Hope everyone had a smooth close out at school.
It was personally bittersweet to see "quality" teachers I have grown to like on a personal level and respect on a professional level pack up to leave. Knowing why they must and how it happened has given me a quiet resolve to continue. All the press release spin coming out of the Superintendent's office, the continued CTA capitulation, and just knowing what next year will be like fuels me. Hopefully we will find out just how many were forced to teach out-of-field.
Thank God for our blog archives. When I begin to feel weary I WILL LOOK BACK. I will NOT forget.
May 29 - 5PM School Board Meeting
May 30 - 9AM - 3PM CTA Contract Negotiations (Open To Public) 4505 N. Rome Ave.
May 31/June1 Teacher Interview Days @ Jefferson High School
June 8 - 9AM - 3PM CTA Contract Negotiations (Open To Public) 4505 N. Rome Ave.June 12 - 5PM School Board Meeting
June 26 - CANCELLED! 5PM School Board Meeting
July 17 - 5PM School Board Meeting
JULY 31 - School Board BUDGET MEETING
By the way: if Elia's bonus was based on "faulty" 3rd grade FCAT data will it be taken back?
What about the kids who got promoted on the faulty data? Their current teachers have got to make MORE than adequate yearly progress to make up for it. Think they'll get Performance, ah, STAR, ah, MAP pay?
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8 comments:
June 26th is shown as canceled on the board agenda on the district's website.
Forget Hillsborough School Board.
Someone needs to go to Pinellas and Pasco county school board meetings and let them know that if they: A) implement some kind of feul reimbursement program and B) waive the insurance waiting period, then they could easily fill their NCLB high-need vacancies with highly qualified Hillsbobough County teachers.
J. Stewart Bryan III, Chair
333 East Franklin Street
Richmond, Virginia 23219
May 29, 2007
Dear Mr. Bryan:
That the Tampa Tribune employs an editorial-page writer of such deficient writing skills as Ms. Rosemary Goudreau does not reassure this stock holder.
Ms. Goudreau’s marginally literate, infelicitous essays stand in negative contrast to the Tribune’s great editorialists Clendenin and Roberts. As Hamlet’s father’s ghost says, “What a falling off was that.”
Goudreau’s editorial output demonstrates inept organization and illogical thinking with signal lack of objectivity. Worst: it is marginally literate. I append a Goudreau editorial below with my corrections in red and comments in blue. I taught college English for twenty-eight years and spot writing errors in my sleep.
I have worked in the women’s movement for forty-five years. In fact, you were probably a reporter at the old Tampa Times when we women made our failed bid to ratify the ERA. Both the Tribune and the Times opposed it. Mr. Clendenin and Mr. Stickney were obdurate. Newspapers have never been in the forefront of approving women’s rights. The New York Times opposed suffrage.
We women’s-rights advocates work to open doors for women to jobs heretofore closed such as editorial-page editor. We believe women have the talent and intelligence to take their places along side men in jobs heretofore closed to them.
Ms. Goudreau is not what we have in mind. One wonders how in the world she got this job. Apocryphal information says she came from up North with no editorial experience, having been in the news side of newspaper work. Her product makes this claim plausible.
Were one paranoid, she could allege that some guy who wanted to show how unfit women are for editorial writing appointed Goudreau so as to cement that self-fulfilling prophecy.
This editorial below demonstrates a peculiar cast of the mind of Goudreau which I call girlfriend fetish. It’s similar to a high school ethos that I observed in campus cliques when my children went to Plant.
The back-story says Goudreau became part of a girlfriend clique with MaryEllen Elia, superintendent of schools, and Jenifer Faliera, school-board member and Elia supporter.
One does not know the basis for this trio’s high-school-clique attachment; mayhap it’s that all three are in over their heads in their jobs. Ms. Elia’s was product of the malignant tradition of sticking with the inside local candidate despite her lackluster degree exacerbated by her inability to write and punctuate. In addition, the Board lowered degree requirements so that she could slide in.
Like Ms. Goudreau, Elia struggles with literacy and demonstrates in her writing the rhetorical felicity of a junior-high student. Yet she extracts $262,000 base salary with Lord knows how many perquisites. Ms. Faliera is the prettiest but least brainy of the board members, none of whom smash into the upper reaches of the Stanford Binet.
This girlfriend clique would be ditzy but harmless were it not that its byproduct reflects in Goudreau’s irrational, marginally literate adherence to her girlfriends on the Tribune editorial page. A board member’s or disgruntled teachers’ challenge to Ms. Elia or Ms. Faliera likely finds Ms. Goudreau’s ill-thought-out, ill-structured, ill-written, grammatically flawed, badly punctuated outpouring on the Tribune editorial page that she rules.
These Goudreau anti-teacher editorials to fight her girlfriends’ battles have embittered the 15,000 county teachers, who post such comments as this on their blog The Wall:
Did you see that The Tampa Tribune has begun a smear campaign on the only two school board members sympathetic to teachers?
Even if Tribune management can tolerate girlfriend editorials adorned with primitive writing errors, it should take into consideration that, with dropping circulation, fifteen thousand teachers outnumber three girlfriends.
Rumor says that Ms. Goudreau recently fired a woman whose abilities you will remember from your Tampa Times days: Nancy Gordon. Ms. Gordon probably offended her boss because she could punctuate.
This shareholder objects to the illiteracy of the Goudreau editorials. It contrasts negatively with the sterling tradition of those of Clendenin and Roberts.
Ms. Goudreau’s self-indulgence does not assist the Tribune in its circulation contest with its competitor across the Bay: The St. Petersburg Times’s editorials are often soporific. But they are not illiterate.
lee drury de cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, Fl 33708
www.grammargrinch.blogspot.com
For those with a strong stomach, review the red-pen analysis of Goudrea's editorial at leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot. com
lee
Suzie Creamcheese: Where did you find the information about the date, time and place of the bargaining sessions?
This is important! Does anyone know if the date, time and location of the bargaining sessions was posted in the newspaper or any other public place?!!?
The bargaining sessions were from an email via a friend of a friend of a friend.
I am grateful for any info like this and figure ya'll would be too.
Anyone with this kind of info is welcome to post it in the comments section where it can be copied and pasted into a post.
There are 3 bargaining sessions in the last of of June. We need teachers to attend these.
Monday - 6/25, 1-4:45
Thursday - 6/28, 1:30-5
Friday - 6/29, 2-5
All at CTA Headquarters. They expect to be done that week.
Has anyone else tried contacting CTA for updates on bargaining?
the dates were in a press release on the schools press releases pages.
http://publicaffairs.mysdhc.org/files2006-07/unionnegotiations.pdf
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