Alamogordo Daily News Article Covering School Board Meeting of Aug. 10th

The Alamogordo Daily News covered the August 8th meeting. The article can be found here.

Regular School Board Meeting of August 9, 2010

The podcast is loaded for tonight's meeting. Visit http://cmsbears.podbean.com to hear the entire meeting, or download it from ITunes. Board Member Doug Porch was not present due to illness.

The financial portion of the agenda was not addressed, as Sharlotte was out. Under Action Items, there was a handout outlining how the school would cut $122,400 from the budget. (These changes were approved).  There was considerable discussion about student travel, and some discussion as to the potential revenue gained by closing the High School campus.

Under the Assistant Superintendent's Report there was discussion as to Cloudcroft Schools meeting AYP and how to interpret the results. Visit the New Mexico Public Education Department's website to see the detailed AYP reports.

The Superintendent's Report covered disabling computer downloads for students. (I had some questions about that.)

Agenda for August 9, 2010 School Board Meeting

Here is the agenda for tonight's meeting. I'm interested in hearing about those budget changes.

Mr. Hancock Responds

In my prior posting I included a copy of a letter that I sent to Mr. Hancock and the School Board Members. In it I offered some suggestions as to ways that the school could better inform the public of upcoming special meetings. Here is Mr. Hancock's response to that letter:

Great minds travel the same path.  Number 1 would only notify parents and to add others would be at an expense that we just cannot take on, Number 3 we have those blocked on our network, number 2 is the one that I have already started Joel working on.  It is my thinking that this will work if Joel can overcome some issues caused by our network software.  He has been working on that and thinks that it can be done but still not sure (it is a network software issue).  If this will eventually work then we will have a list that one could sign up for to receive an e-mail about special meeting that are convened on short notice such as the one last Monday night.  This will require that one contact Joel to be added to the list.  This is not in place yet but I hope that it will be soon.  You can see that we were thinking alike on number two.  If this gets up and running I will let you know.

Special School Board Meeting Held Last Night

I discovered today that there was a special school board meeting held last night. It sounds like the topic of discussion was further budget cuts. Unfortunately, I didn't know about the meeting, so there is no podcast available.  I have long had a problem with the way that the school notifies the public of special meetings. Below is the letter I sent to Mr. Hancock and every member of the school board outlining my concerns and possible solutions:

Dear Tommy,

I discovered today that there was a special board meeting last night. I wish I had known about it ahead of time so I could have included its podcast on my blog, but I don’t routinely stop by the school to read the window. I realize that the school does the minimum which is required by law as to posting notification of public meetings when someone tapes the notice to the window by the gym and gives the notices to the post offices in hopes that they will post them. I am fully aware that you are loath to start an email list to notify people such as myself (People Concerned About Cloudcroft Schools blog) or Jennifer Smith (the Alamogordo Daily News) of special meetings out of fear that “everyone else” will want to be included in that notification, thus taking too much of your or your staff’s time. However, I think that you need to be open to alternative methods of communication if you are sincerely interested in having the public participate in public meetings.

The school has made significant investments in technology, so I assume that means that you and the school board recognize that it is an important tool in the educational process. Unfortunately, when it comes to public meeting notification no one wants to use the technology that you have readily available. I would suggest that the following notification methods could easily be employed by the school with minimal time and effort. I only suggest that these methods be used when it comes to special public meetings that are convened at the last minute...such as the one that you had last night.

1. Use the phone notification system that the school has in place.
2. Establish an email list and allow members of the public who want to be on that list to add their email addresses.
3. Set up a Twitter or Facebook account that can be updated, then anyone who wants notification can sign up for text or email notification.

If you are truly interested in encouraging public participation, then any of these methods could be implemented quickly and at no cost to the school. Expecting people to stop by the school on a daily basis to see if anything has been taped to the window is not reasonable. It is a waste of time, fuel and energy. It is, however, ideal if you want to do the absolute minimum.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

Alamogordo Daily News April School Board Meeting Coverage

Here is the article for the April School Board meeting.