Boone County educators hit for violations of school council (SBDM) laws

But, the SBDM problems run much deeper

If you looked at our video coverage of the testimony about School Based Decision Making (SBDM) from Monday’s meeting of the Kentucky Legislature’s Interim Joint Education Committee, you are aware that educators in the Boone County Public School District, one of the state’s more highly regarded school systems, got their knuckles rapped for running afoul of the convoluted SBDM laws.

Today, the Kentucky Enquirer ran a story about this situation and as a public service, we are making the reports from the Kentucky Office of Education Accountability (OEA) available so you can see for yourself what happened.

Three separate reports were completed by the OEA. The first one covers issues with the superintendent in Boone County.

The second deals with problems at the Camp Ernst Middle School.

The third deals with similar issues at the Connor Middle School.

After reading through these reports and hearing the videoed comments from Monday from Superintendent Randy Poe and Boone County Board of Education Chair Ed Massey, we have a number of concerns.

First, there seems to be an awful lot of confusion about who at the local school level can sign contracts. That is a major problem under any condition, indicating a lot of education is lacking – for adults involved with education across the commonwealth. That serves no one well.

An additional issue is that it appears only the local school board has such contracting authority. But, with the school councils in charge of curriculum and finances, how can that possibly work out well? What if the school wants to order a curriculum product the board members don’t believe is a good choice? Are board members, elected by the taxpayers, required to sign contracts obligating that tax money when those board members honestly believe this isn’t the best action? That’s a crazy situation.

The OEA goes into considerable detail to establish that what the two schools actually adopted was in fact a curriculum, and that curriculum had to have SBDM approval, which was not obtained from either school’s council. An SBDM not approving a curriculum – that’s a problem.

The adopted curriculum also needed to be aligned to Kentucky’s Academic Standards. But, the OEA found numerous individuals in the Boone County schools that said the adopted curriculum from Summit Learning, created for California, not Kentucky, was not aligned. However, this wasn’t determined until six months after the schools started to use the curriculum. The SBDMs in the schools never did an alignment check before the curriculum was adopted. Not vetting a curriculum to Kentucky's standards before adoption – that's a problem.

Something not mentioned in the OEA reports but that bothers us greatly is that the staff in the schools and the SBDM members clearly knew what was going on. Why didn’t they know they had responsibilities in this area and why didn’t the SBDM exert its legal authority to do this properly? Doesn’t this highlight more training problems? And, if staff in this highly regarded system (Poe was the Kentucky Association of School Administrators’ Superintendent of the Year for 2013 and received the Dupree Outstanding Superintendent Award from the Kentucky School Boards Association in 2015) are making these sorts of mistakes, what might be going on elsewhere?Just to add some fuel to that last comment, at virtually the same time that the OEA released their Boone County reports, another principal at the Smyrna Elementary School in Jefferson County was also getting her knuckles rapped for violation of SBDM rules, as well. In this case as well it looks like SBDM members failed in their responsibility to defend their authority.

If SBDM members won’t do their jobs properly, that is a BIG problem, because this leaves our kids out in the cold while apparently no one is really paying attention to and being held accountable for what is going on in the most critical area of their schools, namely the selection and teaching of the curriculum.

So, it is a good thing the Kentucky Legislature is starting to pay attention. The SBDM concept has been around for decades; thus, if so much confusion still exists about how to shoe horn things into this awkward and largely unaccountable system, changes are clearly needed – BADLY.