Prepared Text for Board Meeting – August 13, 2007
Marc A. Schare
614
791-0646 Home
614
791-0067 Work.
marc9@aol.com
Today, I offer 2
legislative updates.
First, I wanted to provide
a brief update on the Office for Community School grants. The board will recall that we spent
approximately $10K to incorporate Phoenix and GEM in hopes
of receiving $100K in state grants, only to find that the state grants
disappeared from the state budget. As it turns out, the grants were in the ODE
budget request to the Governor but were eliminated before the Governor released
his executive budget. Since the legislature was determined to leave Governor
Strickland’s education budget more or less intact, they did not attempt to
restore the program. It is certainly a curious matter why Governor Strickland
would have picked on a 1.5 million dollar budget item out of the billions that
the state pours into K-12 education. I have a call in to the Governor’s office
to try to understand why. I have also spoken
to Rep. Bacon on this issue. He understands the situation and is seeing if
there is support in the legislature for introducing an amendment to the next
budget correction bill that would restore these grants. If so, we may yet get
the grant, retroactively. I did confirm with the office of community schools
that the proposals put forth by both Phoenix and GEM scored
high enough that both grants would probably have been funded although they are
quick to point out that there are no guarantees.
Second, I wanted to
briefly mention House Bill 27. House Bill 27 is the successor bill to HB411,
which was introduced by Rep. Wolpert last year after Hilliard City Schools had failed to reach AYP for 3 straight years and was
dropped to continuous improvement. Rep. Wolpert reintroduced that legislation
this year as HB27. HB27 would essentially disassociate AYP from state rankings.
It would require the state to list the AYP subgroups that were failed on the district’s
state report card. I support this legislation because it seems like a good
compromise. Under HB27, if someone is looking at school districts, they would
see both the state ranking and the AYP results. As Rep. Wolpert noted in his
sponsor testimony, the currently legislation renders the state rankings to be
meaningless. I called Rep. Wolpert’s office last week and his aide shared with
me that the bill enjoys widespread bipartisan support in the House K-12
Education Subcommittee, however, the support does not
extend to the chairwoman of the committee. He invited Worthington to submit either written or oral testimony in front of the House
Education Committee when the legislature reconvenes in September. He was
unaware of any sponsorship in the Senate, however, Senator Stivers
did sponsor equivalent legislation in the Senate last year. His aide told me
today that the Senator is still supportive of the concepts but has yet to
introduce the bill in the senate this year. Time will tell.
Before closing, I’d like
to offer a public “thank you” to our interim treasurer, Tracy Dematteo for her
months of service essentially doing three jobs. She acted as our interim
treasurer, continued as our director of financial operations and provided
support and guidance during the recently completely treasurer search. Our
appointment of a new treasurer this evening will remove Tracy from these proceedings, but she is truly one of the
unsung heroes of Worthington Schools that allows the district to do what we do
for kids every day and for that, she and her staff deserve our thanks.