O'Neill, Brandman and Durso fund Barclay's entire campaign

How the Apple Ballot works.  
Apple Ballot endorsed candidates contribute money to other Apple endorsed candidates.  Then, they are all beholden to each other.  Don't expect to see any debates or disagreements among these elected officials.  They are all buddies!  They need each other to get elected and then re-elected.

Board of Education member Christopher Barclay is running for re-election.  Here is his Campaign Finance Report on file with the State of Maryland.  It shows just 3 contributions to his campaign:

$2,000 from Friends of Pat O'Neill (Current BOE member)

$2,000 from Brandman for BOE (Current BOE member)

$1,000 from Citizens for Mike Durso (Current BOE member)

Campaign Finance Report Christopher Barclays

MCPS wants more Federal Rebate Dollars

Recently, Superintendent Joshua Starr presented a plan to the Board of Education to use Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rebates to buy 2,000 more Promethean brand boards.  The plan calls for MCPS to purchase the Promethean Boards using a lease.  Payments on the lease would be made from rebates received from the FCC through their E-Rate program.

For over a decade, MCPS was receiving the E-Rate rebates and not reporting the funding to the Montgomery County Council.  The rebates were an easy way to have side income that was hidden from Council oversight.  In 2008, the Parents' Coalition exposed this scam.  Now MCPS wants more rebate money from the FCC.  Below is their public comment on this request.

Montgomery Schools FCCs Draft ESL for FY2013

That was quick, Fred!

Just hours after the Parents' Coalition broke the story about the unregistered, lawbreaking MCPS Retiree's Association PAC, the PAC's promotional web page disappeared from the MCPS web site.

The MCPS Retiree's Association main web page no longer makes any reference to the PAC or to the candidates that the PAC endorsed.  However, the October 2012 Retiree's Association newsletter, which is still online, reveals the existence of the PAC.

Board of Education candidate Fred Evans is the webmaster for the Retiree's Association.

$40,000 membership for MCPS - Club dues instead of teacher salaries

MCPS is a member of the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC).  Clients must pay membership fees to join the APQC program.

APQC uses MCPS, former Superintendent Jerry Weast, and a MCPS administrator in their advertisements.  MCPS Policy has a policy about no product endorsements, but it is ignored. APQC uses MCPS and former Superintendent Jerry Weast to endorse their products, including in the letter to the Shelby County Schools shown below. 

 How much has MCPS paid APQC annually for the last 10 years?

Don't look to anything in the MCPS Board of Education minutes to answer this question. But, thanks to the Shelby County Schools in Tennessee, we now have a hint of what the APQC products cost!  

Some APQC products are $4,000 a day, some are $40,000 for six months.  

Thanks to Shelby County Schools for giving us a hint of what Montgomery County taxpayers are paying for this vendor's product!

2012 North Star Proposal Membership Cost

'Parent Trigger' Scores First-Ever Victory at Desert Trails Elementary

LAWeekly:  Judge Issues Historic Ruling Against Adelanto School District

I am Fred Evans

And I have approved use of the MCPS web site to promote myself

You probably didn't know that there is an MCPS Retirees Association Political Action Committee (PAC). Don't worry, though, because the Maryland Board of Elections doesn't know about the PAC, either.  Based on a search of the MBOE database, the PAC is not registered, even though registration of PACs is required by law.

But that hasn't stopped Board of Education candidate Fred Evans from using MCPS resources to promote his candidacy. Evans, who is not an MCPS employee but has MCPS webmaster authority, has created an endorsement page for himself and two other candidates on the MCPS website.

Candidate Evans a.k.a Webmaster Evans uses MCPS web site to promote choices of unregistered (lawbreaking) political action committee.  (Candidate name section has been removed from this illustration.)

The site also does not provide an "authority line" with the name of the PAC's treasurer, another violation of Maryland campaign finance laws.

If Evans is elected to the Board of Education, three of the seven adult board members will be MCPS retirees and pensioners.

Questions for Board of Education Candidates in November 2012 Election

The Parents' Coalition bloggers have assembled a list of 8 questions that we have sent to the Montgomery County Board of Education 2012 Candidates. We welcome candidates' responses to any or all of the questions that we have posed.  Responses from candidates are at the bottom of this blog posting. 

1.  Do you support an online checkbook for MCPS such as is used in a number of other public school systems including Miami-Dade County Public Schools?

2.  MCPS has minority contracting goals—we want more business to flow to people of color.  Currently, do you believe the practice of awarding non-bid contracts supports these goals?  What would you do to make MCPS always use a fair and open bidding process?

3.  Do you suppport a U turn away from a one-size-fits-all education and restoring and improving wider choice of education opportunities for our children, including restoring learning centers for special education students, restoring honors classes, and restoring non-IT vocational education?

4.  Do you support requiring new initiatives and new curriculum be required to undergo a legitimate pilot study that meets the minimum standards from the U.S. Department of Education for reasonable evidence before deploying to the whole county?  Do you support assessing all new initiatives against the minimum U.S. Department of Education standard of "what works"?

5.  If elected to the Board of Education, will you support or oppose MCPS' practice of permitting principals to assess students fees to attend public school classes?

6. Do you support a U turn from current policy of paying attorneys for advice on how to skirt the Maryland Open Meetings Act to a policy of full compliance with the Act and spirit of the law of open meetings, and even going beyond the legal requirements of the Act?

7.  Do you support returning the preparation of the MCPS budget to the public Board of Education table? 

8.  Do you believe that the MCPS Educational Foundation should be transparent in its sources of funds and its expenditures?

Responses:

Annita Seckinger

Morris Panner

Looking for answers to these questions from the other candidates? We have asked them for responses 4 times over the last 7 months.  We will post their responses if we ever receive them. 

Oct. 10th Board of Education Candidates Forum

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

7:00 pm

Forum on Public Safety for Candidates for Board of Education

Long Branch Community Center, 2nd floor Social Hall

8700 Piney Branch Road

Silver Spring, MD

Candidates agreeing to participate:

District 2: Fred Evans vs. Rebecca Smondrowski

District 4: Christopher Barclay vs. Annita Seckinger

At Large: Phil Kaufman vs. Morris Panner

Five of the candidates responded to a public safety

questionnaire. See SafeSilverSpring.com

For further information contact: SafeSilverSpring@gmail.com or 301-587-6943

Blair Cluster: NO MORE PROMETHEAN BOARDS

November 10, 2011, Blair Cluster Testimony to the Board of Education on FY 2013 Capital Budget  

...Please, ELIMINATE unnecessary IT spending. Do NOT spend 150 million dollars on technology modernization. Use this money for Capital Maintenance Projects. Basic IT investments, like fixing the network printer at Pine Crest ES, are important, but NO MORE PROMETHEAN BOARDS. Promethean boards seem to propagate like rabbits over the summer, and we only find out about their installation at our child’s classroom on Open House night. 

Stop this extravagant purchase so we can stick to the basics of keeping our buildings and our children healthy and safe.

Blair Cluster Testimony CIP Nov 10 2011

Breaking News: Promethean is considering making its products open source

Why is Superintendent Joshua Starr pushing a plan to spend $8.9 million on proprietary Promethean brand hardware when even the Promethean CEO says that the company is moving away from this type of product?  

...EdWeek: So it sounds like you are in an interesting position where you're the technology company that is trying to pitch an idea around a less technology-centric classroom?[Promethean World, LLC CEO] Marshall: That's correct. I'd much rather cannibalize myself faster than somebody else can do it. I'd rather eat my own young than have anybody else do it. I believe in all three modalities. 

EdWeek: Would you ever consider moving to an open source platform?Marshall: Yeah, absolutely. That's our direction. 

EdWeek: And what do you see that looking like?Marshall: That's a great question. We're still working on that. But our philosophy is certainly open-object, possibly open source. A plug-and-play environment....

Read the entire EDUCATION WEEK article at this link:

New Promethean CEO Eyes Move to Open Source

Guest Post: NC Teachers Ditching Promethean Boards

A Director of Instructional Technology from North Carolina has sent us the rationale behind his district's ditching of Promethean Boards.  We have never, ever seen the purchase of Promethean Boards discussed with this detailed analysis, or with the weighing of cost versus benefit by the Montgomery County Board of Education.  The parents in the Bertie County School District are fortunate to have Mr. Samberg as their Director of Instructional Technology. 

My name is Mark Samberg, and I am currently working as the Director of Instructional Technology for the Bertie County School District in Windsor, North Carolina...  I interacted with your organization [the Parents' Coalition] recently, regarding our decision to discontinue installation of new ActivBoards in our schools, and instead move to AppleTVs connected to iPads.  At your request, I'm providing information on the reasoning behind this decision.   

I wanted to start with a little background.  Our district is located in rural Northeastern North Carolina.  We have approximately 2,800 students, about 90% of which qualify for free or reduced price meals.  Through a grant, we were able to install Promethean boards in all of our elementary school classrooms approximately five  years ago.  Our middle school principal was looking to expand the use of ActivBoards and other interactive technologies in his school, but outfitting his school with boards would cost well over $100,000.  This simply wasn't feasible in a district our size.  In addition, some of the projectors and boards already in place have started to fail.  Absent any new grant funding or initiatives, each ActivBoard that needs to be replaced (at an approximate cost of $5,500) represents about 8% of the total IT budget this year, and if funding cuts hold, would represent about $35% next year.  It's simply not feasible to replace even one of these boards when they break.  In addition, the projector mounts are proprietary - we must purchase a Promethean short-throw projector should a projector fail.  These projectors cost about $1,000 more than a lower-end short-throw projector, and about $1,500 less than a regular ceiling-mount or cart-use LCD projector.  Finally, all of our classrooms have standalone LCD projectors, many of which are relatively new. 

In addition to the equipment initial cost, we looked  at the total cost of ownership.  The short-throw projector bulbs that are used by most IWB vendors are very expensive, to the tune of about $300-350 each.  Typically, they need to be replaced one per year.  I have no data to back this up, but it seems they need replacement more frequently than other projectors.  The only thing I have to prove this is my own observation, and there are many other factors that could lead to that.  Most newer cheaper projectors have cheaper bulbs. 

The two other things that we looked at were usage/pedagogy, and the evolution of the technology.  While all elementary teachers have IWBs in their classrooms, most teachers use them most of the time simply as projector screens, and not the interactive capability.  In every classroom I ever taught in, I had an IWB as well.  Again, much of the time, I used them to project, but usually abandoned the use of the whiteboard in favor of the document camera, again making the board a very expensive projector screen.  Also, the board still favors a teacher-centered classroom, and limits interaction to the teacher, or a single student or two.  In short, while the IWB definitely has a value-add in the classroom, the cost of the equipment still (in my opinion) isn't worth the return for the percentage of time the boards are used for their interactive capability.  

Also, while there have been incremental improvements, IWB technology is almost a decade old.  While the IWB has stayed relatively consistent, a whole new generation of technology has emerged in human-computer interaction.  Whereas a touch interface was revolutionary ten years ago, it's now commonplace, almost to the point of expectation.  Purchasing a whole-system solution like a Promethan Board locks us in such that we can't try new things as easily as technology changes.  While the IWB is the most mature technology, Microsoft is bringing the Kinect to education markets (http://www.microsoft.com/education/en-us/products/Pages/kinect.aspx), a device by a company called LeapMotion is poised to make a huge impact on the human-computer interaction market (http://www.leapmotion.com/), a company called SmallLab learning is bringing a movement-based system to the classroom (http://www.smallablearning.com/) and Windows 8 is going to be designed around touch interfaces, which means that we will be seeing many, many more touchscreen devices in the months ahead. 

While all of these products are in the developmental phases, Apple has moved forward with their new solution called "AirPlay" (http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/airplay/?cid=wwa-us-kwg-features-00001&siclientid=6381&sessguid=18279e0f-07d9-4d81-a633-0bf8a006fd7a&userguid=18279e0f-07d9-4d81-a633-0bf8a006fd7a&permguid=18279e0f-07d9-4d81-a633-0bf8a006fd7a). 

By purchasing an iPad and connecting an AppleTV device to our existing projectors, we could wirelessly stream the display of an iPad to the projector.  Because we already had the projectors that we could reuse, the total cost for the iPad, Apple TV, and adapter for the projector runs about $700, instead of the $5,000 that the Promethean boards would have cost.  There are Apps available for the iPad that allow for you to write on the iPad screen, annotate documents and web pages, display websites, and play videos.  These were the major functions that teachers were using the IWB functionality for.  Additionally, because the iPad could be streamed wirelessly, teachers could walk around the classroom and use the iPad from anywhere in the room.  In classrooms with multiple iPads, multiple students can take turns streaming their devices to the projector for other students to see.  So in addition to being a significantly cheaper option, it provided the teacher with much more flexibility.   

They can also use the camera in the iPad as a portable document camera, even though they already have document cameras in their rooms.  Of course, they still have their laptops and document cameras that they can also connect to the projectors.  However, many of the teachers who have tried this haven't needed to connect them for anything - they've done everything from the iPad.  If you don't have any projectors in the rooms yet, the total cost to get started would be around $2,500 - still around half the cost of an IWB [Interactive White Board] solution.  This would give every teacher a ceiling mounted projector with audio, a document camera, an Apple TV and an iPad, with all of the connectors.  The reason it's so cheap is that now each individual component (with exception of the Apple equipment) can be bid separately, and given to the lowest bidder, because each piece is modular.  Also, when it comes time to replace equipment, there is no vendor lock-in. 

The teachers who have been using this solution so far are loving it, because they can move around their classroom, they get to use iPads, they don't have to calibrate the boards, or do much more than plug and play.  There is a disadvantage in that a lot of the pre-made educational materials that Promethean and SMART provide aren't available.  There is also a dependence on several different Apps, instead of a "one stop shop".  However, these factors aside, this has been a much more cost-effective solution that has provided a much greater benefit to our teachers. 

I'm happy to discuss this further and answer any questions that you may have.
Thank you,Mark Samberg

Young Activists Club: Candidates who support healthy schools

The Young Activists Club: Board of Ed Candidates Who Support Healthy Schools and Our Dishwasher Project:

Annita Seckinger - District 4

Fred Evans - District 2

Rebecca Smondrowski - District 2

Morris Panner - At Large

CHART: Violence in the classroom | WashingtonExaminer.com

CHART: Violence in the classroom | WashingtonExaminer.com

Many students scared to go to school | WashingtonExaminer.com

Many students scared to go to school | WashingtonExaminer.com

By most regards, John F. Kennedy High School is a good high school in Silver Spring. The overwhelming majority of students pass state exams with flying colors, and 82 percent graduate within four years. Later this month, students will dress in university gear to celebrate College Readiness Day.

So why do only half of Kennedy students feel safe in school?

Civic Fed Board of Education Candidates' Forum Oct 17

REMINDER:

BOARD OF EDUCATION CANDIDATES' FORUM

DATE: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17TH

TIME: 7-9 PM

LOCATION: ROCKVILLE MEMORIAL LIBRARY, 21 MARYLAND AVE., ROCKVILLE

For directions, go here.

All are welcome.  Please email me offline with questions, and we will take questions at the forum.  Thanks to all the candidates for agreeing to attend.  Please pass this information on.

Thanks,
Paula Bienenfeld
Education Committee Chair and First Vice President, Montgomery County Civic Federation

Enrollment goes up, Classroom teachers go down

In a previous post we noted that at the October 9, 2012, Board of Education meeting the Board would be buying some lucky administrator a new car.  We also noted that there would be no discussion of this purchase.  

There are a finite number of dollars in the MCPS budget and every budget decision is a choice.  In this case, the Board is choosing to buy a car rather than put money towards a classroom teacher.  The charts on this page show how those decisions look in the big picture.  As MCPS enrollment has increased (blue chart), regular instruction classroom teacher positions have declined (red chart).

Put another way, MCPS had fewer regular instruction teachers in 2011 than they did in 2006, yet enrollment has increased by 8,658.

Starr to appear at fundraiser. Tickets $100 - $2,500

Community Bridges Event 

with Dr. Joshua Starr, Montgomery County Schools

Tuesday, Oct 23 6:00p

at at the home of Jeffrey Z. Slavin, Chevy Chase, MD

Join Community Bridges
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
6:00 -  8:30 pm

at the home of Jeffrey Z. Slavin [treasurer for BOE member Judy Docca campaign]
5706 Warwick Place 
Chevy Chase, Maryland

With special honoree and guest speaker 
Dr. Joshua Starr, Superintendent of Schools, Montgomery County 
 
Advocate - $2,500 (includes 10 tickets)  
Patron  - $1,000 (includes 7 tickets) 
Leader $500 (includes 5 tickets)
Friend - $250 (includes 2 tickets) 
Individual tickets $100 

Host Committee 
  
Liz Dahan   
Maria Evans 
Melissa Jones 
Molly Knopf 
June Mickens 
Jeannette O'Connor 
Julie Raiscot  [Education blogger for Bethesda Magazine]
Delmy Reyes 
Brad Stewart

Shirley Brandman's BOE Starts FY2013 Spending $26K Fighting Families

Here they go again!

Who is an advocate for families of children with disabilities at 850 Hungerford Drive?

Not anyone on the current Board of Education, that's for sure.

Another fiscal year began this July, and the big dollars have already started flowing to fight families of children with disabilities.

Special education legal fees for outside counsel for July 2012 totaled $26,160. This is 44.8 percent lower than for the same period in the previous fiscal year.
The Jeffrey A. Krew bill totaled $26,160 and included work on six cases, all of which involved appeals to federal court.

Note that the memo doesn't state whether MCPS was the appellant or the appellee in these cases. And don't expect any of the BOE to ask that question. After all, they never do. And in the very rare event special education legal fees are discussed at the BOE table...staff doesn't know the answers to their questions!

A New Car for Your Student!

On the Board of Education (BOE) Agenda for October 9, 2012, the purchase of another new car.  Who is the lucky MCPS administrator that is getting this car? What make and model did they pick out? Don't expect the BOE to discuss it!

Just know that this new car is more important to the BOE than one more classroom teacher for your child's school.  So it must be a pretty important car!   

0367000 Off-the-Lot, New Vehicles
079GH
Awardee
Criswell Chevrolet, Inc. $ 40,727

$237,000 for more Promethean Bulbs!

On the Board of Education's October 9, 2012 Agenda:

7202.2 Bulbs for Promethean Board Projectors—ExtensionAwardeeClinton Learning Solutions, LLC $237,000