Call, write, email, and attend the Lee County School Board meeting - TopicsExpress

Call, write, email, and attend the Lee County School Board meeting on August 12, 2014 and tell them you do not want your money spent to provide an additional hour of unfunded reading instruction to our children who are already deluged in remedial reading! Here is a letter we sent to the LCSD BOE members: Dear Members of the Lee County School Board of Education: Lee County School District needs to ignore the Florida State unfunded mandate of increasing the school day for the 9 schools mandated to receive additional time spent on reading instruction. Our District cannot afford it and our children cannot afford it. It is not rational or financially sound to spend this money for an extra 25-minutes per day. The practice of remedial reading in addition to regular reading classes has not been proven to increase student proficiency, but only to increase our students’ frustration. ELA and ESE students would receive more benefit and increased proficiency if we could provide them with research-based instruction that they can learn from. Lindamood Bell offers research-based instruction and offers partnerships with school Districts. Our money would be better spent providing instruction that these children can increase their proficiency through rather than increasing instruction that they cannot benefit from. According to Florida statue 1011.62 (9) School districts shall be allowed reasonable flexibility in designing their plans and shall be encouraged to offer reading intervention through innovative methods, including career academies. I have copied Lisa Funk, with Lindamood Bell, on this email so that you may contact her for additional information on the services they offer to school Districts. I would like to know how much, if anything, it would cost our District to ignore this mandate.I would like to see the LCSD BOE discuss this further at the August 12 meeting, vote to ignore this unfunded mandate, and evaluate a partnership for this year with Lindamood-Bell to provide our students with a research-based reading instruction that can teach all of our children how to read proficiently in the least amount of instruction time. State mandates ALREADY require students who fail the FCAT to participate in remedial classes for reading and math, (in addition to their regular Language Arts and math classes) in lieu of electives during the school day. The State even provides a waiver for these students so that they are excluded from the mandated 30-minutes of daily PE in order to attend these remedial classes. Is it a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) when these students are only being instructed in Language Arts, Math, and testing??? Our District has allocated millions of dollars to increase our computer hardware and software to comply with the state mandates for high stakes testing. Millions more will be spent on the administration of high stakes testing each year. Our School Board has voted to ignore class size mandates. None of this is in the best interest of our children or their education! Our District needs to look at priorities on where our money is being spent and make certain that those priorities are in the best interest of our children. We do not need more computers or more remedial classes if we do not have enough schools for all of our children. ...the district also has to reduce its proposed $1.28 billion budget by $75 million. “There is a transportation cost attached to it,” she (Graham) said. “We have to adjust our routes and we have to add routes. Other cost is for personnel but we think that we’ve budgeted it and that we will be OK.” Currently, our students days are packed with the maximum hours required by state mandates for math and reading, so much so that higher order skills and nontested subjects such as arts and science have little or no emphasis. Our children have even had recess reduced or removed in order to have time to focus on testing of LA and Math. Nine schools in the district are on the state’s low 300 list and the state mandated those schools extend the school day for additional time spent on reading. Since the district’s schools already have longer school days than other districts, Graham said they only have to extend these schools by 25 minutes, according to the bell schedules released Thursday. naplesnews/news/education/lee-county-schools-running-out-of-space-must-cut-budget-by-75-million_79097702 I look forward to hearing from you and to hearing more discussion on this at the August 12 meeting. Lori Fayhee