BOE Meeting Feb. 4th

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Finally I have a clear headed moment to post this.

The BOE meeting was painfully long. I managed to capture just over 3 1/2 hours of video before my battery died and that didn’t even get past the presentation agenda items. I must say the lecture hall looked really nice, especially compared to the council chambers. It had remote controlled cameras, a working sound system, drop down overhead projector and tiered seating spacious enough that I could setup my tripod behind one. I can’t help but wonder if the students actually perform better in their daily learning because of it, or if it’s just something to show off.

While at first I was struck by the amount of people who had showed up for the meeting (especially so well dressed) it turned out that almost all of them were only there because they had a presentation to give.

There was one particularly disturbing portion of the night I’ll pass on to you. A person who shall remain nameless was answering some questions for me on how the CIBA works before my camera was setup. I asked how many EH students get to attend and the reply if memory serves me was 15. Now this person went on further to say that when possible they prefer students from other towns over EH because they receive more money for bringing those kids in.

Why oh why is budget more important than quality of EH education? I can see a response like that from a private school who has a mandate to operate profitably in most cases. The task of the EH school system is to best educate students of EH, surrounding towns be damned.

There was one comment in the introduction of the Cambridge report by the chair “… do whatever it takes to make sure that every child in East Hartford regardless of their race gets the best education that they possibly can.” I will be calling the chair on this in the future I suspect because there is only one way to do that and so far no school system in CT is doing it.

It seems the hot topic of the night was the report on results of an independent audit of the East Hartford schools by Cambridge Education Associates. Basically, the summary was that everything is wrong, but the personnel have had a positive attitude towards fixing it. I believe the chair said the summary and full report would be available online but I can’t seem to find it as of yet so I scanned in what I have, which is the summary and not the full report. The reports are now available online: FULL REPORT – SUMMARY

I doubt many are going to watch the FULL 3 1/2 hours of the video below, so here are some times to skip to if you want to see a particular portion. Please note that the video will take a long time to load so if you are not looking for the whole thing you may want to hit play then pause and let it download for a while. I would have split it up but as the advanced sound editing hides well, I have been sick as a dog (which caused me to miss the council meeting, sadly) and was lucky to get this much done.

00:06:55 – Student Reports
00:12:40 – Cambridge Report on EH School District
01:37:35 – Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology Report
02:21:00 – Connecticut State Space Grant Consortium Report
02:35:50 – Status Report on Reading District Wide

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3378766819438295513]