In order for this Blog to work, someone needs to approve post more often than every 2 or 3 days. I miss you sara.

I would agree Mike, I rarely see discussion on here anymore. It's more like a mass posting of opinions with no room for back and forth.

Alonso is a jerk. He has ripped this city school system apart. He thinks that if he closes all of the city schools that he will fool everyone into thinking that he is doing a great job. He has ripped schools of their history. He is an outsider and a want to be know it all. I ask anyone who is reading this to name a high school outside of the big five high schools..............yeah....keep thinking.....you can't. If and when some of these kids want to come back to their school and help out with money, time, anything. They will not be able to do it because their school will have been renamed four or five times by the time they come back to help, sad. Change the names back and stop closing schools. You might find more help with money and a whole lot of other things when Alonso can put his heavy ego a side and do so.

@ terry cummings - The history that you're so tied to is the one that makes my co-workers say "Oh my god, I can't believe you're actually sending you kids to city schools! They're not going to learn anything and they'll probably get beaten up in the mean time." So, if you ask me, shedding that history by changing school names, breaking up big schools into multiple smaller schools, re-inventing cultures etc is all for the good.

And to answer your question about high schools beyond the "big five", I can name quite a few. I have a 6th grader who, because of his special needs, will probably not be in one of those schools. How do I find out about new schools? I see kids on buses, I read the high school choice books that come out every year, and I talk to other parents of middle school kids. I've been looking at transformation and charter high schools as well. It's a fair amount of work to keep up with the changing situation. Of course, being a parent is a fair amount of work if you want to do a good job, so I'm not complaining.

@mike & brandon -
yeah...pretty much. It's hard to keep up a train of thought when it's days instead of hours.

BS paper @ AAA responds to teachers' appeals

MR. ALONSO: I can answer the question
7 but I'd like to make a couple of comments before
8 that. First of all, the answer is 22 out of
9 103. Remember, that should not be read as a
10 proportion that is disproportionate because it
11 should be read in the context of the first-year
12 teachers and second-year teachers and the
13 composition of the cohorts.
14 So, out of the 103 teachers who were
15 non-renewed, 51 teachers came from the direct
16 pools, 22 came from the Baltimore City Teacher
17 Residency cohort, 8 came from Teach for America
18 and 22 came from the foreign teacher cohort
19 which is made up of both Filipino and Jamaican
20 teachers.
21 The reason why I have these numbers so
readily is that, of course, I've been hearing
2 about this for a while now. At the beginning,
3 the assertion was made that this was in some way
4 discriminatory which forced us to actually look
5 at the numbers and try to figure out if there
6 was any kind of disproportion in the action.
7 The reality is every year we hire
8 hundreds of new teachers that, with the increase
9 in accountability on the part of the school
10 system, we had a greater number of non-renewals
11 this year than in years past. That we have
12 contracts with BTU which establishes protocols
13 guidance laws that, to the extent that these
14 protocols are violated, then there should be an
15 appeal. That the appeal should, at some point,
16 come to me. That many of these cases are in
17 midstream and that if, at some point, the appeal
18 doesn't hold, then there are a whole host of
19 actions that can be taken on the part of the
20 union and the individuals.
21 What cannot take place is the
assumption that in the first year or in the
2 second year of a teacher's life in Baltimore
3 City Public Schools, that there is not going to
4 be non-renewals because that is sacrificing the
5 interests of students for the sake of the
6 interests of adults regardless of where they
7 come from.
8 There will also not be an exception for
9 one kind of teacher in favor of another kind of
10 teacher. Those are non-negotiables. What I
11 will say is that if there has been a violation
12 of process, then there will be a consequence as
13 a result. But if there has not been a violation
14 of process, then the appeal process will have to
15 run its course. This is with full understanding
16 that, overwhelmingly, most of the teachers in
17 the foreign cohort that have been hired as
18 teachers for Baltimore City Schools are still
19 with us.
20 So, part of the question in every
21 single case, which is why it is so difficult to
be engaged in these conversations, is what
2 happened in the specific facts. The reality is
3 that, on the Board protocol, and we've been
4 skirting the issue tonight and, unfortunately,
5 we skirt the issue of Board protocol in nearly
6 every single Board session where we have
7 protocols for public comment that are constantly
8 violated by adults. The same adults that then
9 complain about children violating protocols.
10 The reality is that in public comment,
11 we should not be discussing personnel issues.
12 Even granting that every single person that came
13 to the microphone is completely on the level
14 about the facts, there might be other people in
15 the room who were not non-renewed who should not
16 have been renewed and for whom the protocols
17 were followed.
18 So, we need to be very careful in these
19 conversations. I'm extraordinarily in support
20 of the Filipino cohort and all my first-year
21 teachers or second-year teachers, I want them
all to be successful. But there are legal
2 elements that have to be followed in terms of an
3 appeal process. Especially when I'm sitting on
4 a lot of the appeals myself.
5 Secondly, in terms of how people come
6 to this body to give their testimony, it is so
7 often a political process where there's an
8 element of this wasn't done right or this wasn't
9 done right. But, the reality is there is a set
10 of protocols that we need to follow as a Board
11 and we should not be in discussions about
12 personnel issues. Even in follow-ups to some of
13 these questions. Sooner or later, it's not
14 going to work for us. Thank you.

@ I&EP - Are you a Board member now?

@ Over-The-Top

A word to the wise use Open Access Board Docs to become better City Schools informed district stakeholder.

@OTT -
Looks to me like I&EP can cut parts of the transcript out of Board Docs. Without a comment I've really got no idea what point he's trying to get across.

Oh I get it now. The numbers threw me because I took the verbiage to be I&EP's own not AAA's.

Protocols are CYA rules when things don't go as planned.