Thursday, July 15, 2010
School Board Meeting July 12, 2010
I was out of town for the meeting, but someone did record it. You can find the podcast here. You can find the agenda here.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
School Spends $43,000 to Wire a Wireless Network
In listening to the school board meeting, I was interested to learn that the school spent $43,000 to wire a wireless network for all of the schools. I'm sure it was just an amusing choice of words...I was sure amused.
But on a more serious note, the High School currently has wireless...the only problem is the IT person won't give ANYONE the password...not teachers...not administrators...certainly not students! If the school is going to spend this kind of money to develop a wireless network, they darned well better give Students, Teachers and Administrators unfettered access to it!
But on a more serious note, the High School currently has wireless...the only problem is the IT person won't give ANYONE the password...not teachers...not administrators...certainly not students! If the school is going to spend this kind of money to develop a wireless network, they darned well better give Students, Teachers and Administrators unfettered access to it!
School Board Meeting June 14, 2010
The Alamogordo Daily News coverage of the meeting can be found here.
The podcast of the meeting can be found at http://cmsbears.podbean.com.
The podcast of the meeting can be found at http://cmsbears.podbean.com.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Agenda for June 14, 2010 School Board Meeting
Here is the agenda for the school board meeting to be held Monday, June 14, 2010 at 6 pm.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
K-5 Language Arts Book Adoption
The school will be adopting new Language Arts books this year. On Wednesday, May 19th at 3:30 p.m., three publishing companies will be presenting their books for parents and teachers. The even will be held in the Media Room at the Middle School.
Regular School Board Meeting of May 10, 2010
First, mea culpa for not posting the agenda last week! But I did make it to the board meeting and you can find a complete podcast of the meeting at http://cmsbears.podbean.com.
There were 2 visitors at the meeting. Mary Lutz spoke to her concern that the budget restrictions could remove teachers from the younger children. She wanted to see the classroom sizes kept small in the K-3 ages and, if teachers had to be moved and class sizes increased, have that done with the older grades.
The second visitor was Steve O'Connor. He spoke about the 5th and 6th graders going to Honor Band in T or C and how well they did. He also cautioned that 2011 and 2012 budgets could be worse than this years and that everyone should plan appropriately and get input from the community. He said he would like to hear some kind of summary of the budget committee meetings at the school board meetings.
In action items, the board appointed an Audit Advisory Committee as required by HB227. Board President Buttram received two letters of interest...one from me and one from Denny Schilling. He asked if anyone else would be interested and Jim Maynard threw his name into the hat as well. So all three of us will serve with board members Doug Porch and Bill Denny on this committee.
In other action items, the board approved the Elementary Art Program Application (the program will pretty much be the same as it was this year) and the Title I and Title II Applications.
The board also approved the 2010-2011 Budget. In the podcast, you will hear Sharlotte refer to a phone review with PED where they went over "the analysis." She also provided handouts of the budget.
The board approved the transportation contracts for Mr. Taylor in the amount of $35,960 and Mr. Swope in the amount of $202,617.
With school drawing to a close, there were numerous upcoming events announced in the information items.
There were 2 visitors at the meeting. Mary Lutz spoke to her concern that the budget restrictions could remove teachers from the younger children. She wanted to see the classroom sizes kept small in the K-3 ages and, if teachers had to be moved and class sizes increased, have that done with the older grades.
The second visitor was Steve O'Connor. He spoke about the 5th and 6th graders going to Honor Band in T or C and how well they did. He also cautioned that 2011 and 2012 budgets could be worse than this years and that everyone should plan appropriately and get input from the community. He said he would like to hear some kind of summary of the budget committee meetings at the school board meetings.
In action items, the board appointed an Audit Advisory Committee as required by HB227. Board President Buttram received two letters of interest...one from me and one from Denny Schilling. He asked if anyone else would be interested and Jim Maynard threw his name into the hat as well. So all three of us will serve with board members Doug Porch and Bill Denny on this committee.
In other action items, the board approved the Elementary Art Program Application (the program will pretty much be the same as it was this year) and the Title I and Title II Applications.
The board also approved the 2010-2011 Budget. In the podcast, you will hear Sharlotte refer to a phone review with PED where they went over "the analysis." She also provided handouts of the budget.
The board approved the transportation contracts for Mr. Taylor in the amount of $35,960 and Mr. Swope in the amount of $202,617.
With school drawing to a close, there were numerous upcoming events announced in the information items.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Budget Committee Documents
The next Budget Committee Meeting is scheduled for April 19. Some background on last year's actual versus budgeted expenditures can be found here. The estimated budget was emailed to the committee members yesterday and can be seen here.
UPDATE FOR APRIL 19 MEETING: An additional handout was supplied offering more detail as to the specifics behind the categories in the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 budgets. The committee worked off of the numbers provided in the handouts linked to above. No changes were made to the allocations at the meeting.
UPDATE FOR APRIL 19 MEETING: An additional handout was supplied offering more detail as to the specifics behind the categories in the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 budgets. The committee worked off of the numbers provided in the handouts linked to above. No changes were made to the allocations at the meeting.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Open Letter from Dulaney Barrett
Dulaney Barrett has asked me to publish this letter which is his response to the Special Board Meeting held to address the School Board's violation of the Open Meetings Act when appointing D'dre Brock and Ed Woten to the School Board.
In his letter, Dulaney refers to various blog postings from cmsbears.net. To help you follow his letter, I have linked to those postings:
Open Meetings Act notification (dated February 5, 2010)
Request for Letters of Intent (while I requested copies of these letters in November, I only received Dulaney's letter and was not successful in obtaining a copy of Ed's)
In his letter, Dulaney refers to various blog postings from cmsbears.net. To help you follow his letter, I have linked to those postings:
Open Meetings Act notification (dated February 5, 2010)
Request for Letters of Intent (while I requested copies of these letters in November, I only received Dulaney's letter and was not successful in obtaining a copy of Ed's)
Letter to Mr. Hancock Outlining State Budget Concerns
Mr. Hancock asked me to post the following:
Attached is a letter that everyone should read. I would like for the Mountain Monthly, Margo, and our web site to please publish the letter. People need to know what things are like as we develop our budget for the 2010-2011 school year.
Tommy Hancock, Superintendent
Cloudcroft Municipal Schools
PO Box 198
Cloudcroft, New Mexico 88317
575-601-4416
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Alamogordo Daily News April School Board Meeting Coverage
Here is the article for the April School Board meeting.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Summary and Podcast of School Board Meeting held April 5, 2010
You can find a podcast of the meeting at http://cmsbears.podbean.com. For convenience sake, you may choose to listen to the podcast in ITunes, which will let you skip to the chapters that you are interested in. Just search for Cloudcroft in the ITunes store and you should find the podcast. Sometimes it takes them a day to update their podcasts.
To briefly summarize the meeting, the board approved all of the Action Items with the exception of appointing the Audit Committee, which they tabled. If you are interested in serving on the Audit committee, it will consist of two Board members, plus a parent of a student in the school, plus a community member with knowledge of accounting/auditing principles. They should be selecting the committee at the next meeting.
The Finance Committee will consist of Ed Woten and Jackie Cates, who also serve on the Budget Committee.
The Board approved consolidation of the School's bank accounts. Apparently, the school has 7 different bank accounts, which the Business Manager Sharlotte Lund explained makes it very easy to kite checks and misappropriate funds (per the Auditor) so the auditor has recommended that these accounts be consolidated. What was not addressed publicly was (1) how long ago the auditor made these recommendations, (2) have any of the other auditors made this recommendation and (3) how long has the school maintained multiple accounts. As a member of the public, I found this odd. The board agreed that the opportunity for fraud was there and approved consolidating the accounts.
The Board approved the Open Meeting Resolution, which is the same as last years' only with a date change. Doug Porch did note that the Agenda has not been getting posted in the Cloudcroft Post Office and asked that Teresa fax him a copy when it is done so he could personally take it over there (right now Teresa mails it to the post office.) I also couldn't help but pipe up and ask once again that they post the agenda to the school's website, which was supposed to start happening last July. See: (http://cmsbearsinfo.blogspot.com/2009/06/school-board-agenda-publication.html). It sounds like Teresa is sending the agenda to Wanetta Ferguson (wife of the school's Technology & Network Administrator Joel Ferguson) and assuming from there that they are being posted. I assured her that I check on a regular basis and they are usually not posted.
Next year's school calendar should look very much like this year's, and was approved by the Board.
To briefly summarize the meeting, the board approved all of the Action Items with the exception of appointing the Audit Committee, which they tabled. If you are interested in serving on the Audit committee, it will consist of two Board members, plus a parent of a student in the school, plus a community member with knowledge of accounting/auditing principles. They should be selecting the committee at the next meeting.
The Finance Committee will consist of Ed Woten and Jackie Cates, who also serve on the Budget Committee.
The Board approved consolidation of the School's bank accounts. Apparently, the school has 7 different bank accounts, which the Business Manager Sharlotte Lund explained makes it very easy to kite checks and misappropriate funds (per the Auditor) so the auditor has recommended that these accounts be consolidated. What was not addressed publicly was (1) how long ago the auditor made these recommendations, (2) have any of the other auditors made this recommendation and (3) how long has the school maintained multiple accounts. As a member of the public, I found this odd. The board agreed that the opportunity for fraud was there and approved consolidating the accounts.
The Board approved the Open Meeting Resolution, which is the same as last years' only with a date change. Doug Porch did note that the Agenda has not been getting posted in the Cloudcroft Post Office and asked that Teresa fax him a copy when it is done so he could personally take it over there (right now Teresa mails it to the post office.) I also couldn't help but pipe up and ask once again that they post the agenda to the school's website, which was supposed to start happening last July. See: (http://cmsbearsinfo.blogspot.com/2009/06/school-board-agenda-publication.html). It sounds like Teresa is sending the agenda to Wanetta Ferguson (wife of the school's Technology & Network Administrator Joel Ferguson) and assuming from there that they are being posted. I assured her that I check on a regular basis and they are usually not posted.
Next year's school calendar should look very much like this year's, and was approved by the Board.
Budget Committee Meeting Podcast and Handout
The Budget Committee met today and was given this handout. You can listen to a podcast of the meeting at http://cmsbears.podbean.com.
As a member of the committee, I'm still trying to sort out in my head just what input (if any) the school is looking for. As you will hear from the podcast, most of the meeting consisted of the Superintendent and the Business Manager telling us what guesstimates they think they will be plugging into the budget. I have asked that the committee receive last year's budget estimates versus actuals (in the same categories as we were given), as that seems to me to be a logical starting point in the budget process. It sounds like this information will have to be "created" for the committee and the Business Manager isn't sure when she'll have a chance to get to that. I am hoping that it will be prior to the next meeting, which is the day before the budget is due to PED.
As a member of the committee, I'm still trying to sort out in my head just what input (if any) the school is looking for. As you will hear from the podcast, most of the meeting consisted of the Superintendent and the Business Manager telling us what guesstimates they think they will be plugging into the budget. I have asked that the committee receive last year's budget estimates versus actuals (in the same categories as we were given), as that seems to me to be a logical starting point in the budget process. It sounds like this information will have to be "created" for the committee and the Business Manager isn't sure when she'll have a chance to get to that. I am hoping that it will be prior to the next meeting, which is the day before the budget is due to PED.
Quality of Education Survey
The 2009-2010 Quality of Education Survey is up and running on the PED website. You can access instructions on how to complete one (or more) for Cloudcroft Schools here. You can also go to the PED website at http://164.64.166.19/studentsurvey/surveyframe.asp
Now is your chance to complete the online survey. It is a pathetic example of apathy that only 39 surveys were submitted last year.
Now is your chance to complete the online survey. It is a pathetic example of apathy that only 39 surveys were submitted last year.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Agenda for School Board Meeting to be held April 5
Here is the agenda for tomorrow's meeting. I would like to be able to link you to the agenda on the school's web page, but the it is not posted there.
Friday, April 2, 2010
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