PEORIA, IL -- The high cost of the bond sale for Peoria School District 150 was addressed at the Dec. 12 School Board meeting by school critic Terry Knapp.
During the required public hearing for the budget, Knapp said his son, a finance executive, told him that the school board could have spent less in fees had they made a few phone calls to check prices.
Knapp also objected to selling bonds thus obligating taxpayers to pay back the money with interest, instead of the board living within its means.
The bond sale will be done with the anticipation that new sales tax revenue, approved by voters in the November election, will pay back the money.
The district plans to do school construction and air-condition schools with the money.
Knapp also said that nothing in the budget was for Peoria Stadium.
Here are recordings of the public comments.
Download D150 Dec. 12 1 (1)
The public hearing.
Download D150 Dec. 12 1 (2)
The public comments.
During the public comment section, Knapp noted the small number of students in the bands at Manual and Peoria High Schools. And he told the board that students and parents he knows had left Quest and preferred Manual because of its better academic classes.
A mother also complained to Knapp that her child is being bullied at Quest, the charter school.
Knapp urged the board to investigate Quest, since public tax dollars are involved in it. "You should research what's going on," he said.
Then he noted that of the $83 million received in taxes from the Par-A-Dice casino, none has been spent on schools. Instead the money went into improving the Warehouse District, Knapp said, and have made property owners there rich. Meanwhile many streets in Peoria lack sidewalks. "This community has its priorities mixed up," he said.
Critic Sharon Crews said the district needs to plan to fight charter schools and vouchers, if the Trump administration has its way.
Now, she said, lax grading standards and inflated grades are harming the students, but most serious is the lack of discipline and policies that encourage that, she said."Parents black and white are fleeing the schools because of discipline problems," she said.
The student representative to the board praised her report, saying he agreed with the concerns about inflated grades and behavior issues. .
Her full report is posted below.
-- Elaine Hopkins
Comments by Sharon Crews:
Whatever I say or have said, please believe that I support the students, teachers, administrators, and this board with a special interest in Manual. Running this district is not easy.
Federal and state leadership will soon do all in their power to establish more charter schools and the voucher system. We need to do everything in our power now, not later, to ensure that Peoria Public Schools will be a viable choice for Peoria and West Peoria families. We would lose money and probably our best students to charters and vouchers. Private schools have and will find ways to reject students who do not meet acceptable academic standards and/or create discipline problems.
Assessing my own education in District 150, I know that there was little or no toleration for misbehaving students and limited places for Afro-American children. When I began my teaching career in 1962, I experienced the unmitigated joys of watching Afro-American young people and adults take their place in our school system. Even so, that was a slow process. In the 1960s, Adrian Hinton and Audrey Gipson became the first black high school teachers in Peoria. During my early and even not so early years at Manual, I realized that black students were not enrolled in enriched or advanced courses. I do believe that those of us who taught basic classes realized this inequality and did all that we could to challenge our students to achieve at levels that would prepare them for the work world and/or college.
For the last twenty years, I have seen a trend that is troublesome to me. Please try to understand my fears. Because so many in leadership positions today are those-- including most around this horseshoe--who witnessed and even suffered all the inequities of the past, I see an attempt to compensate for those past evils by allowing today’s students an academic and disciplinary latitude that simply does not encourage a path to their success.
This process began before I retired. Teachers were already encouraged to give mostly passing grades and non-tenured teachers were in jeopardy if they were not lenient with grades and behavior. Consequences for bad behavior were often delayed for days because the deans did not have the time to deal with all the referrals—and the consequences were not deterring bad behavior—in fact, bad behavior increased.
My own observations lead me to believe that not much has changed; in fact, the teaching environment is even worse. I think those who make the rules but are not in the classroom do not fully understand that teachers cannot teach and handle discipline problems at the same time. I believe most of our schools follow a policy that a disruptive student must remain in the classroom, at least, until a referral is written. Changing that policy alone will resolve a considerable number of problems. Give teachers credit for knowing when a student is keeping the others from learning.
I believe that way too much money is being spent on programs that promise to change behavior but do not contribute to content learning necessary to the next level of a student’s education. Administrators find negative consequences to be too punitive. If these programs designed to make students feel good about themselves are working, I would applaud their use to replace the traditional consequences. However, this is where transparency is of the utmost necessity. You must be honest with yourselves and parents and the community in collecting and analyzing data. You are good at providing us with the positives but not so good at presenting the negatives. The negatives are not your fault unless you are ignoring all that data, not listening to teachers, and not recognizing that parents--black and white--are fleeing our schools because of discipline problems.
The same attention needs to be paid to inflated grades—and there is no denying this practice is followed in our schools. Inflated grades help you increase the graduation rate, but you need to request and analyze data as to whether or not these inflated grades lead to success in the work world or college for our students.