Issue #6 Effective Technology

Problem:

The province and district are pushing “21st Century Education” which includes better use of technology and yet many of our district’s teachers and students are denied access to wireless networks, mobile devices, and projects that fit the goals. They express frustration with computers not working as expected, or having their laptops locked down to the extent they can’t access teaching tools. The mac users are disheartened as they see their computers thrown out to supposedly save costs. A board office presentation last year to all interested staff suggested that schools would be outfitted with only the most basic of technology and that students and teachers could buy their own teaching & learning tools if they wanted to innovate. It stops being “public” education when the users, especially our students without means, are expected to supply the learning resources. The collaboration that used to take place between teachers and district staff is also gone, and is far enough gone that many of the most experienced teachers who use a lot of technology have given up on trying to get the board office to listen to their concerns. The “Chilly Climate for 21st Century Learning” report issued by a group of teachers in September listed a number of support structures for collaboration on technology that used to exist in the district but are gone now over the last 3 years: “Key Tech Contacts, Tech Coaches, Tech Innovation Grants, Tech Education Coordinator (teacher and/or district principal), and teacher input in virtually every area related to philosophy, planning, decisions, directions, budget, practice, standards, and assessment.”  In addition, 4 secondary and 3 elementary projects designed to bring 21st century mobile learning ideas into classrooms were turned down by the board office last year. How many other potential projects were discouraged by this? This is the kind of work the ministry of education is trying to encourage - innovative, personalized use of technology. The district superintendent’s blog mentions innovation, disruption, and 21st century learning as ideals for the school system, so trustees need to be aware of where these ideals are being blocked in our schools and give teachers and students better chances to experiment alongside traditional paths of innovation (it doesn’t require a computer to challenge thinking, collaborate, or be creative).

Solutions

The most basic and obvious response is to say yes to teachers and students when they are passionate about pursuing innovative learning projects, technology-related or otherwise. Almost every successful program or project starts with engaged teachers who have a vision for what can be done for students. There must be cost limits and tech support to consider, but technology must be given a chance to be tested and flourish in classrooms before teachers give up.

It will be a big help for the board office to send consistent messages to teachers. If it can’t afford to support new technology, it should say so instead of talking about 21st century education but then blocking it when teachers volunteer to try it. The board office can start by allowing some of the proposed mobile learning projects to proceed or allowing teachers who are gifted with technology the access they need to use technology for powerful learning. The momentum of earlier teacher-district supports and the graduates of SFU's TLITE (tech ed diploma program) is all but lost in the disconnect of the last few years.

Pretty much every innovative use of technology in the past got its start in the district either through teacher initiative or by a partnership between teachers and a supportive board office : video editing, websites, blogs, podcasts, smartboards, interactive media, class-to-class connect, digital learning platforms, etc. Part of this is the teachers and students with ideas for how to use existing technology. The other part is the teachers and district staff sitting down together to figure out how to support it. We need a return to some level of teacher involvement in decisions, training, leadership, and coordination. It is time to end the shutout. The board office should find relief in this as they realize they can’t lead if nobody is following - get your teachers back onboard.

Issue #5 The Student Experience

Problem: 

Schools have a hard job balancing academic achievement, fine arts, respect for diversity, support for struggling or challenged learners; they generally do well but areas of concern remain.  One of them is ensuring that special needs support is not diverted due to budget constraints. Funds generated specifically for special needs students often get spread across other school programs (and without a requirement to notify parents). While support in unfunded areas is needed and appreciated (like providing TAs in other classes for struggling students that do not have special designations), this shouldn’t come at a cost to the special needs students whose presence in a school generated those funds to begin with.

Another concern is the loss to elective programs. Fine arts and applied skills are seen as “bonus” programs at elementary schools (most have them, but no guarantees), and at secondary schools have been pushed off of student’s timetables in return for core classes such as math. A controversial pilot started last year adds a mandatory term of math for every Grade 8 student, regardless of ability, and a cost to electives. This was done to address deficits in early math education that eventually show up on the Math 10 provincial exam.

Solutions:

Principals should publish for their staffs and public how their special education funding is allocated, and invite discussion and feedback on how best to support all learners with limited funds. When it becomes clear that funding shortfalls exist, this need to be passed on by trustees to the Ministry of Education.

The emphasis should be on supporting math teaching and learning in the elementary level, not taking away the well-rounded set of course that students look forward to in high school. Students with problems in math should get targeted help, rather than simply throwing more time in math class at every student.  We have great math teachers, but there is only so much time for students to experience a variety of subjects and find their passion. Missing out on electives in Grade 8 will means that electives programs in later grades may not attract the students needed for the program to thrive. It is the electives that often give students a chance to excel and connect to something they will pursue for the rest of their life.

Rick Mercer on Teen Suicide

"It gets better" sometimes isn't good enough. See the story at http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2011/10/26/pov-mercer.html

Issue #4 Support for Rural Schools

I think I got this one covered below. The "Dunster Affair" was very interesting, both on its own and also what it says about "histories" in our school district. I still can't believe the school board office made the parents buy back the land that the community donated to the school district in the first place! I sure hope the Dunster school thrives in its new arrangement.

Issue #3 Communication

Problems

Trustee Communication: Our trustees typically gather information from the public and respond at a later date. This is true of board meetings, and also of the entire Sustainability process in 2010. Individual trustees are often great listeners, and get things done for parents and schools, but their input and consultation procedures make this harder.

Website Communication: The district website has lots of information, and has improved since 2010, but is also confusing to navigate and does little to celebrate student success.  Many links are dead ends, catchment maps have not worked for two years, and the design does not have the professional appearance that might be expected of a district with a $125 million budget. Many of the school sites have the same issues. Teachers report that the site controls are too difficult to use and as a result are no longer involved in website contributions. Our biggest high school (PGSS) has given up on the district-provided website system and has their own dynamic website embedded within the dysfunctional one.

Parents Communication: parents get conflicting information when they ask for reasons behind decisions and data about their schools. In 2010, parents were shown three conflicting lists of school capacities and projections, and were made to wait for freedom-of-information requests for information that should be publicly available.

Solutions

As a parent recently requested at a board meeting, the trustees should be willing to respond to questions and presentations from the public, either immediately after the input, or publicly (if appropriate) on the district website. Parents and others who give input are rarely offering private concerns, they are bravely representing the concerns of many, and those many wish to hear what the school board has to say, even if it is bad news. Some kind of regular interaction and input on plans is needed, not just “thanks, we’ll get back to you later.” Revising the official consultation process is a tall order but must be addressed if improvements are desired.


I'm not the only trustee candidate to suggest this (Don Sabo has clear ideas about this), but I think as many trustee meetings as possible should be public.  Keep personnel matters private, but almost everything else can be dealt with out in the open as a public institution. This should also extend to the so-called "senior learning team" that has set out some excellent topics for their consideration. See p. 5 of the District Plan for Student Success. There work will be so much more powerful if their discussions, at the developmental stage, are not confined to the board office but are open to others. They can't succeed if the people who have to live with their plans (like parents and teachers) have been excluded from the planning process. More about this in Issue #8.

Add interactive functions to the school district website, fix the dead ends, and remove content that is.  It has come along way, but we can learn from other districts that have attractive, functional, dynamic websites like Kamloops-Thompson, Gulf Islands, Columbia-Kootenay, etc. The access to reports, plans, organizational charts, info for parents and educators, etc. on these sites is excellent. Let teachers and students have access to websites again, so that school websites can easily reflect the character and spirit of each school.

The board office, as part of its planning cycle and ongoing attention to sustainability, should publish a yearly synopsis of school data, accomplishments, issues that were dealt with by the board, issues on the horizon (financial, educational, community issues). We should partner with the DPAC on this, as they have already filled the gap in recent years with the excellent resources and data on their website.

PG Free Press spot

...and now she wants to see it from another side.  The Prince George Free Press published my interview with Allan Wishart online today.  I'm quite pleased with how it turned out... I've never really done that sort of thing before.

Issue #2 Improving Say for Parents

Problems:

The government, as part of its 21st Learning Agenda, wants more distance education courses pushed on secondary students. While the plans are still fuzzy, the only detailed report published by the government on the topic up until last week shows a gradual shift from near-total class-based learning in Kindergarten up to near-total self-directed or blended learning by Grade 12, which relies on distance/distributed learning. There is now a new government report, but the Agenda is still vague and open to interpretation. Having a choice is great, but forcing the choice by restricting access to real school with real teachers is not productive and should alarm parents. While there are some interesting distributed learning models in our province at the secondary and post-secondary levels, our local distance education system is not up to the task of delivering the same quality of education as our “brick-and-mortar” schools. The distance education school has the lowest pass rate in our district and is designed to provide education at the edges: rural students, homebound, remedial, accelerated coursework. Students may be born learners, curious and creative, but very few possess the self-motivation and independent learning skills to succeed outside of an environment that has an active teacher, mentor, or parent. The government has made many statements about learning outside regular schools - looks great on paper but parents and teachers are worried that this is designed to reduce the number of schools and privatize educational services. The internet is wonderful, but is not a replacement for a committed teacher.

Solutions: 

Give parents a choice about distance learning, do not force the choice by removing options. As a trustee, I will pursue policy that states this.

Pilot “blended learning” programs at many schools, not just the distance education school.  This combines classroom based instruction with some independent, accountable community-based or online learning.  This has good potential for our small and rural schools, but should be an option at every high school. Give parents simple and effective tools for seeing how well these models work.

Listen to parents: use PACs and School Planning Councils to gather input on plans and programs as they are being designed instead of simply approving them after they have been made. Develop more face-to-face and digital opportunities for parents to be involved in the evolution of the school system.

Listen to educators: local professor Andrew Kitchenham has just published two guides to blended learning. A district-sponsored teacher focus group (“Quality Learning Globally”) met for a year and in 2004 reported a series of recommendations on how distributed learning could best be used in the district.  Engage these professionals and follow up or respond to their recommendations, which were ignored at the time.

Other trustee candidates, such as Don Sabo, have suggested that the board use less in-camera meetings and privatge commitee meetings to conduct business.  I think this is a great idea - public institution, should be public processes. Obviously certain personnel matters can be kept in-camera, and the trustees do need some time to talk with each other and the district adminsitration when they aren't performing for the public, but more public meetings would allow more transparency and access for parents.

Issue #1 Safe Schools

Problem: 

I met with a group of parents and teachers from four different high schools on Oct. 15th and one of the topics that came up was drugs in the secondary schools. Their students and kids tell them that everyone knows where to find drugs, and most of them could find it in/during school. At the same time, and despite a desire for zero tolerance of bullies and drugs, teachers are encouraged to get more of the students through to graduation regardless of the hurdles, and administration face pressure to give second chances to abusers of the most serious rules. Our struggling students do need support programs, tolerance and understanding, but this is much different than allowing assaults and drug violations to end with a five-day suspension. It is a sad comment when the easiest place for dealers and drugs users to practice is in school where the consequences are small. The drugs that kids have access to are not the joints from their parents’ time, they are stronger, nastier substances that ruin lives and steal childhood.

Solutions:

Give full support and resources to vice principals who take a hard line on drugs and bullies. Send the message that drugs and violence are a short-cut to expulsion, and that parents at EVERY school in the district can have a reasonable expectation that their child will be safe from dealers and bullies. This means as a trustee I will pursue a more aggressive policy in dealing with student conduct referrals for drugs and violence.

Celebrate schools that go above and beyond in making their schools healthy, safe, and tolerant. Advertise their programs, and reproduce their strategies. Trustees, if they get to know their schools, are in a good position to do this.

Involve the police more often, both in prevention and in consequences. Community policing and liaison officers are already in place, but the mindset has to change that drugs and violence are not just school violations - they are criminal acts.

Platform

I've set down my ideas and reasons why I'll work on behalf of students, schools, and communities in My Election Platform.  The document has more detail, but here is a quick version of my top ten issues:
1. Safe Schools - drug users, dealers, & bullies need not be given multiple chances
2. Improving role for parents - they need a say on programs forced on students
3. Improving communication with trustees - more interaction, less passive listening
4. Support for rural schools - important for food security and resource stability
5. The student experience - protect elective programs and special needs funding
6. Effective technology - the district is saying and doing two different things
7. Honesty in Education - more open talk, less politics and message-management
8. Long-term planning - current key plans are inconsistent or non-existent
9. Building Bridges - management and teachers are far apart on important goals
10. Real Sustainability - green schools, reduce/recover carbon taxes

I will ask the tough questions to get these issues on the table and I will use my ideas and your ideas to get results.

The Learning Agenda

On a facebook forum for rural schools solutions (CORES), one of the trustee candidates brought up the BC government's plans to transform education and our school district's endorsement. 21st century learning, personalized, flexible, empowered by technology, better teachers & standards, allows parents to choose what, where, how, and when their kids learn. In response, I'd have to say that the "Learning Agenda" needs to be seen in more detail. "21st Century Learning" means too many things to be at the centre of a plan. For some, it means critical thinking and problem-solving, or collaboration and creativity, for others it means more distance education and use of technology. Some of those things belong in any century, and are already "normal" in our schools. The where/when part speaks to the goal for more distance education, phased in as students approach Grade 12. As a parent, I am not interested in having my child learn about math or social studies by staying home and looking up helpful websites on a cell phone. This would be a difficult option for working parents. I want my kids to learn, websites or not, in the presence of a teacher who can guide & instruct and other students with whom they interact. There are some successful "blended" models for delivering distance education, but we're not there yet in SD57, our correspondence courses have very low success rates. Making improvements there is very much needed if distance education can be used to support rural communities. Our schools and teachers are not always perfect but squeezing out the students for distance courses as they approach graduation will not make them better. More parental involvement sounds good but the reality is that most working parents are quite content to send their kids to school and trust that they are learning. Do many parents (outside of home-schooling) actually want to design their kid's educational experience? Choosing a school or program (like Montesorri) yes, but curriculum and learning activities? Our teachers are already very good at this. I am absolutely committed and deeply involved in my kids' education, but I have more than enough opportunity to interact with their teachers and affect how and when they learn. I think the "Learning Agenda" is not so much flexibility as it is privatizing education. It seems to be a recipe for downgrading public school until we end up with a two-tiered education system. There are some really good things that can come from changes to the system, but our own district has a big problem in that many of the "21st Century Learning" ideas that teachers want to pursue are stopped by board office policy. The disconnect between the teachers and the board office has deepened over the last few years and is quite obvious during the current job action. Sorting out and bringing in the "Learning Agenda" will not succeed unless this disconnect can be addressed. This will be a hard task for trustees, but it needs to be on the agenda. I look forward to the challenge.

Rural Schools

Rural schools have traditionally been at or near the beating heart of small town Canada.  Along with churches, community spirit, and rural jobs, these schools have helped sustain agricultural and resource towns through boom and bust cycles. While some rural communities seem too small to support a school, the PG district includes towns and non-urban areas that are still vital and help remind us that we can't exist simply on service industries and urban jobs... we need food from farms, and sustainably managed resources. If we abandon rural schools, we are losing our ability to provide for ourselves and we become dependent on foreign producers to feed and equip us. In other words, rural schools are not just a part of our past, they need to be part of our future. The average age of rural Canadians has grown, as has urban migration, resulting in fewer rural residents with higher living and transportation costs. Statscan's Rural Analysis and the Office of Consumer Affairs (see sec. 3.4) have good data on this. If we ever want to take ideas like the 100-mile diet or resources sustainability seriously, we can't simply be an urban society that sees the hinterland as a place to extract raw resources.  School districts have an incredible responsibility to be one of the pillars of community stability, and this must include rural communities. Our decisions about rural schools affect transportation and living costs, and the carrying capacity in our region (the ability of cities to be sustained by their local area). People live in "the country" for a reason: air quality, jobs, lifestyle, etc.... and their schools makes it possible over many generations. Our District 57 has a mixed track record in its support for rural education. Efforts to engage the Regional District came slow and only after pressure. The creative and passionate effort of the Dunster community to save their school was met by resistance and unnecessary conflict. Giscome/Willow parents have had a long struggle to be heard and understood. We've heard years of talk about how 21st century learning and technology could help in rural settings but the board office is very slow to act or experiment. Hixon was spared, but Salmon Valley, Shady Valley, Mackenzie and others did not fare so well. Still, some creative solutions came from the process... like the land/school deal in Dunster and the modular units proposed by the Giscome PAC and finally taken seriously by the trustees. Send me an email or leave a comment about what we should do for our rural schools. How do we provide meaningful learning for small multi-age groups? Can we use project-based learning, itinerant teachers, blended learning (mix of technology, face-to-face, and distance education), or shared-use buildings? What do we experiment with first? Check out the CORES group (Coalition of Rural Educational Sustainability), they are also working on this... I've found their facebook page and I'm looking forward to seeing more of the discussion and their work.

little guy in a box

Has anyone else noticed this little guy hunched over his desk? He looks to be in a cage or something. Where are his friends? What's on his mind?  Is he in some kind of trouble? I wonder if his life is being enriched, if he is finding his passion. This is our school district logo, by the way. The little guy could be your grandfather, or maybe it was you? What do you remember about school? What parts did you treasure, and what parts could be improved on? What can we do to get the little guy out of the box?

Why do I want to be a trustee?

As a parent who followed and participated in the consultations around school closures in 2010, it became quite clear that the processes used by our school district were brutal. Trustees were put in a position of listening but not responding, taking in incredibly intelligent and professional proposals from the public (parents, teachers, students, neighbours...) and simply saying thanks, "we'll make our decision on March 30."  The Sustainability Committee, made up solely of board office staff (no teachers, parents, or trustees), had created a jigsaw puzzle plan with very little flexibility. It was a recipe for conflict and exclusion. Other districts, like Kamloops, adjusted their plan during consultations in response to input. As a result the final Kamloops plan satisfied the "partner groups" while meeting educational and financial goals. In our district, parent groups had to fight to get basic information about their schools, teachers felt like their needs were being ignored, communities were told that "bigger is better" when it comes to schools, and principals were told to stay quiet.  Now, it is not every year that the district needs to close schools and make cuts, but we need a new culture at the board office if we don't want to repeat the past. So, I'd like to see the trustees & board office become more accessible, transparent, inclusive, and responsive. This has impacts for safe schools, rural education, effective technology, improving the role parents can play in supporting their children's learning, reducing politics and double-speak, and building much-needed bridges between management and teachers. These are the issues I am passionate about, and will work for if elected. Some of what happens inside classrooms and schools is unaffected by the board office or the trustees, but I think we can have a real impact on these issues if we address the overall climate in which trustees and the board office engage their "partner groups."  I'll blog in more detail about theses issues, and I'd like to hear from you on this blog or by email. You can also come to the all-candidates meeting at the Playhouse Nov 9th, 7pm I think.

introducing...

Where to start... I'm a mother of 2 kids, wife, potter, mapper, reader, cat-owner, and dreamer. I was born in Halifax, raised in the Prairies, and have lived my adult life in BC. Most of my family seems to be in the military or the ministry. I've treeplanted, waitressed, and worked in GIS (landscape data for forestry and archaeology).  I've been to Laval, Kwantlen, CNC, and other schools, and I've lived in Prince George for 14 years. While I've never quite gotten used to the cold winters, I like how family-oriented our city can be and how my neighbourhood is safe and friendly. What you'd probably want to know is why I'd like to be a trustee... next post!

Here we go!

Filling in the nomination forms tonight for school board trustee in School District 57 Prince George. It's quite the stack of papers to read through! The prospect of a campaign and the public office makes me a bit nervous but also excited to take on the challenge. I'm looking forward to listening, advocating for students and schools, and keeping the school district accountable for high standards in education... programs, services, decisions, relationships. I think I'll bring a unique perspective to the board -- I've attended school in three countries and six provinces..... some of these were amazing and some were a disaster, but I've emerged with a very strong sense of how students perceive the schools, teachers, and systems in which they find themselves.