Pueblog USa
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Hail to the Chief
Kitty Kennedy gets a second chance.
According to reports, Kitty Kennedy has been re-elected to be president of the District 60 School Board. The vote was unanimous, with Kitty abstaining from voting for herself.
Her previous tour has been, as some people would say, ‘interesting’. Between scandals regarding people holding positions on the board that probably should not have been, due to rampant ‘truancy’ issues, hints of shenannigans regarding the spending of bond monies delegated to the improvement of the schools in the district, apparent inappropriate influence being exerted by members of the school board over the administrators of the schools, she had quite a learning experience in the previous two-year term. I certainly hope she learned well from those experiences.
As one general officer who addressed the assembled classes at Benning School for Boys put it, “Good judgement is based on experience. Experience is based on poor judgement.”
And on that note, let us look to the future….
Judging from the past, Kitty has had a LOT of experience now. The question is will she have learned the critical lessons? We’re going to find out.
Over the last year or so, I’ve been listening to a lot of what goes on in District 60. A lot of it was good to hear. However, there is a considerable amount that is cause for concern.
There are things like hearing the graduation rate at CSU-P is only 30% in 6 years. That came out at a recent meeting I attended where someone seemed to be grilling the representative from CSU-P over that statistic. The statistic was not denied. However, a comment that the CSU-P rep made stuck with me; the kids coming from high school to CSU-P are not prepared for college-level math and/or writing. Nobody else at the meeting seemed to pay that comment much attention. If they had, they would have asked Kitty Kennedy about it. But the school board should not feel like the lone ranger out there in the wilderness with a lot of savage people about to go for her scalp. There are a LOT of other school districts with the same problem. If you doubt this, consider why so many high-tech jobs are now going overseas, to places like India. Either that or why Congress was impelled by industry to lighten up on the immigrant worker statutes. It was to allow those bright young men and women from Asia to come and work longer here in our high-tech industries.
And correlating with that particular matter, the lack of necessary skills our children coming out of the K-12 education system have, let us consider another report I heard recently.
Did you know that it is NOT a requirement for kids graduating from high school to have passed a course on computer literacy? Seriously. The course is an elective.
The question that comes to mind is WHY? Computers are the tool of choice in almost every business one can get into, other than entry-level ditch digger for a company with no hardware other than a shovel. Why is it that the school system does not require these young men and women to be properly prepared for the business world? This only correlates all too well with the lack of preparation the district’s education system is providing these people.
It’s two years until the next school board election. Right now, the indications are that Kitty Kennedy has quite a little clic on the school board…more on that later. We’ll accept this state of affairs, vis-a-vis her second chance. I wish her luck in straightening out the current mess in terms of educating our children, now that the mess on the school board itself seems to have been straightened out. However, we’ll be watching closely to see (1) what other ‘interesting’ developments occur and (2) whether the school board takes action to bring the education system inside of the district up to the 21st Century…..
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