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(photo ©2008 Bruce Fritz)
About Me
- Peter Sobol
- My family moved to Monona in 2003 and have been happily ensconsed in the Frost Woods Neighborhood ever since. I have 2 kids who graduated from Mg. I have been serving on the school board since April of 2007. We moved back to the Midwest in 2002 after spending 10 years in California, where I was a Department Director for Maxtor, a Fortune 500 company. In truth we left California largely because of the school situation - chronically underfunded schools did not offer the kind of programs or opportunities we wanted for our children. We picked Monona because our thorough research showed that this was a place we would really like to educate our kids. Our experience has taught us to value the quality schools we have here in Monona, and the importance of careful stewardship to maintain community support for those schools.
9 comments:
"If approved, consolidating would result in the loss of a full-time clerical position, a full-time custodial position, a part-time nurse and part-time assistant principal at Maywood"......
I see no "upper" todem-pole job is as risk here.....as usual. oh, and let's axe the part-time nurse, 2 nurses for our District is sufficient. (please note sarcasm)
What upper job would you cut? Should we not have principals in our district? Should we not have someone in charge of curriculum? Should we not have a business manager? Should we not have someone in charge of facility management? Should we not have someone in charge managing our special education program thus inviting law suits for not meeting the myriad of mandates?
If you compare public schools to the private sector our management is really, really thin. Maybe our director of HR could go as we did not used to have that, but I suspect that allows our superintendent to concern himself with less mundane issues.
We could get rid of all sports and clubs so we can ditch the Athletic Director position. (please note sarcasm, sort of.)
I think we all know, there's "pork" in everything, including the public school system.
As for potential job cuts, there is an excellent point to be made that there are no High Ranking-Administrative Positions being cut.
I think we all know that we are not going to cut Principals from schools getting their jobs cut, so that was just a moronic example of a cut. As for a business manager, what do they do? And, a facilities manager, please tell me their tasks they do on a daily basis....
What does a business manager do? Hmmmmmmm.......maybe, I dunno, manage a 30 million dollar budget? We could probably do without that, right?
What does a facility manager do? Hmmmmmmm......maybe manage the maintenance of an operation of an operation with 7 large buildings? I'm sure nothing ever comes up there, so we could probabloy ax that too.
all jobs are important in our district, bottom line. it doesn't matter if you sweep floors at the school, or are in charge of the budget. i would hate to see anyone lose their job, but, it's time to get down to the nuts and bolts of things. if they are really serious about saving money, staffing cut backs need to be addressed across the board. (administration, i'm looking in your direction) NEVER, have i seen on the chopping block, ANY administrative jobs. all too often i've seen teachers side by side with the lunch ladies serving up food to the kids, multi-tasking and taking on roles that are above and beyond their normal daily routine. does administration take on other projects or "roles"? do they wear many hats? it's odd too, because the individuals in our district who have the largest salaries are the ones who are not doing the "one on one" work with our children, making a real difference and impact in their lives, yet their jobs seem to be safe.
We have a Business Manager AND a Superintendent to manage/oversee our budget and finances?
For you business types - the Superintendent is the CEO; the business manager is the CFO. You need them both.
For every support person, for every administrator you cut, you put more and more on the backs of teachers and the other "front line" people who have contact with kids. Duties don't go away when you axe someone - they get shoved onto someone else.
I think the basic problem is some people believe we can cut deeper without hurting the education of our kids. We can't. We either ante up the money or accept a lesser school district.
If you compare public school district administration & management to a well run private company of the same size, I believe that you would find that the district has much less management than the private entity. The average management ratio in the US is about 10%, in our district it is about 4%. You would also find that a complete layer of support services that a well run company would deem essential is absent in the district.
For example, as a department manager in a company with ~500 employees, I had an entire HR department to help me with the hiring process, performance evaluations and management of under performing staff. I would not have been nearly as succesful without those resources. In contrast it has only been recently that we have had even a single HR resource in the district. How many employees does a lone principal have to manage, on top of dealing with hundreds of students and their parents? I would posit that you can't find a private entity that runs with as few resources for supervision, support & performance management of its front-line employees as a school district. If you can find a model that is succesful that way let me know, I'd love to study it!
School districts have been squeezed for a long time, and the administration is a bare bones operation. Its easy to throw out "we all know there's "pork" in everything", but its simply not true. We have a lean operation, one that is too lean for success if you ask me.
The "CFO" is responsible for $45 million budget, a job compounded by the extra layers of DPI and state law requirements. Even so, the Superintendent has to spend far too much of his time dealing with finance and budgets instead of education where he really should be focused.
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