-year-old down for a nap, Cathy Peschke put her beliefs about education into practice.

“What is salt?” she asked Anastasia.

“Sodium and chlorine,” Anastasia said.

“It's a molecule, right?”

Anastasia nodded.

Spread out on the Peschkes' dining room table were science and reading books that form part of Anastasia's curriculum, a tumbler of water and an egg, and two other glasses, one containing water, the other, cooking oil.

With the egg and the tumbler of water, they perform an experiment, adding salt to the water by spoonfuls until the egg is suspended in the center of the tumbler. “How many tablespoons of salt did it take?” Peschke asks. “Four!” Anastasia replies.

Before the Peschkes adopted their children, Anastasia and Alexander, Cathy Peschke worked as an audiologist. The Peschkes started fighting taxes around the time they were married, in 2002. They decided they would home-school soon after.

“My children, my responsibility,” she said. “I really don't think it's the community’s responsibility to educate my children.” Further, “I also think I can provide a better education than the public schools.”

Anastasia was reading the alphabet at 18 months, Cathy Peschke said. “Her ability to learn is limited only by the minds of the people around her,” she said. She estimates that home-schooling materials (which she gets from a private school the Peschkes declined to name) cost around “a thousand bucks a year.” As for her time educating her kids, “My time is nothing,” she said.

On a nearby counter, her black laptop computer sat open. She doesn't post to the blog as often as she used to, but she is still pretty prolific.

Her blog posts sometimes seem better suited to a larger advocacy organization than to a small-town homeschooler. The top of the blog features a pair of citations: “What luck for rulers that men do not think.” And, “Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them.” The latter is Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century rationalist philosopher; the former, Adolf Hitler. On the blog, Cathy Peschke is fond of calling public schools “Taxpayer Funded Socialist Indoctrination Centers.” She also blogged live from a Tea Party rally in Manchester last month.

In her view, the temperature of her rhetoric makes no difference. “If people are against taxation, it's not going to matter to them,” she said

But the harsh language has alienated some Croydon residents, who said they don't understand what the Peschkes are doing.

“We're confused about what his motives are, moving to this small town,” Christine Almstrom, head of the Croydon PTO, said from behind a bake-sale table at the School District meeting.

Jim Peschke said he and Cathy chose Croydon after drawing up a list of the qualities they wanted in a place to raise their kids. A small town, a good job market, a more welcoming political climate. They found a house in Croydon, and Peschke, who is trained as an engineer for nuclear power plants, found a job at Dimatix, a leading provider of inkjet printheads, in Lebanon. He was laid off in January, but found a position as a contractor for KMC, a firm in Merrimack that makes medical devices.

Although the Peschkes are libertarians, they are not part of the Free State movement, a wave of libertarians who moved to New Hampshire in recent years, Peschke said.

***
Jim Peschke's presence on the School Board comes at an important moment for Croydon.

For over 40 years, the Croydon Village School has had a close relationship with Newport schools, and for the past 10 years, they have had a binding contract under which Croydon agrees to send children to Newport and Newport agrees to accept them.

This year the deal comes up for reconsideration. If the two parties decided to do nothing, the agreement would simply continue indefinitely. Under state law, there's a lengthy process for considering whether to continue or to end the agreement. Peschke made his feelings clear in an interview before he was named last month to chair the committee that will study the agreement.

“I would like to see Croydon leave the AREA agreement with Newport,” he said. Croydon parents should be able to choose the school they send their children to, he said, adding, “I can think of no morally defensible reason why they shouldn't be able to do so.”

Peschke said he was expecting and hoping to be put on the committee studying the AREA agreement. “There are many people who want us to maintain the monopoly agreement with Newport,” he said.

A reason for that is one that Peschke holds dear -- cost.

Although Peschke asserted that Newport is “where most of the waste is” in his town's school spending, Caccavaro said he doesn't think Croydon can get a better deal anywhere else. “It’s not going to be cheaper any other way we do it,” he said.

Croydon has only 98 schoolchildren, which doesn't provide the town with a lot of leverage. In the deregulated marketplace Peschke imagines, there would be more options for Croydon parents that might also benefit Croydon taxpayers.

The reconsideration of the agreement with Newport is a lengthy process, and Peschke's term on the School Board ends in 2012. “They will have a candidate fielded,” he said of his opponents.

Peschke might even step down if he feels the schools are too resistant to change. “If I sense a general futility in making substantive changes, I won't bother spinning my wheels,” he said.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3219.

Taxes will go up way up in Croydon

Taxes will go up way up in Croydon way up, if you do not let your voice be heard. The SAU administration presented the Croydon School Board a budget that included a 29% increase in the monies they are asking from Croydon taxpayers. We have.....


Rising unemployment - "The unadjusted November 2009 unemployment rate for New Hampshire was 6.5 percent, unchanged from the October rate, which was unchanged with revision. The November 2008 unadjusted rate was 4.0 percent."

Decreasing home values - Just ask anyone who has tried to sell a home or refinance their home.

Uh we are in a recession folks.

But the greed of those who want Croydon tax dollars is unrelenting and the insensitivity to the taxpayers of Newport's feeder district appears never ending. Those on social security are not getting a raise this year, but Newport and the SAU wants 29% increase in the tax dollars they receive from us. Many of us are lucky to even have a job or even get a raise. Make sure you tell these people how you feel at the next School Board Meeting and the Town Hall Meeting this year. Seriously have they no sense of shame?

Cathy Peschke
Spelling and grammar errors as well as typos are left as an exercise for my readers.

Quote of the Day - "To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical. " ~ Thomas Jefferson

In case you missed it - SAU 43 students didn't watch Obama's Speech

The following piece appeared in the Valley News on September 15, 2009.

Newport, Croydon
Students Weren't Allowed to Watch
Obama's Speech
By Alex Hanson
Last Tuesday morning, Charen Urban was planning to watch President Barack Obama's address to the nation's schoolchildren with a Running Start college-level sociology class she teaches at Newport High School.

But during the first block of classes, an announcement came over the loudspeakers that the speech would be taped and shown at a later date, and that teachers were not to screen it live in their classrooms.

Urban was surprised. She had planned her lesson for the Running Start class around the speech. She did download and print the text of the speech and she had her students read it and discuss it, but that's not the same as having the president talk to you.




“I thought that it was an opportunity lost,” Urban said.

Marilyn Brannigan, interim superintendent of Newport and Croydon schools, told the Valley News last Tuesday that she supported the message of the president's speech. “Is encouraging kids to study hard and do their best bad? People say it's political, but I don’t know. Encouraging kids to study hard, work hard, is a good thing,” she said.

She also said the schools were offering the option to any class or students who would like to watch the speech. But early in the school day, Brannigan preempted the live broadcast.

Newport and Croydon students will see Obama's speech as part of this Thursday's Constitution Day activities, Brannigan said in an interview Friday.

“We didn't have time to do any planning” before the speech aired, Brannigan said, noting that students had been out of school the previous Friday and Monday. The delay will give teachers time to prepare, she said.

“We also had 10 parents call and say, ‘You can't show it to my kids,' ” she said. She and the school principals “decided on the morning (of the speech) that we hadn't had the opportunity to preview” the president’s remarks. “We didn’t know how many people were out there” who objected to having their children watch and discuss the 15-minute speech, she added.

Preparation time, and not pressure from parents, was the prime reason for the delay, Brannigan said.

Croydon School Board member James Peschke was among those who questioned whether the district should show the speech live. He sent an e-mail to Brannigan, and posted his objections on the blog he and his wife write on behalf of Croydon Citizens for Reasonable and Fair Taxes.

“I don't know if my letter altered their plans in any way,” Peschke said. Brannigan cited the letter in a conversation with the Valley News.

Peschke opposed the speech on several grounds: It isn't the president's job to talk to students, schools and parents wouldn’t have adequate opportunity to review the speech beforehand, and the speech was directed at students in kindergarten through 12th grade, too wide an age range.

“The lack of review was my largest concern,” Peschke said in a phone interview, adding, “I had concerns that (the speech) was propagandistic in nature.”

Asked to clarify how the president's speech, which urged children to stay in school and work hard, might have contained propaganda, Peschke said, “You could make the case that ‘stay in school' is propaganda.” It might be for a good cause, “but it's still propaganda,” he said.

“My personal view is that parents should make that individual decision” about whether their children should watch the president's speech, Peschke said, noting that he “would do that for any president.”

Peschke said he has read the speech and found it “relatively harmless.” Still, he's glad the district taped it.

Not all parents share Peschke's views.

“If it was a speech directed to the young people, then I thought they should be able to hear it,” said Rick Cota of Newport, who talked to a reporter while watching the Newport High School girls soccer match on Saturday. Even watching a taped speech wouldn't have the same impact as a live address, he said. “It's when it’s live that you’ve got everybody talking about it,” said Cota, who has a third-grader and an eighth-grader in Newport schools.

“I thought it was absolutely ridiculous,” said Lisa Clivio-Wentrup, a guidance counselor at Indian River School in West Canaan and the mother of two daughters in Newport schools.

“It's a prime example of how divided our country is,” said David Clivio-Wentrup, Lisa's husband and a teacher at Newport High School. “I'm 56 years old and I’ve never seen it as bad as it is now,” he added.

Would most Newport and Croydon students still have a chance to see the speech?

“I think everyone is planning to show it in some form,” Brannigan said.

“I guess we'll see,” David Clivio-Wentrup said. “Why wasn't it done in the first place, knowing for how long this speech would be done?” The White House news release about the speech was dated Sept. 2, the Wednesday before.

Brannigan said that the timing of the speech, on the Tuesday after a four-day weekend, left school officials with little time to plan. In the absence of central planning, teachers made their own plans to watch the speech.

“My principal and I had conversations via e-mail about it over the weekend,” said Debra Beaupre, a fifth-grade teacher at Newport's Towle Elementary School. Teachers “were thinking we could do what we wanted,” she said in a phone interview.

“I was looking at this as a gimme, a free little pep rally from the president of the United States,” Beaupre said. For some children, the speech might be one of those times when they might say “I remember when… .”

“The thing that was frustrating was I thought that we missed a chance to celebrate a free moment,” she said.

Showing the speech on Constitution Day, as the district now plans to do, doesn't hold the same appeal. “Maybe there's a point there, but I don’t see it,” Beaupre said, adding that as of the end of last week, there had been no talk in the school of curriculum in which to situate the speech.

Urban, who has made a point of reaching out to students in poverty, said she doesn't know what the plan was for showing the speech. She was ready last Tuesday. “I feel it was a very appropriate part of my curriculum,” she said.

School Board Meeting Tonight

School Meeting - June 8th

Last night I attended the meeting at Town Hall regarding the AREA agreement.


Miscellaneous information and my thoughts from the meeting......

SAU members told Jim three times that it was his job to tell the people of Croydon what they want and what is best for them. Jim responded that we are representatives, not kings. Our job is to do what the people want, not to tell them what they want. The board members either did not understand what Jim was saying or they didn't care. This incident brings to mind a quote:

"The people do not know what they want; they do not know what is the best for them." - Benito Mussolini

I must remind my readers of the Delphi Technique. Delphi is a technique used by educrats to lead the audience into what the educrats want and away from what you want.

Last year a survey of the people of Croydon told the school board by a margin of over two to one that they want choice. Last night's meeting orchestrated by the SAU and not the Croydon School Board seemed intent on informing Croydon that freedom from the Newport monopoly agreement will be nearly impossible and they will do everything in their power to ensure that school choice will never become an option.

The first step is to establish a group to investigate the feasibility of leaving the AREA agreement with Newport. Thanks to the ethically questionable acts of the legislators and educrats the laws are such that you can't just leave the agreement once the contract expires. If the committee recommends leaving the AREA agreement, the town will get to vote on whether to leave the AREA agreement. Once this vote passes, the state must approve the dissolution of the agreement.

This is the twisted world of public education. In a sane world the town would vote at the end of a contract and abide by that vote. The decision would not rest in the hands of some committee or the department of education. Blatant obstructionism at its finest.

When the department of ed representative mentioned the "Best interest of the child" and "Manifest educational hardship", a Newport board member had the gall to suggest that Croydon should remain bound to pay the tuition of any students removed from Newport through these perfectly legal processes. The Croydon crowd groaned and even those who oppose choice were not happy with that comment. I hope my readers can see the greed inherent in such a statement; they simply want our money and don't care about the parents or the taxpayers.

At the meeting Jim Vezina said Croydon was getting a deal on Newport tuition because it is based on the prior years' budget. He also said our tuition is going up a year later because of the raises given at Newport schools. The tax warrant in Newport was not supposed to impact the taxpayers and therefore should not impact Croydon tuition. He stated that the budget is going up 600,000 because of the wage increases but 10 teachers were to be cut to offset those wage increases. So Newport is not going to feel the impact of the wage increases but Croydon is? Either someone is mistaken or Croydon is getting screwed.

Cathy
Spelling and grammar errors as well as typos are left as an exercise for my readers.

Please do not Forget the School Board Meeting Tonight.

School Board Meeting tonight at the Croydon School. Please attend and let your voice be heard.

Consolidation of Schools

While surfing through New Hampshire Newspapers online I ran across an article on the CV Spectator titled Board to proceed with consolidation plans. The story got me thinking about "Big Public Ed", SAU 43, the Newport School district and our own district here in Croydon. Here are some random thoughts on the four items I just listed.

Despite their denial "Big Ed" in general in public schools promotes some ideas that are counter productive to their existence. Through the promotion of a homosexual agenda, women's rights, abortion and birth control they reduce the number of children in the world which reduces the students they need to keep their schools running. Than they wonder why enrollment keeps dropping or remains flat. Now I am not making judgement on any of the above just making an observation.

Marilyn Brannigan is the Superintendent of SAU 43 I have read the statutes regarding her duties. Those duties do not include meddling in the Croydon's citizens and taxpayers decision as to what to do with the area agreement once it expires. If she and the educators at Newport would spend as much time trying to educate the students of Newport as they are trying to merge Newport and Croydon into one district the students could achieve so much more academically. Croydon is a separate district from Newport we are not just another school within the Newport school system. Stop worrying about job preservation and start educating your students and Croydon's students.



The merger of Newport and Croydon into one school district would be very bad for Croydon residents and taxpayers we as voters would carry less weight when it comes to controlling education costs. The bigger the district the harder it is to control costs.

Cathy
Spelling and grammar errors as well as typos are left as an exercise for my readers.

I'm a fan of Steve Varone!

I was glad to read that someone besides my husband and myself believe that schools should reject the stimulus money also known as the thank-you fund for getting us elected money. This "stimulus money" is printed taxpayer money that is putting our country deeper and deeper into debt, out children and grand-children will have to pay this back with higher taxes. If this was honestly explained to our children I am sure they would not want the stimulus money either.

The following LTE appeared in the Eagle Times.

Cathy Peschke
Spelling and grammar errors as well as typos are left as an exercise for my readers.

To school boards

Friday, April 24, 2009 1:23 PM

To the Editor:
An open letter to area school boards:
On April 21, the federal government released information regarding millions of dollars granted to local school districts which must be spent on supplemental special education programs. Area superintendents and other school administrators have already been quoted making salivating remarks about how they will spend the money and some have even talked about sustaining the spending when the grants end.


So, the big question now is, will the school boards strap on their bibs and belly up to Uncle Sam's pig roast picnic table to get their heaping helping of federal pork (borrowed, of course) or will they demonstrate fiscal responsibility and reject the funds outright? This money is just more hair of the dog that bit us. We're in this mess because for years we have borrowed recklessly, with both political parties to blame. Does anyone really believe that the solution is more borrowing? This country is debt drunk and our leaders just keep uncorking more bottles. It's time to join DA folks -- that's Debt-aholics Anonymous. If we really care about our children, we'll stop spending them into a hole.
As a Fall Mountain resident, I hope that my school board members will demonstrate the real leadership that's needed here and reject these funds. I also hope that if they do so, that they will encourage other school boards to do the same. In a way, I guess this is a test. The next few weeks will determine if they pass or fail.
Steve Varone
Walpole

Summer School At Croydon - Is it cost effective and does it improve performance?

As you have read in the Eagle Times Article Jim Peschke rejected funds for summer school. His reasons was that only 41.7% of the students performed proficient in math with 9 months of schooling, how was two hours a day, four days a week for four weeks going to improve student performance. At this point Marilyn Brannigan scolded Jim and said he needed to do research in the the subject. Jim has done plenty of research and he knows that, "in fact most research shows that summer school as typically administered has little if any impact on learning.” You can read another article on the subject here.

Cathy
Spelling and grammar errors as well as typos are left as an exercise for my readers.

Croydon Residents will see a 26 Cent Drop in the School Tax Rate.

The following article is from the April 9, 2009 edition of the Eagle Times. The article is a partial summary of what happened at the Croydon School Board Meeting.



Click on the article to enlarge the article.

Cathy

Jim sent the following to Archie Mountain as a correction to Jim's comments made in the article.

Archie,

I just read your article about last night's Croydon school board meeting and would like to comment while the event remains fresh in my mind. I believe that you misquoted me, and more specifically mischaracterized the interaction between myself and Marilyn Brannigan regarding the role of a school board member. This article gives an erroneous impression of my stance on the role of a school board member.

Marilyn Brannigan did not merely "suggest that I read up on the subject to understand it better." She dictated that in order to be a school board member that I had an obligation to read the research. (Her words were something like "If you're going to be a school board member, you need to read the research.") This is quite different than making a suggestion. This is a command - completely inappropriate in her position.

I cannot remember my exact response, but it was something to the effect of "I already have the only requirement to be a school board member - I got elected".

The point I was trying to make is that it is inappropriate for the Superintendent to attempt to define my role as a school board member. I believe that my words succeeded in making that point at the board meeting.

In contrast, your article not only fails to convey the spirit of the exchange, but actively represents an entirely different message.

Jim Peschke

What is Next For Croydon Schools - Jim Peschke

The Next Steps

The Croydon special budget meeting concluded at about 9:30pm with board approval of the necessary spending cuts. As in any negotiated process, none of the board members considered the end result to be perfect.

Although I believe that Croydon school is overstaffed, my budget proposal did not contain any staffing cuts. Budget areas where spending cuts were more palatable were abruptly deemed "off-limits" due to various combinations of bureaucratic regulation and "That's just the way it is" eduspeak.



We remain far from getting our money's worth from public schools; Croydon's per-pupil spending today is almost three times as much as it was only 10 years ago. Are students actually receiving three times the education, or are more funds simply being wasted due to government edicts and overzealous administrators?

The time has come to push back on unfunded mandates. Such resistance stands on firm legal ground, as the New Hampshire constitution specifically prohibits unfunded mandates. Some would try to intimidate us from standing up for ourselves, claiming the only resistance is total resistance and that total resistance would meet with disastrous consequences.

This is a false dilemma; many mandates have considerable latitude in their implementation. Scaling back mandates to bring costs out of the stratosphere doesn't rise to the level of Fort Sumpter defiance. We must also guard against becoming tools of our own demise by pressing for "more funding". All too often Big Ed's solution to unfunded mandates is funding them. That simply lets us keep $1 in our right pocket while Concord takes $2 from our left pocket. Mandates themselves are the problem.

The money we waste in mandated programs show that there's plenty of room to save taxpayer dollars. With a combination of legislative action and selective trimming, we can continue to make progress towards affordable public education.

Special interests spent decades buying laws to force us to spend more than we should. We can't undo this damage overnight, but the sooner we start, the sooner we can make "public education" truly "public" again.

Jim Peschke
Croydon School Board Member

Jim had sent the above letter to the Eagle Times. I have checked both online and several paper editions and have not been able to confirm if the Eagle Times published the letter.

There is a school board meeting tonight at the Croydon Village School.

Cathy
Spelling and grammar errors as well as typos are left as an exercise for my readers.