General News
Union: DOE leadership team reform plan ‘step backward’
Oct 18, 2007 11:09 AM
UFT Staten Island parent liaison Joan McKeever Thomas told the City Council at its Sept. 20 Education Committee meeting that both teachers and parents were being given a short shrift in the latest proposed school-leadership-team reshuffle.
Thomas, a former member of the Panel for Educational Policy, challenged proposed department changes to Chancellor’s Regulation (CR) A655, which governs the operation of school leadership teams. Thomas said the changes to the document — which unamended “gave parents and staff real collaborative input into school governance, curriculum and budgeting” — were in fact a “misguided and unwelcome departure from the earlier collaborative, team approach.
“If the [Department of Education’s] current proposed changes are institutionalized,” Thomas said, “many SLTs — which show and continue to offer so much promise — would become rubber stamps for the principals. SLTs under the proposed changes will be redundant organizations, talk shops with no direction or larger purpose. From a transparent, collaborative, active system that works, the new recommendations will create an opaque, one-directional, passive system that adds no value to school organization.”
Another problem: The proposed changes “only address the parent side of the SLTs … not staff, the other half of the team,” Thomas added. “They omit addressing any initiatives that could help staff to be better team members” while severely diluting existing SLT powers.
Among the proposed changes Thomas objected to was one stripping the SLTs of their current role, as described in the regulations, in “develop[ing] and review[ing] the schools’ Comprehensive Education Plan (CEP)” and “consulting with the principal in developing a school-based budget and staffing plan aligned with the CEP.” They will now have the lesser role of receiving “a report from the DOE Galaxy budgeting system” and offering input on the proposed school-based expenditure “prior to submission to the school superintendent.
“So, from being an active, collaborative body, as required by state law, the SLTs are downgraded to at best bodies advising the principals,” Thomas said
The new system would also eliminate the principal’s responsibility to review with the SLT “the form and content of the school-based budget request” early in the process and provide the SLT not just with a recommended budget but, as the present regulations say, “with all appropriate and relevant information, memoranda and documents on the budget request process … [to] develop and prepare the school budget request.” SLTs would now be left to comment on a budget that is a fait accompli.
Most misguided of all, said Thomas, the proposals would put the teams under the supervision of the DOE’s Office of Family Engagement and Advocacy, as if the teams dealt only with parental involvement and not staff and community involvement, too.
“Because the Comprehensive Educational Plan deals with budgeting, as well as teaching and learning, which are outside the purview of the more narrowly defined OFEA, SLTs should instead be part of a more all-encompassing Department of Education body,” Thomas told the Council.
In conclusion, Thomas called the new regs “a serious step backward. The Green Book [the original regulations setting up the SLTs] offered a model where every member of the SLT was a leader, someone who took responsibility and exercised good judgment. The current changes throw cold water on that effort to get every SLT member operating maximally and collegially in the interest of students.”
For more on the value of keeping School Leadership Teams in their current form, see Vice President Michelle Bodden’s column below.
