Today's Journal remarks that only one person attended the County's last budget hearing. He/she can join us in McLean, where the only people in last night's audience were invited there for recognition and left shortly thereafter. And there was much good news to report, but no one to hear or publicize it. I don't think anyone can object if I give the highlights:
1) We're well on the way at last to mapping the entire curriculum.
2) For the most part, we're keeping class sizes where they should be.
3) Our adaptive PE program is a great success.
4) We have the basic tenets of a strategic plan.
5) We are revising our policy manual to update and correlate it to new laws.
I hate to b*tch, but it does sometimes feel like all of us are working in a vacuum.
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2 comments:
I sympathize. It's kind of like the news media: people only show up for the bad news.
So, I checked out the BOE website this morning. The agenda, briefs and minutes are available as PDFs. (Let's not get started on how long it takes me to open them.) The current minutes are for August 14. And archives cover only seven 2006 meetings and no 2007 meetings. As you know, minutes are not news articles. I came away knowing little more than I did before. I'll ask you later about mapping the curriculum, class sizes, adaptive PE and the strategic plan. I think I'll skip the policy manual update.
In preparation for the new year as Supervisor, I started to list regularly scheduled meetings which I should attend or would like to attend or should designate someone else to attend. The list stands at 27 monthly or semi-monthly meetings so far. And I'm sure I've only scratched the surface. There's got to be a better way.
Oh, wait! It's newspapers. Why, oh why can't we have better news coverage?
I think the consolidation of our local media is largely to blame. We have a radio monopoly, understaffed. We have the Ithaca paper, which is less and less local as it cedes its core to Binghamton and beyond. We have the Cortland paper, still without a decent working online version and no delivery service past Route 13. We have the weeklies, which try to keep up without much in the way of resources. It's very sad in an intellectual community to have so little in the way of daily coverage of events.
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