Woonsocket prepares deficit reduction plan
Woonsocket school officials are working on a plan to close a $3 million deficit. Superintendent Giovanna Donoyan says her staff is combing through the books looking for ways to cut costs.
“I’ve asked all of my directors to take a look at all programs and take a look at the efficiency of all programs,” Donoyan said. “We need to tighten our belt, I realize that.”
Donoyan says she will have a deficit reduction plan ready for state officials by next week, but she says finding the savings will not be easy.
“In the year 2000, Woonsocket had a $75 million school budget. Now it’s down to $59 million,” said Donoyan, adding that the decrease comes as expenses for everything from heating oil to personel continue to rise. “The costs across the board have escalated just to keep the bare minimum. The things we can control, we do our best to control, but there are uncontrollable costs.”
Woonsocket city officials have expressed disappointment over a history of school deficits which contributed to a downgrade from Moody’s investor service early this year. The city has sent a finance officer to work with the school department on a budget review.
Brown remembers Joe Paterno
Brown University athletics coach Phil Estes says Joe Paterno was one of the greatest football players in Brown’s history. Paterno died Sunday of lung cancer. He lost his head coaching position at Penn State for failling to do more to stop alleged child sexual abuse at the hands of an assistant coach.
Paterno graduated from Brown in 1950, and Estes remembers him as a “great mentor”. Paterno played quarterback and defensive back for the Brown Bears.
The university still hands out an annual atheltic award in Paterno’s name. Current students and alumni have debated whether the award should be re-named following the sexual abuse controversy at Penn State.
Longtime fundraiser leaves URI
Robert Beagle, a key figure in fundraising and marketing at the University of Rhode Island, has announced plans to retire in June. After more than two decades at URI, Beagle says he wants to spend more time with his family and plans to teach at the University’s Department of Communication and Media, which he helped establish.
URI officials say Beagle will be sorely missed. They credit him with helping to establish fundraising and alumni relations at the school and with raising URI’s profile in the larger community. Beagle was instrumental in efforts to build the Ryan Center, among other major construction projects. He also oversaw the university’s first capital campaign in 1992, raising more than $60 million.
In recent years, Beagle has served as Vice President for Advancement, focusing on branding initiatives like the “think big we do” campaign. He has also been active in the transition to the university’s new president, David Dooley.
Bills to watch at the General Assembly
Several education-related bills come up for committee hearings this week at the Statehouse.
One bill would broaden the allowable reasons for teacher layoffs, but they would still have to be based on seniority. The House Committee on Labor is scheduled to take up that bill on Tuesday. The sponsor, Rep. Scott Guthrie (D-Coventry), is proposing that the state allow school districts to let teachers go for reasons that include budget cuts, program changes and loss of student population. The bill would also push back the deadline for notifying teachers of potential layoffs, from March 1st to May 15th.
Meanwhile, the House Committee on Health, Education and Welfare will take up the question of whether Neumont University should be allowed to grant degrees in Rhode Island. The Utah-based school is hoping to open a campus in Providence in 2013. Neumont offers Bachelor’s and Master’s degree programs in computer science and computer programming. The for-profit university needs an exemption from a state law barring for-profit schools from granting BA and MA degrees.
The Health, Education and Welfare Committee will also be looking at a bill to ban texting during the school day. The measure sponsored by Rep. Peter Petrarca (D-Lincoln, Johnston, Smithfield) would prohibit all texting during school hours, except for pre-approved emergency or instructional purposes. Schools would have to adopt their own disciplinary measures to enforce the law, but the bill specifies that no cell phone should be taken away for any length of time beyond the day of the texting offence, and no student should be suspended for texting.
Finally the HEW Committee will consider allowing school districts to sell advertising space on school buses. The HEW Committee meets Wednesday at 5 p.m.
Ed officials wrap up Race to the Top meetings in DC
State education leaders participated in a two-day meeting in Washington this week for Race to the Top grant states. Education Commissioner Deborah Gist was on hand for the gathering, along with teachers’ union leaders and school district officials.
The Federal Department of Education invited all of the Race to the Top grant states to Washington, to encourage collaboration on public school improvement initiatives.
Rhode Island is in the process of spending $75 million federal Race to the Top grant funding for programs like teacher training and re-vamping public education standards.
For-profit university seeks exemption from state law
Neumont University is looking to open a branch in Providence by 2013, but first it has to get around a state law prohibiting Bachelors and Masters degrees at for-profit institutions.
Neumont President Ned Levine says he expects bills to be introduced in both houses of the Rhode Island legislature this month to exempt Neumont from the law. If it passes, the legislation would allow Neumont to seek approval for a Rhode Island campus from the State Board of Higher Education.
Neumont offers degrees in computer science and software development at its current campus in Utah. Levine says the school plans to offer similar degrees in Rhode Island and already has relationships with several local companies.
“Companies like GTECH and FM Global are currently coming to Utah to recruit our students,” Levine said. “That demonstrates the scarcity of computer software developers here in Rhode Island.”
Levine has longstanding ties to Rhode Island. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and later served on its board of trustees. He co-founded a local bicycle design and marketing company called Rhode Gear, which at one point had two factories in Rhode Island employing hundreds of people. Levine went on to found a business strategy and brand planning firm before taking a job at Johnson & Wales University. He proudly says that he still has a Rhode Island driver’s license.
While for-profit universities have been under increasing scrutiny in recent years, Levine maintains that Neumont has a good reputation. The school serves 350 students in Utah, who attend classes five days a week. A Bachelors degree takes just 2 ½ years to complete at a cost of roughly $72,000.
According to Neumont, 68 percent of students complete their degrees, and 95 percent of those who graduate go on to find employment in their field.
“The unemployment rate for computer scientists is zero,” Levine said.
Atheist wins battle with Cranston schools
A federal judge has ordered Cranston to immediately remove a prayer from the wall at a local high school. A student and her family sued the school district, arguing that the message, which contains the words, “Our Heavenly Father,” constituted a breach of the constitutional separation between church and state.
City and school officials claimed that the mural had historic significance. It has been at the school for roughly 50 years, and residents call it a tradition in Cranston. The overall message of the mural is not religious, according to school officials. It urges students and teachers to work hard and be a credit to the school.
The Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, arguing on behalf of student Jessica Ahlquist, called the mural an inappropriate display of language that promotes prayer in a public school. Ahlquist considers herself an atheist.
The Cranston school district has 10 days to respond to the ruling. School officials tell the Providence Journal they are not likely to file an appeal.
The full text of the prayer mural:
Our Heavenly Father,
Grant us each day the desire to do our best,
To grow mentally and morally as well as physically,
To be kind and helpful to our classmates and teachers,
To be honest with ourselves as well as with others,
Help us to be good sports and smile when we lose as well as when we win,
Teach us the value of true friendship,
Help us always to conduct ourselves so as to bring credit to Cranston High School West.
Amen
Study finds better teachers have wide-ranging impact
Teachers who raise test scores also have a positive impact in other areas of their students’ lives, according to a new study from economists at Harvard University. The study has not been peer reviewed, but it seems to indicate that there is a value in rating teachers based on how their students perform on standardized tests, a method known as “value added” or VA.
According to the study:
Students assigned to high-VA teachers are more likely to attend college, attend higher- ranked colleges, earn higher salaries, live in higher SES neighborhoods, and save more for retirement. They are also less likely to have children as teenagers.
The researchers were trying to determine whether “value added” is a good measure of teacher quality. To do this, they looked at test score data for more than 2 million children in a single school district in grades 3-8. Then they used tax records to find out what happened to those children later in life.
They concluded that:
On average, a one standard deviation improvement in teacher VA in a single grade raises earnings by about 1% at age 28. Replacing a teacher whose VA is in the bottom 5% with an average teacher would increase students’ lifetime income by more than $250,000 for the average classroom in our sample.
“Value added” teacher ratings are extremely controversial, with critics arguing that a single teacher is rarely the only factor driving student performance. The New York Times notes that some critics also warn such systems could influence teacher behavior, driving them to cheat, for example, or to remove weaker students from their classrooms
Does RI need a full time higher ed commissioner?
Some members of the State Board of Higher Education think Rhode Island should no longer settle for a commissioner who divides his time between the Office of Higher Education and the Community College of Rhode Island.
The Board of Higher Ed’s committee on finance has voted to back a proposal to look into requesting funding for a full-time commissioner. The issue is on the agenda for a meeting Monday at the full Board of Higher Education.
The move comes as lawmakers consider the future of the Office of Higher Education. Some state officials have suggested consolidating the agency with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Higher ed officials are deeply opposed to that idea, saying higher education is too important to the state’s economic future not to have its own department.
