Dolce & Nutella

Mixed Happiness

2012-01-19T16:16:00.000-08:00

There are kids that like snow:

And kids that don't.

I haven't been posting much, but since early December (ish), at least one person in our house has been sick at any given time, ranging in level of seriousness from man-cold to hospitalized for several days. Everyone is well now, or at least well enough to be playing hockey, sledding and swinging from the flying trapeze.

Never Saw It Coming

2011-12-04T18:31:00.000-08:00

Some things Stumpy and I spend our money weren't precisely what I expected, but aren't really very surprising. Travel, feeding and clothing our spawn, paying for their athletics and other activities, bla, bla, bla. While I might not have anticipated the details, the essentials aren't a surprise. Kids need things like winter coats and braces. The bill for such things is sometimes a bit shocking, but the fact that there is a bill for it... not so much.

I really never, never thought, though, that I would happily sacrifice my fancy shoe budget for the following things:

Goat pedicures
Flying trapeze lessons

Total surprise.

Looks Kinda Like A Puppy

2011-11-15T07:35:00.001-08:00

The Seattle Weekly noted that Costco is selling these suckers. Looks, for all intents and purposes, like Costco is selling jumbo-sized SPAM.

And in theory, as someone who cooks SPAM on a regular basis (musubi, fried rice, sliders, plain old fried breakfast meat), I don't object to that. But SPAM looks... well, like a depersonalized bit of rectangular molded meat.

This? Looks like a puppy.

I'm sure you're thinking what I'm thinking: Puppy: it's what's for dinner. Mmmmmmm.

FACMAC Open Thread

2011-10-20T08:50:00.000-07:00

Got questions, comments or input on whatever it is the Facility and Capacity Management Advisory Committee may or may not be doing? Pipe up.

I'm not Charlie and Melissa, and I do gleefully delete comments. Let's keep it on topic-ish.

Still. Too. Fancy.

2011-10-10T17:42:00.001-07:00

Signs that the lunch you make for school is too fancy?

the word "confit" is part of lunch
your child suggests that a cranberry relish would match better to the lunch meat than the (I cannot believe I'm going to admit I made a relish just for a school lunch, but... I did. I did) pomegranate that was on it
your child says "I saw someone eating a ham sandwich. It was just... ham. And bread." As if it's amazing someone could eat something so plain. And yes, I did think: oh, you twerp.
the other children at school pay your child treats on a daily basis for a future share of one of their favorite meals (my boy has really cashed in on this. Curly, not so much - lunch trading is a lot more fraught when you have a deathly food allergy)

I have created my own problem here. Nobody made me do it. But today really made me realize that you have to admit there is a problem to address it. I sent duck confit sliders with a slaw and pomegranate relish. Yeah. I know.

I just... I didn't quite realize the lengths I would go to in order to get my skinny, skinny boy to eat lunch at school. Until I was standing in my kitchen this morning, shredding hot duck confit and talking to the kids about tomorrow's lunch (vietnamese chicken salad or grilled lamb sandwiches with tzatziki). And then I realized that somehow, Alice Waters had sunk her crazy fancy school lunch notions into me but good.

Crappy! Chart! Thursday! Saddles Back Up with um… a Truthy SuperAnalysis™ Re-run?

2011-10-06T12:31:00.000-07:00

I know it’s been a while, so you would think I have something brand new to share.

Nope.

So, I’m recycling some old charts here. You may feel ripped off and ask for your money back, if you want (and good luck with that. To say I am not customer service-oriented would be an understatement).

District Statement (well, okay. Peter Maier’s statement in the recent Stranger candidate debate):

“Within the past two years the district [SPS] has reduced Central Administration by one third.”

Actual Factual Facts!

Hee. Central Administration is, officially, about one third less than it was. In 2009-10 it was listed at $52M, and in 2010-11 at $35M. So officially: lower.

But.

You knew there was a “but” coming, right?

The one third “reduction” wasn’t completely through, well… “reductions.” It was through the re-classification of about 1/3 of Central Administration expenses to Teaching.

Which is kind of different than a spending reduction.

It’s not unlike Stumpy coming to me after realizing that my frivolous dress budget has ballooned in the past couple of years (dude. I wish), and me agreeing to trim it (sadly, it’s already been trimmed. Because my life is soooooooo harrrrrrrd. [silent tears of suffering]).

So let's say that after agreeing to reduce the frivolous dress budget, I realize that I don’t really want to trim it, because I love me some frivolous dresses (which, okay. I do).

Let’s imagine that I decide (through torturous and easy-to-argue-with reasoning) that because sometimes I think about walking into the back yard to pet my goat’s nose whilst wearing a fancy dress that really, approximately one third of my dress budget should qualify as goat maintenance, which is part of the larger home/yard/schtuff maintenance budget.

We will ignore the fact that there is a snowball’s chance in hell I would go anywhere near my goats while wearing one of my fancy dresses, because they like to confirm, by chewing, that my clothing is not a snack. And if they chewed on one of my fancy dresses I would host a rather sorrowful barbecue in which goat tacos were the main dish.

But that’s not the point.

So. Back to the point. Because there is one!

What I’m trying to say, not very wittily, is that reclassifying an expense is not the same as reducing it.

And while Central Administration did have some expense reduction, the bulk of “reductions” came through moving expenses to other parts of the SPS budget. Which expenses? Funny you should ask. I've got details! And charts!

In late 2009, it came to the district’s attention that Central Administration was well out of line with other districts in the area. District administration looked at the Central Administration budget, and one growth area really, really stuck out: professional development coaches (which were part of Supervision of Instruction). There were somewhere between 100-120 of them – numbers from senior district management at the time differ in different presentations.

After a little hemming and hawing, management said that PD coaches should be classified as teachers, and had been mis-classified to Central Administration.

And poof!

Like magic, some $10+M in coaching expenses were moved out of Central Administration and into Teaching, where they are much harder to see. And which, even more magically, brought Central Administration expenses back "in line" with other districts.

Also, in case you're wondering how fifty two milllllllion minus ten to twelve millllion equals thirty five millllllion? It doesn't. In addition to reclassifying the coaching expense, some ARRA funds and schtuff were also moved to Teaching (which... fine. Okay).

Whether you agree with the reclassification decision or not (I don't - Teaching should accurately reflect how much SPS spends on direct instruction of students) isn't relevant in this discussion. What's relevant here is that there was movement of an expense from one budget area to another. Movement and reduction are different.

Have there been reductions?

Yes, there have. But reductions have not been to the extent claimed. Which, actually... I'm fine with. When it's admitted. Because usually proposed reductions and actual reductions will differ. But SPS is touting the initial proposed reductions AS the actual reductions, which... not cool.

There have additional expenses offsetting reductions (like, say, raises and additional high-end hires). Have they totally offset reductions? I don't know. I doubt that expense increases have erased reductions, but I don't know.

There’s a not-entirely-clear amount of Central Administration expenses that may be buried in other expense segments. Consider: almost 30% of expenses in a $52M segment were "mis-classified." It does make one ask (well, it makes me ask), how much has been misclassified in a $338M segment, like Teaching?

If you want a meaningful understanding of changes to Central Administration expenditures, either consistently compare year to year Central Administration expenses with coaches, or consistently make year to year comparisons without coaches. Doing it one year with coaches and the next year without makes the comparison useless – an apples to oranges comparison, when we're all looking for apples to apples.

Super Truthy Analysis™!

The district did reduce Central Administration expenses. However, SPS did not reduce Central Administration expenditures by one third through expense reduction; they reclassified a large portion of Central Administrative expenses and made some reductions.

Target Sucks

2011-09-13T16:25:00.001-07:00

Like approximately a gazillion other women, I was super, extra, crazy excited for the Missoni at Target line. Embarrassingly excited, even. Squealingly excited.

Juiced as I was, I was not excited enough to line up before the store opened - mostly because I have worn-out kids in their second week of school.

Admittedly, I (briefly) debated getting them up early so mommy could shop. After all, mommy's had a tough couple of months, and, strange though it may sound, it's kind of nice to get excited again about something intensely frivolous.

However. I came to my senses and realized that waking the kids to shop was idiotic, and I would have to take my chances and hope that stuff would still be in the stores, because I was not getting two tired kids out of bed in order to shop.

So I took my chances.

And it was all gone.

Seriously. My mom and I went to Northgate and there was one looooonely (and notably hideous) camisole hanging forlornly by a single ugly strap in front of a really big Missoni display. That was it, other than Missoni signs - sans actual Missoni items - sprinkled through the store. It was pretty impressive, actually. 10:30am on a weekday, and virtually every last Missoni item had been vacuumed out of that store.

Which, okay. That I can live with. I knowingly took my chances and I missed out.

Mom and I trucked down to another store (okay, we're a little lame), which was also impressively picked over, but had more than one item left (and had several actually attractive children's items left).

So, since I coveted stuff for presents (and for myself), I went online, and ordered a bunch of stuff which I was excited for. Including, I might add (to drum up some sympathy, although it's also true) some stuff to brighten up the days of a relative who is ill with cancer and enjoys Missoni. And then the site crashed, emptying my cart.

So I tried again. Except the order wouldn't place, and different items in my cart sloooooowly vanished from the cart as I screamed "no! no! nonononononono! Come baaaaaack! I had you first!" (in, of course, an extremely dignified manner), presumably as other customers managed to place orders on the exact same items.

Target is a behemoth. The kind of crappy, amateurish inventory management in which customer's orders vanish before their eyes as they try to pay is what you'd expect if the fellows in this photo headed up your inventory and IT departments.

Or, if, say, a mom and pop operation had a huge, unexpected run on their website. But not from a large corporation with over 1,700 retail stores and 300,000 employees. And, you know, billllllllions in revenue. Yes. I looked it up. Because if you put me on hold for over 45 minutes at a stretch (which I'll then have to lose my place in line to go deal with the goats, picking the kids up from school, coaching soccer and the like), I will look up geeky info like numbers of stores and employees.

A call to customer service (after massive hold times! Wheee!) resulted in a "Oops, that is a problem! But... we can't do anything about it." Could I order it from them over the telephone? Nope. Could they do anything but tell me, gee whiz, they were terribly sorry? Nope.

I'm not really feeling the love right now.

However, truth be told, one, not being able to buy Missoni at Target (even if those items are really, really, really painfully, covetably cute) is not an actual problem. Despite my frustration, I am aware of that.

And, also, I did score Curly a pair of crazy cute rain boots and some socks, which goes a looooong way towards consoling me over my still-vexing non-problem (when consoling someone over a retail problem like mine do you say: "oh, poor baby. You tried sooooo hard to shop and couldn't spend as much as you wanted to. That must be sooooo difficult!!"??), especially because Curly squealed in surprised delight the same way I would have if I'd managed to score, say, the adorable ballet flats or one of the skirts or dresses.

Which, oh, right. I did score those things. I ordered them. Target put the order through to my cart. And then, as I repeatedly tried to pay, the items slowly, slowly slipped out of my cart.

So the bottom line is that Target sucks, and some other woman who is not me is prancing around delightedly after spending hours online begging Target to let her order go through, and having her Missoni prayers answered by Da Interwebs. Dammit.

Curly does look cute in those boots, though.

Rip It Off

2011-08-14T22:35:00.000-07:00

I am a believer in the rip that motherfucker off method of band aid removal.

Pardon me, ladies, if the language offends. But really, what does your thought bubble say when you rip off a band aid (or get waxed)?

The slow, mincing removal annoys the living hell out of me. It doesn’t hurt less; it just extends the goddamn hurt.

Rip it off.

Just. Rip. It. Off.

Deal with the sudden searing realization that, say, when you put the band aid on, you accidentally stuck a corner of the adhesive on the actual wound and now that you’ve ripped it off, you’ve ripped off a piece of the wound and your flesh feels like it’s on goddamn fire, with every hair removed creating an additional prickling little burning song to go with the bright spark of angry pain.

Even so.

Just rip the damn thing off.

If you haven’t guessed, waiting for something unpleasant makes me crazy.

I suppose I could posit that you can tell a lot about a person by how they remove a band aid, but I think that’s bullshit.

Life regularly puts one in a position where proverbially ripping it off is not an option. And what are you going to find out then? Maybe a lot. Maybe not. The only guarantee in such circumstances is it won’t be much fun to find out.

My sister’s husband died in mid-June.

He had a life-threatening stroke just before Easter. Horrible scraps of information slowly dripped out over the next week or two after the stroke, finally leading to the diagnosis that he had advanced metastatic skin cancer and was riddled with tumors. His stroke was caused by brain tumors. After the stroke, cancer unwound the machinery of his body unwound very, very slowly – in part because he’d been in terrific shape and was fairly young – until he died.

There was no rip it off option. There was just grinding, crushing misery for my sister and her kids, and for her husband a sharp, gnawing horrible pain that he couldn’t communicate, because his stroke robbed him of speech.

I am so glad that my sister and her children have so many people who love them, even as I wish none of this had happened.

My parents were in Chicago within 48 hours of the stroke, stayed until after the funeral and have been in and out since the funeral. My other sister spent weeks in Chicago, helping out. My brother swung through to lend a hand. The kids and I spent most of June there.

Neighbors and friends came by with food, or to do yard work, to lend a hand, to just keep company at their house and to visit at the hospital. And visiting at the hospital was hard. Really hard. Family took shifts so that there was someone there, keeping an eye on him, so we all saw quite a bit. Visiting someone who can no longer speak and is visibly in terrible pain is a difficult thing to do. But many people came, their discomfort and unhappiness naked on their faces. But they spoke kindly, and tried, gently, so gently, to ease the burden of grief.

That’s why I’ve been so quiet this summer.

But because it was so immeasurably worse for so many people, it feels self-indulgent to talk about how awful it was.

Who am I to speak about an ordeal or a tough summer? I didn’t lose my father suddenly at 17. I didn’t lose my son, my husband, my brother.

And for us, the whole summer hasn’t been horrible – we’ve been able to go camping with the kids, to take time to enjoy the summer and one another. I drove home from Chicago with the kids at a leisurely pace, through the Badlands and Yellowstone.

Even so, each time I sit down to type, I find myself a low on follow-through with frivolity or analysis or travel chit-chat. I can’t sustain patter.

So mostly, I’ve been wallowing in quiet, deep enjoyment of the kids, and Stumpy, and family. They’re worth appreciating. Recent events have reminded me of how fortunate, how glad, I am to be a part of their lives.

And, I cannot believe I am about to say this, but I’ve also really been enjoying my goofball goats.

Eventually, I’ll get back to wanting to talk about my frivolous wanderings, my fondness for ridiculous shoes and the goats who’d like to snack on them, and the absurdity of, say, the way in which Seattle district administration goes about staffing schools.

But not just yet.

I AM SO IN.

2011-07-09T09:28:00.000-07:00

Spam musubi making contest at Momo, tonight, 6pm.

Is it silly? (Hint: they're not presenting the contest as a segue to an intellectual discussion of the presentation of post-contact island culture in the works of Herman Melville)

Is it completely awesome? (Hint: YES)

Unlike SPS issues, do I have a snowball's chance in hell of winning? (HINT: since the answer on getting SPS to change course has been 100% of nev-ah, it's hard not to do better)

Answers: Yes, yes, and yes!

My chances of coming out on top in this contest are, in fact, probably not much more than a snowball's chance, despite the fact that Curly and my boy are, at this very moment, chattering at me to make sure to get the rice texture just so (and asking me to make extra, so they can have some). Still. Spam musubi making contest. So awesome.

Right. I need to go soak some rice.

Later, I will discuss our ever-thrilling adventures, which lately have had nothing to do with school district budget issues and more to do with bears and moose and Yellowstone and the Badlands and, since I drove two kids across 300+ miles of be-billboarded South Dakota (where I hope the local chambers of commerce did not approve the "THE WAGES OF SIN ARE DEATH" billboard and other less-than-friendly billboards of that ilk, since they weren't the sort of billboards to inspire purchases of locally made angry religious bumper stickers): Wall Drug. Their donuts don't suck. Although... we weren't the most discriminating customers ever, at 7am, after packing up the tent and hurtling down a loooooong dirt road to Wall.

Things to Think About While Driving From Seattle to Chicago in a Weekend

2011-06-11T14:44:00.001-07:00

1. Once you cross into eastern Washington, no need to get fussed about the guy in the Prius refusing to move out of the fast lane (presumably because he feels that 3 miles over the limit means he is Entitled To The Fast Lane). Just move over when the inevitable gigantic pick-up comes flying up behind you (don’t worry, you won’t have to wait long), and let him chew on the bumper of the Prius for, oh, ten seconds, and the fast lane will open back up. It's like magic.

2. Montana is really, really big.

3. They aren’t joking at the Little Bighorn Battlefield about looking out for rattlesnakes. I took a break and walked around and saw… rattlesnakes. About three feet away from me. Three words for you in eastern Montana: closed toe shoes.

4. Again, Montana? Big. Really big. Holy crap does it take forever to get across that damn state.

5. There is a weird correlation in South Dakota and Minnesota with a) an increase in roadkill, b) the increase in pro-life/anti-abortion billboards and c) the increase in billboards advertising Sexxxy! Adult! Superstores! The conclusion that someone passing through at 80mph might draw is that people who live in eastern SD and southern MN need more porn to get through days filled with extra dollops of super-hatey Jesus freaks (look, I respect differing views, but arguments for your view don't need to be made in a hateful way), and in their hurry to get their damn porn, already, they run over animals. I am simply assuming that there is always a liquor store located next to the sexxxy adult superstores, since liquor and porn seem like they would be like beans and rice. Only dirrrtier. That seems like a safe assumption?

6. I’d forgotten about the bug increase in the same zone - central South Dakota through southern Minnesota. Ick. It sounded like rain on the windshield at night. Blech. Is there anything more fun than cleaning a crust of squished bugs off the windshield after 10 hours of driving? Why yes. Yes, there is.

7. Wisconsin drivers exceed the speed limit more in construction zones than out of it. Perhaps their need to get to the nearest Cheese Haus/Cheese Chalet/Cheese Schloss makes them reluctant to take their foot off the accelerator? Behind the Cheese Curtain, of course, is the only place I saw billboards for various sorts of cheese stores. No ads for polka outfit stores, though, which was a little disappointing.

8. Once again, though insanely beautiful, Montana is also absurdly large. Crikey.

9. Driving that far in about two and a half days is not really fun.

2011-12 Projected vs. Assigned

2011-05-26T13:10:00.000-07:00

Initial numbers are coming in - what's your school coming in at for fall 2011 assignments? And what was the projection (yes, I can look that up, but seeing them both in the same comment could be helpful)?

A Quick Primer on the School Budget Process

2011-05-25T00:20:00.000-07:00

The school budget process is boring.

It is a smaller segment of the district's long budget process, but the most important part. School budgeting determines the level of staffing each school receives, and strongly affects staff continuity in schools from year to year. This is how it works:

1. The district makes enrollment projections for every school in the district (February-ish).

2. Based on those projections, district administrators allocate staff and money to schools using a funding formula called the WSS (also February-ish, released with the enrollment projections).

The WSS has formulas for each type of school:

elementary (with 3 staffing sizes. under 300, 300-450, over 450)

K-8 (with 5 staffing sizes. under 300, 300-399, 400-499, 499-700 and over 700)

middle (with 3 sizes. under 700, 701-900 and over 900)

high school (with 4 sizes. under 800, 801-1100, 1101-1500, over 1501)

There are clear guidelines about student-teacher ratios at different grade levels, as well as for students with additional instructional needs (bilingual, Special Education). Teachers are allocated according to whatever the specified ratio is (the biggest ratio variance, outside of students with special needs, is at elementary schools; the student-teacher ratio increases from K to 5th). The total population size of the school (an elementary school with more than 450 students, for example, will get an assistant principal) determines what additional support staff will be in the building: assistant principals, extra nurse time, house administrators, and increased secretarial staffing.

3. After the initial allocation, no matter how crappy, the budgets are sent to schools to "approve." Schools have some wiggle room to make decisions (sometimes if staff is being reduced, they get to decide who goes), but mostly, they have to approve the budget.

4. Initial enrollment numbers come in (May-ish), and "staffing adjustments" are made upwards or downwards. I have just a wee bit of additional commentary on this portion of the process.

5. Secondary enrollment numbers come in (over the summer). Judging by what happened at Garfield this past fall, nothing happens at this point.

6. Students arrive at school. Final staffing adjustments are made and finalized by October 1.

How to Quietly Yank a Couple Million Bucks Out of Schools

2011-05-24T23:10:00.001-07:00

I suppose this could qualify as a Crappy! Chart! Thursday! post, but I didn't feel like making a crappy chart to go with it.

In lieu of a crappy chart, I have a picture of a bunch of chickens. It'll have to do.

So, wanna know how to pull a few million out of schools without any of those mouthy, fussy community-types being any the wiser – and quietly close the budget gap on the backs of schools? Sure you do! Doesn’t everyone?

The most PR friendly way to do it is, to paraphrase Director Sundquist’s words: "be fiscally conservative."

Translation: under-project enrollment.

Why? Because if you under-project enrollment, you quietly get to change the game on staffing allocation to schools, thus skirting the pesky rules of WSS ( there's a fair amount of inside baseball here, so I wrote a quick primer on the school budgeting process).

Because when staffing is added back in after an enrollment underestimation, re-staffing doesn’t have to conform as tightly to the WSS.

Re-staffing adjustments are done more on a... case-by-case-ish basis. And that's where the more enterprising of us could get a huge chance to yank several milllllllion dollars out of schools.

So.

Step 1. Sandbag the hell out of enrollment projections.

This will allow you to proceed to step two. If you correctly project enrollment, you've failed. Goodbye.

Step 2. Game Staffing Adjustments to Thwart "Community Engagement" and "Board Oversight"

We all get to see initial school allocations. They're up on the district website. "Involved" members of the public can appeal and lobby and be all extra-engaged and whatnot. Whoopee.

However. When it comes time to re-staff based on enrollment - which is basically round 2 of school allocations - that information isn’t thrown up on the district website for all to see. It’s not discussed in front of the board. It’s not discussed with the public. For all that the district claims they're “open” about the "transparent" budgeting process, this critical segment happens completely out of the public's eye. And out of the board's eye, as well. Handy!

Round 2 of school allocations happens after assignments (which, okay, makes sense. Adjustments should be made after enrollment numbers come in), and appears to be mostly a case-by-case discussion between school principals and district administrators.

Step 2.5: take the opportunity, for fun, to screw ineffective principals... and principals you just don't like very much. Principals have a tricky path to walk here – they need to get money and staff for their school, but it would be unwise to push so hard for it that they alienate the people holding the purse strings. If you have a principal who is a piss-poor negotiator or just loves kissing up to the folks downtown, your school may suffer for it. And even if your principal is a good negotiator, they're still at the mercy of the administrator/team of administrators they're negotiating with. Closed-door negotiations are a great chance to screw someone over for making an unwise remark in your earshot about "the dipshits down at HQ." Just think of the joy of thinking - or better, saying: "Suck on that, beeetcheeez." (I'm suspect that's about what Eager said to Luongo when he knocked Luongo into the net after a goal and was yapping at him.)

Step 3. Re-Staff "Conservatively"

If you under-project enrollment, when you make "staffing adjustments" after school assignments are made, you won't have to put as many faculty into the school as you would have to if you correctly projected enrollment.

Example.

Lowell elementary was projected to have 579 kids, a bump up from current enrollment of not quite 40 kids. Rumors are flying that Lowell has been assigned 700 students next year.*

So with 700 kids coming instead of 579, Lowell will pretty clearly need more teachers than they got in their initial budgeting round. Right?

Yes. But probably not as many as they would have gotten if the initial projection had been correct. A correct projection would have had to allocate according to the WSS.

Post-allocation adjustments, though, is allowed a significantly higher amount of subjective decision-making. Our friends at JSCEE say this of restaffing:

“There may be space within the allocated number of teachers and homerooms to accommodate actual enrollment. In that case, there won’t be a change in your teacher allocation. Class sizes would be higher than projected.”

Translation (mine. And my bureaucratese is pretty good):

Your principal needs to fight for additional staffing beyond what is clearly, visibly, unquestionably needed.

Beyond glaring need, it’s an administration decision, not an automatic add-back. So Lowell (or Schmitz Park. Or Maple. Or Garfield) will certainly get more staff. But it’s also quite likely they won’t get as many as they would have if the projections had been on the money.

Think of it this way: stiffing every school in the district an average of .75 of a teaching FTE isn’t quite enough to make every school community go beserk with the injustice, because times are tight, right?

But since a fully loaded (not super-senior) teacher runs in the neighborhood of $85K a pop, that little tweak alone would cut out about $5.7M across 90 schools. This leads us to:

If you restaff at paltry to thin levels (making sure to remind schools they should be glad they're getting anything), you could cut quite a bit. If you restaff strictly according to the WSS, you won't save a damn penny.

Blammo! Cutting around $5M out of the WSS is so easy! It’s like shooting puppies in a barrel! Only less messy! And doesn’t get the neighbors to call the cops about their sociopath neighbor destroying helpless, adorable animals!

Am I saying this is exactly what has happened (screwing the WSS, not killing adorable baby animals)?

No.

I am speculating (with education, research and observation) on how such a thing could be done. I do not have my hands on post-assignment allocation adjustments. My speculation does not mean that every school will get stiffed .75 FTE – I would imagine some won’t get stiffed at all, and some, especially big schools, may get stiffed by more. Garfield, for instance, could be in for it. Word has it that there's a gap of about 200 students between projection and actual (rule of thumb: 200 kids, up or down, equals a gain or loss of $1 milllllion in revenue). Which means that Garfield, projected for about 200 kids less than it looks like they'll get, is currently underbudgeted by roughly a milllllllion bucks. Think they'll get restaffed to that amount? Wanna bet?

Who knows. Maybe Glinda the Good Witch will start working at JSCEE, and allocation adjustments will be made according to the WSS, and everyone’ll come with three extra teachers and hot fudge sundaes. If that little fantasy doesn’t come to pass and you still want to know how to screw the WSS over, you have an easy-peasy blueprint for reducing the budget shortfall without stirring up fussy, loudmouthed community members.

But wait! There's a leeeetle bit more. Step 4: Screw Over PCP Allocations in Dribs and Drabs

In the current WSS (it gets tweaked regularly, so you have to pay attention), the assignment of PCP teachers (gym, art, etc) to elementary and K-8 schools works like this:

The number of homeroom teachers is established, and rounded up to the nearest whole number. Then the number of PCP teachers is calculated, and rounded up to the nearest half.

But. If you use the under-project strategy and have to restaff, guess what you won’t have to do before calculating PCP? Round up your homeroom teachers before making the calculation (you will, though, have to staff the homeroom teachers with a whole number)!

And then, once you’ve calculated PCP, you don’t have to round up to the nearest .5! It becomes, I think, the nearest .2. If all 60 (ish) elementary and K-8s only had .2 of a PCP teaching FTE shaved off, that’d come to around $1M. Shaving off .4 FTEs (combo hit of not rounding up homeroom teachers combined with not rounding up to the nearest .5!) would cut out $2M, and making it to an average of .6 FTEs (if you really screw a school when you re-allocate homeroom teachers and get 'em on the PCP!) would help you round the corner to $3M. Not as big as a cut that goes across all 90-ish schools, but not small potatoes, either.

There’s been lots of talk about all the ways that under-projecting enrollment leaves the door open for TFA and allows needless RIFs. And it may do that, too – under-projecting may be a workhorse of an administrative tactic. But under-projecting gives district administration a quiet way to screw the WSS without much fuss or protest from the community.

And that's today's lesson.

I don't know if I can answer your questions unless you send me a Barneys gift certificate, because the death of my fancy shoe budget has caused me great psychic trauma, making it difficult to answer questions without big, fat gift certificates to over-priced stores soothing my hands. Because the prospect of fancy shoes calms the mind and allows one to think more clearly. I'm pretty sure Lao Tzu said that.

Okay, fine. I'll just imagine the gift certificate.

*For now, let’s ignore the galling fact that SPS split elementary APP because Lowell (which housed all of elementary APP at the time) was so! dangerously! overcrowded! … with 528 students.

Dreaming of Tranquility in a Disaster

2011-05-17T23:56:00.000-07:00

We all need a mental escape now and then. My mental escapes are pretty well-worn paths.

Rome.

Hawaii.
There have been several surprises in the last few weeks, most of them deeply unpleasant. One surprise that has been simply that - a surprise - is that Rome and Hawaii have not been where my mind has wandered to, seeking a bit of peace.

Things suck here at my house. The kids are healthy, Stumpy’s healthy… but in our wider family, things are… bad. Very, very bad.

There’s been a personal tragedy, and there is really no end of sucking to it. There is no upside. It won’t get better. It is not a case of a door closing and a window opening. If you say that everything happens for a reason, I will reply in a rudely honest way and probably delete your comment. I don't want Hallmark card theology for something horrible. It's horrible. We'll endure it and help one another as best we can.

But it still sucks.

And sucks.

And then, for no change of pace at all, it sucks some more.

I have been thinking a lot about tranquility – and places that where I have found myself at peace. I’ve been thinking a lot about the inn we just stayed at in Albuquerque (technically, in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque), because it is so deeply, surprisingly peaceful.

Los Poblanos.

We were lucky enough to be there when there were loads of baby goats on the farm, and we blissed out on the hilarious, wiggling, contenting fun of bottle feeding a squirmingly eager baby goat, and keeping the same wiggling, eager baby goats company while the chickens scratched and clucked, and the grown-up goats wandered over to see if anyone busy with the baby goats might be interested in scratching their neck, just a little. Under the extremely patient tutelage of the goat farmer, Curly learned to milk a goat.

Even away from the farm, which is on the grounds of the inn (although seriously, you would be crazy to ignore the smelly joys of the farm and its animals), the inn is remarkably tranquil.
The driveway alone is suffused with a leafy, tree-lined quiet. There’s the low-slung adobe main building, with a burbling fountain in the courtyard that perfectly balances the Spanish influence in the architecture, and still speaks in the vernacular of southwest architecture.
There’s a bocce court, which is always, always a score for our family – my sibs and I played as kids, and my own kids now love it. The court at Los Poblanos was somehow made for Curly, who won definitively, slaughtering all comers.

There’s a point, as an adult, you realize you’re really competing, and stop going soft on a kid. And even after we realized that, and really tried, the kid still creamed us.

There were the peacocks (sometimes on the bocce court, even), which added to the general atmosphere of calm beauty.

But, of course, being dipshit peacocks, they make a lot of noise after they roost at night.
We aren’t bugged by animal noises at night (the inn provides earplugs for people who are), so mostly, the peacock noises added to the deep, settling sense of peace. I woke up at night – not woken by the peacocks – and heard them making their bird-brained cries, and found myself more reassured than bothered. They weren’t setting up an unholy fuss because of something alarming, they were just chattering to one another in the night. Are you there? Yup. I’m here. Are you still there? Yes. Jesus. Go to sleep. But I wanna know if you’re there? Yes. I said I was. It was like that. Chitter-chatter in the night – not enough to wake me up, although I heard it when I did wake up.

However, unless it sounds like an animal is about to come in and kill me (it’s happened. Without, you know, the actual death part. Hey. Hippos and bears can be scary loud and really bad-tempered), I am not generally disturbed by animal noises in the night.

And then, of course, there are the breakfast. I don’t generally eat scones unless… okay. Snotty confession? Unless I can smell them baking. In Britain or my own kitchen. Otherwise? Pass. So. Snotty. I know. I really do. Hopelessly snotty. Even I am put off by my own snotty pretentiousness about this. But... most scones suck. They’re just not good, and that’s without doing crazy-chick-diet-math (as in: “is this worth exercising for x minutes to work it off and make sure I stay a size 2 4ev-a?”). The scones at Los Poblanos are a fluffy, warm Platonic ideal of a scone. And that’s without clotted cream, which helps prop up a whole lotta sub-par scones. Without any adornment, the scones at Los Poblanos are perfect. And they’re still not the main course for breakfast – which, generally, you get to choose from a couple of options.

So overall, my kids were blissed out. Bocce, delicious breakfasts, nearby (so far unmentioned) walks along the Rio Grande, pretty gardens, peacocks, and best of all (as far as they were concerned): goats. Especially the baby goats. Especially feeding the baby goats.

In fact, for much of the road trip, there was much talk of what the baby goats could be up to and how big they might have gotten and whether or not the pregnant goat would have kidded before we went back (we stayed there at the beginning and end of our trip). I could make fun of the kids, but... I was just as blissed out as they were. Almost the entire time we stayed at Los Poblanos, I had the same feeling I have when I play hockey: thinking of nothing but what I was doing, and incredibly contented to be doing it.

As I said, often, when I want to escape mentally, I escape to Rome or Hawaii.

And yet in the last month, what I've thought of is Los Poblanos, of the lavender fields stretching out in the sunlight with the mountains behind them, of the quiet, sheltered courtyard with its cool, murmuring fountain, of the gardens and the food and the gentle hospitality. And yes, the goats. Because apparently goatie tourism is now a part of my life. But... their goats are really nice?

I really, really wish myself and my family in a calm spot, instead of a terrible storm right now. And right now, if I could take them to a quiet spot, and nestle them away, I would take them to Los Poblanos.

Whistle-stop Travel vs. Fully Experienced Travel

2011-05-02T10:42:00.001-07:00

I’m regularly guilty of whistle-stopping a place. Zoom in, jump out of the car, noodle around a little, zoom away.

I've whistle-stopped various parts of the Olympic National Park. Actually, it would be fair to say that whistle-stopping has been the primary way I've gone about seeing the national parks in Washington. And, um... Oregon.

And the Oregon Coast (twice even, once on my honeymoon and once last summer). And the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone. Multiple times. And the Badlands. Another place I've whistle-stopped more often than I really want to admit.
And Joshua Tree.
Typing this out makes me realize I've gone whipping through an awful lot of national parks in the west.

But, um... as it happens, I have also whistle-stopped amazing state parks. Anza Borrego, for instance (well. Actually, we explored that pretty well. But I'd still like to go back).

Really, the list of places I've whistle-stopped instead of taking plenty of time to explore goes on.

And on.

I don't aspire to be a travel dilettante. I enjoy a leisurely chance to explore a place.

But I love, love, love to just... go.

At the risk of sounding revoltingly sincere, I feel incredibly lucky that I've gotten so many chances to see so many places (my couch, on the other hand, may be wondering when I will budget money to reupholstering instead of travel).

Sometimes, oftentimes, the time isn’t there to properly explore a place. Or time is there and money isn't.

Is it better to wait and see a place until you have enough time to really explore a place, or should you grab a chance to get a little taste and hope you get another chance for a longer savoring of it (or take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them)?

Clearly, I'm in the "take what you can get" camp.

And over spring break, I got a great chance to take a roadtrip in the Southwest.

I grabbed the kids and met up with one of my sisters, one of her sons (hooray for overlapping spring breaks), and our parents. I've been hoping for a chance to head down that way for some time.

Stumpy couldn't come, which was a total bummer, but he encouraged us to go. So... we did.

We met in Albuquerque and took a short loop that went to Canyon de Chelly, Monument Valley and Santa Fe.

It would have been great to have more time everywhere we went. And I say this after having cut Mesa Verde, Taos and a couple of other places that I'd really like to see from the trip.Even though I've gone on and on about how taking a little is better than waiting for the perfect chance... inadequate editing on a road-trip leads to a very bad road trip. Tallying up how much time you'll be spending in the car is an essential part of roadtrip planning.

However enticing something may be, skipping something extraordinary is sometimes better than trying to pack everything into a single trip.

This is a lesson I learned the hard way, after driving with an eighteen-month old and four-year-old from Seattle to Chicago (via Colorado. Genius planning.) and back.

There's nothing like a baby screaming all the way across Wyoming (big, big state. Even when your foot presses harder and harder on the accelerator as the screaming goes on and on and the four-year-old starts screaming at the baby to "STOP SCREAMING! STOP SCREAMING! STOP SCREAMING!") to make you really, really scrutinize and think about the amount of time you'll be driving every day.

Wow, am I really going on with the unsolicited advice today.

While you're remembering to seize the day, travel-wise, and not pack so much in that you don't enjoy any of it, don't forget to wash behind your ears and floss regularly.

Also: gaucho pants are still not flattering on anyone. Even gauchos.

Um. Anyway.

The trip was fantastic. It did nothing to cure me of my habit of taking what I can get in travel, however imperfect it may be.

And surprising nobody (except maybe me, but I can't be the only person who doesn't like to think that I am absurdly, utterly predictable. Right?), the trip has left me scheming to go back.

Livin' the Stereotype

2011-04-16T09:42:00.000-07:00

When I travel, I really enjoy hearing how people in other parts of the country think of Seattle.

Rainy, full of coffee, hippies and hipsters is a pretty typical description.

I often tell them that Seattle’s a little different than they imagine.

But sometimes, it’s not.

The other day I drove through the drizzling gray morning, wearing a polarfleece jacket, to drop our 11-year-old car off for some repairs.

I picked up a latte.

The shop lent me an aged Volvo while they worked on my car.

I turned on the radio as I got ready to drive home to my goats.

It was tuned to NPR.

Yeah.

It's Gonna Take More Than Corn Chips

2011-03-03T13:16:00.000-08:00

Olive, one of my goats, is really, really unhappy with me.

Don't get me wrong. He loves me. He's just not sure, after I went away for 10 days, how much he trusts me.

There has been quite a bit of goat-y shouting from my back yard since we've returned from vacation. It appears to translate to: "I really, really, really didn't like you being away so get out here now with some corn chips and attention"

Olive seems to be experiencing, for lack of a better way to describe it, goat-y outrage.

He has made it abundantly clear that it's going to take more than corn chips to regain his trust and shut him up (Abelard? Just wants to know if we have snacks. With snacks, he's willing to call it even).

Right now, Olive's feelings of goat-y outrage appear to match pretty well to my own feelings about what's been happening in SPS (without the goat-y part. Or the desire for corn chips as a way to soothe me. Although... corn chips are tasty).

Do I think the board acted properly in terminating the employment of Maria Goodloe-Johnson and Don Kennedy? I do. It's a step in the right direction of real oversight and governance, and a step in the right direction makes me want to celebrate a little.

But firing Goodloe-Johnson and Kennedy is a step towards a solution, not a solution unto itself.

The problems in district administration, while nurtured and, in some cases, codified by the former Superintendent and CFOO, were not confined to them. The board will have to provide continued, strong oversight for substantive changes in administration to happen.

A last note: for those of you outraged about the almost two millllllllion dollars spent on Silas Potter's program, you should probably be more upset.

The Regional Small Business Development Plan mis-spent almost two milllllllion dollars. But it spent around $3 milllllllllion.

Crappy! Chart! Almost! Thursday! Betting Edition: What's da Board Gonna Do?

2011-03-01T16:48:00.000-08:00

Stumpy and I took off with the kids for mid-winter break. I read from a sunny distance as the Potter debacle unfolded – and, well, yowza.

Even from a distance it’s gob-smacking. It’s not really surprising (being an audit finding and mentioned pretty clearly on the Save Seattle Schools blog in August, detailing Melissa Westbrook's board testimony). But still jaw-dropping.

The game of musical chairs that’s been unfolding – with The Appearance of Innocence as the chairs – has been riveting. In the spirit of transparent decision-making, I have provided a betting chart. The questions amount to: how will each board member lean on keeping vs. ousting the current Superintendent and CFOO? And if they oust them, who will that board member suggest as an interim replacement?

In addition - that's right, there's more! - I have also scored out how various parties are selling themselves in the wake of the scandal, and tips on what not to notice if you’re considering buying what they’re selling.

Sales pitch from the current Superintendent: She trustingly delegated to her right-hand man, the CFOO, and didn’t look into the issues – despite the issues being brought to her attention by the Sutor report in January 2009 – because it was sooooooo far below her and would have been micromanaging! Also, she is committed to addressing the issues raised in the SAO's reports, as all staff in Seattle Public Schools are committed to achieving Excellence for All, and making sure that every student is achieving, and everyone is accountable.

Buyer beware: Oh, my. If you’re gonna buy what she’s selling, there’s a lot you need to ignore. You might also consider a drink (or twelve) so that you can maintain your suspension of disbelief.

Don’t notice: that she met with Fred Stephens and Don Kennedy in January 2009 about the Sutor group report (which noted that the RSBDP was a little bit of an unsupervised mess and needed some structure), and that somehow, all she ended up mentioning to the board about that report was that it got some coverage in a local paper, but that management was on it.

Don’t notice: that the SAO, in April 2010, discussed problems they’d found with the RSBDP with at least 7 different senior district staffers from at least 3 different departments… and that if that information did get back to her she chose, once again, to neither take corrective action nor inform the board of the issues, and that if it didn’t, it maybe, just maybe, could be the fault of her very own communications protocols.

Don’t pay attention to the fact that the Superintendent was exchanging friendly email with Silas Potter as late as May 2010. Or that she received an award for it and filmed a promotional video for it. Also, pay no attention to the fact that she might have one or two teeny tiny documented instances of not being completely forthcoming with information (hey, remember who forgot to mention she was on the board of NWEA when you were buying MAP? Or 17%-gate? No, of course not. Only crazy people with wacko grudges and vengeful agendas would remember that stuff).

So. You wanna buy what she’s selling? Pay no attention to those details.

Sales pitch from the CFOO, Don Kennedy: he delegated to the Director of Facilities and (is there an echo? It sounds kinda familiar) wasn’t going to micromanage his capable report!

Buyer Beware: Get your amnesia ready, suckers. You need to forget that you ev-uh saw the email (in the SAO’s supporting documents) from Stephens to Kennedy asking if Stephens was right that Kennedy and Goodloe-Johnson didn’t want to distribute the Sutor report to the board. You also need to forget that the CFOO should have any idea about a couple of million here and there in the capital budget when there’s a painful maintenance backlog, or that a CFOO should keep any track of departments having significant budget over-runs. And just like with the Superintendent, you must pretend his executive director of finance, director of facilities and the deputy general counsel all willfully refused to let the CFOO know of the SAO’s concerns… which were discussed with each of them (and other staffers too - something like 7 different managers in 3 departments) in April 2010.

So. Remember nothing, and you'll be happy with your purchase!

Sales pitch from Director of Facilities, Fred Stephens: he managed Silas Potter just like he managed everyone else! And he trusted him!

Buyer beware: I’m torn between “hee” and “eek.” Mr. Stephens managed someone who was clearly unqualified for his position (a position that Mr. Stephens secured for Mr. Potter, despite saying it was a “courtesy interview”) just like he managed all his other reports? Um… really? That seems, well… dumb. And he trusted him after multiple neon warning signs (like the auditor’s office reviewing with him, in detail, exactly HOW the RSBDP expenses were not an okay use of public money) were flashing “KEEP. AN. EYE. ON. SILAS. POTTER. AT. ALL. TIMES.”? Dude. Not brills. Also, despite the “reprimand” Mr. Stephens issued to Mr. Potter, he had no idear what was going on, despite the fact that Potter sent Stephens a detailed email noting exactly how he was going to transition the RSBDP from public to private, using SPS funds, and likely SPS office space? And had an office near enough to Stephens’s that he would have seen the foot traffic in and out? Um, okay.

If you want to buy what he’s selling, chant, "There's no place like home. There's no place like home." Do it until you forget why you're doing it. And pay no attention to anything, ever, much less stuff behind curtains.

Sales pitch from Deputy General Counsel Ron English: He was “concerned” and raised his “concerns” with Mr. Stephens, and the then-General Counsel Gary Ikeda, but was told by his boss that, having informed the client, his work had been done.

Buyer beware: Too cute! Apparently, the deputy general counsel was sooooo concerned that he was an instructor for the RSBDP. He's even listed as teaching classes on Monday, December 14th, 2009... even though... that's a work day and he had a full-time job with SPS? But, um... surely he received no additional compensation. He was just really looking into RSBDP. And his desire to be really, truly, positively absolutely certain apparently went on for some time, because in Spring 2010, he was still listed as an instructor for RSBDP. Well... I guess that’s one way to keep an eye on the program, and, um, possibly supplement your paycheck [note, 3/3/2011: Melissa Westbrook noted that based on the public documents she's seen, Mr. English did not receive additional compensation]. Perhaps it’s best not to pay attention to the fact that the SAO discussed the issue with the deputy general counsel pretty carefully, and that the deputy general counsel“admitted that some activities were ‘fringe’” but also then made claims to the SAO about how many of the expenses were allowable… which maybe sounds less like “voicing concern” than “defending the status quo.”

So, you wanna buy what he’s got to sell, best to ignore all of that.

Sales pitch from Director Sundquist: He knew nothing, nothing! until December. Once apprised, he acted in an action-y, super-upright and ethical manner befitting an ethical, action-oriented, Boy Scout-y kinda guy!

Buyer beware: Aw. I bet he pushed his glasses down his nose when he said that. If you wanna buy what he’s selling, pay no attention to the fact that the issue was a major audit finding and that Melissa Westbrook gave public testimony on the topic in August 2010. (maybe he only "found out" in December because his family totem is the ostrich?). And riddle me this, Batman: if Director Sundquist learned of these issues in December, why, why, why, why, why was he exhorting his fellow board members to ask "clarifying" questions only at budget workshops? Because he felt the misuse of district funds and lack of supervision by executive management was unrelated to, you know, money issues? If you wanna buy what he's selling, forget all that.

Sales pitch from Director DeBell: he spoke of a cultural problem.

Buyer beware: Well… I’m not sure I’d disagree with him, even if I might express my opinion in considerably stronger language. Director DeBell is more politic than I am.

There is indeed a long-time, extremely serious lack of accountability in the culture of SPS’s central administration. The Superintendent and CFOO, rather than changing that culture, became part of it. To an extent, the Potter debacle is the fruit of a corrupted tree, the growth of which the board has nurtured by a lack of effective oversight and governance. It’s well within the realm of possibility that we’ll eventually learn the tree has borne more fruit than just the Potter debacle. Wow. That sounded twerpily self-righteous. Crikey. Movin’ on.

So, placing your bets for this is kind of like placing bets for Oscar night winners. Except... no fun with dresses (although, this year’s Oscars were not much fun on the dress front, either. Why didn’t they at least invite Cher to make sure someone brought the crazy?). And, well… no fun at all, really. But, there will probably be lots of speechifying.

Okay, it’s not like Oscar night at all. But you can still place your bets on what’s going to happen.

The big question is: are there 4 members of the board with the stones to put an end to this nonsense? In this case, I am hopeful a yes is possible. There’s solid evidence that, faced with a clearly delineated problem, on multiple occasions, the Superintendent and CFOO, among others, neither took corrective action nor informed the board, which is an epic fail in basic management. Still, solid evidence and lots of "outrage" and "disappointment" doesn't guarantee termination. And even if the current Superintendent and CFOO are exited, there is some serious house-cleaning and restructuring that needs to be done in administration.

Still. I think it will be a 5-2 vote, with Directors Maier and Martin-Morris saying the Superintendent is still viable as a leader, and Directors Patu, DeBell, Smith-Blum, Carr and Sundquist voting to oust her.

As board president, Director Sundquist votes last (if it's voted on publicly). He will place his vote with the winning side and then push his glasses down his nose and talk interminably about accountability and ethics. If Director Carr votes no and Director Sundquist is the final vote, Director Sundquist will vote to keep the Superintendent. And then he’ll push his glasses down his nose and talk interminably about accountability and ethics.

You've got a scorecard. Place your bets, privately or in the comments. And let’s see how this falls out.

And, look, I know this is revoltingly sincere, but please, cross your fingers and hope like crazy that what happens is what’s actually best for students in the district.

I should probably say that I'm sitting at my computer awaiting the latest word, which I will instantly convey. But... I'm not. As far as awaiting the Latest Word, I am just not that connected. Also, I'll be watching The Good Wife (which I am likely very twee and middle-aged housewife for admitting, but I like) and chatting about the day with Stumpy over a glass of wine. Still, I will check on the bets. Eventually.

Budget Workshop Recap, Shorter and Possibly More Coherent

2011-02-14T13:57:00.000-08:00

Given how rambling my weekend posts were (I'm going to invoke the sick kid excuse again for my wordiness), here's a quick(er) recap of the cuts recommended at the budget workshop.

I didn’t score each change by the board as it went down, so the numbers here are from the handout available at the 2/9/2011 budget workshop.

Total Recommended Cuts in Central Reductions Exercise: 97.15

My rough breakout:
Central Administration: 15.3
Teaching (that'd be Evening School): 2
Administration billed as Teaching (coaches, SpEd consulting teachers & coaches): 8.5
Teaching Support (I counted athletics in here, though in discussions, that sounded more like an administrative cut): 11.2
Other Support (includes Information Systems -- known in SPS as DoTS -- maintenance, custodian, grounds): 60.75

Numbers Comparison:

Total Employees listed in Central Reductions Exercise: 734.85
Central Administration: 155
Other Support: 507
All other functions (teaching & teaching support, mainly): 72.85

Total Central Administration FTEs (from F-195 budget report, available on OSPI): 245 (i.e. 90 more than in the Central Reductions Exercise)

Total Other Support FTEs (again, F-195 report): 507 (i.e., same as in the Central Reductions Exercise)

So. The “central” reduction exercise was supposed to be about reducing SPS' administrative burden. A dramatic reduction would require a serious restructuring of Central Administration, and as I understood it, the intent was to discuss that.

However. Only 2/3 of Central Administration employees were even listed on the "core FTEs" handout (compared to 100% of Other Support). Given that the positions on the handout were identified as "non-grant funded," one is left to conclude that... the remaining third of Central Administration employees are grant-funded. There are several issues:

Over one third of Central Administration is grant-funded?!?! Well... it sure looks like it.
Why? In previous budget cycles, administrative positions were “shifted to grant” in order to reduce pressure on baseline funding, not to optimize use of grant funding.
It looks like SPS spends at least 10% of its ~$90 milllllllion dollars in grant funds on Central Administration – and that’s not including professional development coaches, who are billed to Teaching (and supposedly most of them are “grant funded” too).

Central Administration cannot be effectively restructured when over 1/3rd of the organization is conveniently omitted from the exercise. Cuts are about reducing total expenses, not just those with certain revenue sources. Presumably in most cases if a grant-funded positions is cut, a baseline position could be shifted to that grant instead. Or – and this is really wacky – that grant money could be spent on students, which is usually the intent of grant money, anyway. You know, to help the keeeeeds.

In order to effectively reduce expenditure, all expenditures must be considered. If Stumpy and I were cutting back on household expenses, I wouldn’t exclude my shoe budget because I fund it from our tax refund (I don’t. It’s an example.) and argue that because it came from a different funding bucket it couldn’t be part of household expense reduction. That would be… ludicrous. Ludicrous is the word I’m looking for. SPS’ position is all the more absurd because, as I've pointed out, many "grant-funded" positions come from one-off issues in previous budget cycles, not careful planning and structuring.

When basic school and student funding is on the chopping block – and it is, since WSS cuts are being considered – then everything else needs to be up there as well. And if it's not, saying "it's grant-funded" isn't enough. There needs to be detailed transparency justifying the protection of that much administrative expense.

Should the board consider custodial and maintenance expenses? Absolutely. But they should also be considering every penny spent downtown, too, instead of taking the easy way out and padding "central" cuts by scything down large numbers of maintenance, custodial and grounds staff.

Cuts have nothing to do with how hard people work downtown. They have nothing to do with the quality of their work (although I do have some opinions on that). It has to do with reducing over $30 million in expenditures. Everything has to be considered.

Right now, with recommended cuts to Central Administration coming in at about 6% of the segment, it really doesn't look that way. Other Support will have 4x more FTEs cut than Central Administration and be cut by 12%. Hmmm.

So, okay, it’s a recap plentifully-seasoned with opinion, but hopefully that explains it without too much shoe talk.

Crappy! Chart! Thursday! How Not to Cut the Administrative Burden!

2011-02-12T14:49:00.000-08:00

Note: I decided that this is really two posts (which I had earlier crammed into one reaaaaaaallllly loooooong post). I'm not sure that it makes it more coherent, but I'm not super-coherent right now: Curly has an ear infection and has been up in the middle of the night with pain. Which means I've been up in the middle of the night crooning to and tending to a sick kid. My brain is mush.

Anyway. This is going to come as not even a little bit of a shock: I have more bad things to say about SPS Central Administration.

Central Administration in 2010-11, as an expense segment, comes in around $17 milllllllllion less than it did in 2009-10. So, yay, right? It shrank!

But the problem is, SPS moved an expense segment - professional development staff (coaches) - from Central Administration to Teaching. They didn't "dramatically" reduce spending. They redistributed it.

Apparently, professional development staff aren't the only central administrators billed to Teaching - Special Education Consulting Teachers, who make placement and administrative decisions, are billed there as well.

Which means: SPS spends millions less than it says it does on Teaching (and they already spend less on Teaching compared to other districts in the state). Swell.

You could say I'm being nit-picky (which maybe I am. Being up with a sick kid does not put me in a forgiving kind of mood), and it's harrrrrd to show people all that super-uber-complicated tricksy information and how it breaks out. Let's look at Spokane's budget pie chart, shall we? Wait a minute. Spokane is openly admitting to anyone who reads their budget pie chart that they have a significant amount of administration spending that is billed to teaching. That's right - Spokane is (on purpose and everything!) making their administrative burden clear to anyone who looks at just at the most basic budget overview. They are acknowledging that they have administrative expense billed to other categories, and they add it up as part of their total administration burden.

Seattle? Um, not so much. Seriously - how many different numbers have we heard about professional development staff? The admitted numbers range from 80 to over 115, usually with a CYA comment of "most of them are in schools" (to be fair, most appear to be), and some hazy comments about spending requirements for Title I (SPS gets around $14M in Title I funds and must spend 10% of that money on professional development. Coaches fulfill that requirement - so around 16 coaches would fulfill Title I PD spending requirements). About 29 professional development coaches have an assignment to the Stanford center (coaches who work in schools are assigned to specific schools).

But, again, I digress. Reading SPS's budget, it looks like Central Administration shrank. Except... SPS moved administrative categories elsewhere and got coy about precise dollar amounts and this crazy thing many public organizations do with spending of public money called "clarity."

Which bring me to the "central office" cuts of this past week. Because the discussion was apparently about "non-grant non-school based FTEs" every single custodian, gardener and maintenance worker got thrown in (wait... aren't custodians mostly school-based?), but fully 1/3 of Central Administration employees did not, apparently because they're "grant-funded." Um... wha? 1/3 of Central Administration FTEs are grant-funded?

Not-so-quick-note: in previous budget cycles, administrative positions were "shifted to grant" not because it was the best use of the money, but to reduce the burden on baseline money from the state.

Let's take a quick look at how the $12M cut scenario recently presented to the board plays out, shall we?

Hard to read, I know. Here's the link to a larger view. It is, I admit, an exceptionally crappy chart, even for Crappy! Chart! Thursday! I have not done a great job of clearly distilling my thoughts. The cuts "recommended" came in even more depressingly: a 6% total cut to Central Administration, and a 12% cut to Other Support, mostly to custodians and maintenance workers - although with quite a few to DoTS (listed by OSPI as "Information Systems"). 63% of the total recommended cuts were to Other Support, and only 16% to Central Administration, even though the point of the exercise was supposedly to consider a drastically reduced Central Administration.

If you're wondering, I have a point.

I think.

And it is: SPS's Central Administration cannot be effectively reduced and restructured, as it needs to be, without the entire organization on the table.

For that to happen, staff cannot simply whimsically say "oh, we'll include everyone assigned to JSCEE" or "we'll only put in people billed to Central Administration" or "we're going to include every other person who walked into the Stanford center on Tuesday, February 1st, except the ones who came in while we were getting coffee," or "we just want to talk about people funded by certain types of revenue."

Staff needs to break out the org chart, the whole thing, and be honest. And maybe even do something wacky, like explain why there's a divide in how much transportation bills as administration, and how much is really a district-wide cost.

Anyone read Anchorage's budget? It is broken out in really quite spectacular (and okay, dull) detail. It's almost as if... Anchorage's administration wants people to be able to understand how district money is spent. You can see, if you want, how overall teacher staffing has changed for each grade. You can see how much the Superintendent spent on meals billed to the district ($1,200 in 2009-10, with $600 budgeted for 2010-11). You can see how much is spent by each department on contract services. Is everything perfect in Anchorage? I doubt it, but their budget makes a real attempt to present public information clearly - you can look at the overview and drill down to extremely granular details.

Administrative spending, and transparency surrounding it, is a serious issue in Seattle, and one that is hurting Seattle's schools. The current budget climate is an opportunity - a difficult and unpleasant one, but still an opportunity - to restructure Central Administration and reduce the administrative burden so that as many people as possible are where they should be: in schools, helping students.

Instead? SPS is firing maintenance workers, groundskeepers and custodians for the bulk of "central cuts."

Yeah, we were all reeeeeaaaaaalllllly worried about the gazillion overpaid custodians and gardeners running around downtown.

Crappy! Chart! Thursday! Mad Libs and Central Administration!

2011-02-12T09:56:00.000-08:00

You might have noticed that I have a distinct fondness for over-priced whackadoodle fashion. I pretty regularly come across a dress or pair of shoes that I become instantly, painfully, deeply covetous of. I have to have it. I need it. I cannot possibly go to the grocery store without it (because what else would one go to the grocery store in, in February, but, say, gladiator espadrilles with a 4" heel that cost a small fortune?).
Even in the grip of materialistic greed, I can see that I don’t need a new dress, or a fabulous pair of shoes. The latest and greatest is alluring and desirable, and the desire to possess it can feel urgent to act upon. But it’s not necessary. And for me, budget-wise, fashion comes behind an army of real obligations – to Stumpy, to my children, even to my goofball goats.

When I hear Education Professionals talk, I’m reminded of fashion.

Yes, they’re talking pedagogies, metrics and best practices instead of hem lengths, silhouette trends and heel shapes. But a Mad Lib could be made with education fashions filling in the blank as easily as actual fashion.

For instance (and here's a link in case this cannot be read from your device):

Is it just me or is the fact that it's so interchangeable more than a little creepy?

It's all the more unsettling because SPS is a hot mess of education fashion trends: Formative data assessments! Strategic Plans! Teacher Evaluation Systems! Curricular Alignments! New Student Assignment Plans! STEM! IB! STEP! Performance Management! Professional Development Coaches! Best Practices! Whatever the Gates Foundation says could be the next hot thing, even if they admit they’re not sure and could be totally wrong! Stuff that can have an acronym that isn’t as ill-considered as the South Lake Union trolley!

It’s like wearing as many fashion trends on your person as is humanly possible.

The results, whether you overtrend in fashion or education, aren’t pretty.

A huge screw-up in fashion is pretty entertaining. Seeing a woman wear a phenomenally expensive dress that looks like it was made from a flock of flamingoes with bedazzled feathers and could be worn for interpretive ice dancing about formal balls for disco birds is... well, kind of awesome, as both fashion road-kill and... fun. In education, it’s just depressing, because keeeeeds are getting screwed.

SPS has a ton of latest! greatest! implementations and initiatives. And almost all of them are hot messes.

Curriculum alignment? Great theory, dreadful practice. If a science class that you can get college credit for is considered an “elective” instead of core science, something is awry in the state of… well, curriculum alignment. Clearly, we’re not in Denmark.

NSAP? Say it with me! Great in theory, mixed bag to nightmare on implementation (yes, I'm aware some people are happy as clams, usually because they landed a spot at a school that is good and not near the fire code limit of over-crowded).

MAP, the formative data assessment? I’m not actually sure it’s a great theory, given the amount of time it takes. But we’ll give Our Professional Educators of The Stanford Center the benefit of the doubt. So: great in theory, decidedly lame in practice.

Professional Development Coaches? Look, the theory is actually fine. The practice, in SPS, has been so poorly tracked – and do not attempt to insist that the data cannot be disaggregated – that SPS has no idear whether or not it’s working. Yup, that’s right. SPS is spending between $8M and $11M on something, every year, and nobody’s tracked it well enough to see if it’s working, other than some “really positive” feedback from teachers. And yes, I like teachers to be happy. But are you kidding me? That’s a whole lotta money to spend without paying close attention to the results.

We could go point by point, but it would take a while and be really, really boring. But feel free to point out your personal, most loathed example of "good in theory, lousy practice" in the comments.

The thing is, fashionable efforts cost gobs of money. In fashion and education, whether you pull it off well or badly, being at the front of a fashion is expensive. And in education, money spent on new trends always includes the following accessory: administration.

You personally may dislike top-down management or strong central administrations, as a management structure, it can work. The management structure itself is not the primary issue. The management of the structure, however, is a major issue. Because it's dismal.

And, well, let's be honest: in SPS, the structure itself is fat. If a fat, strong central administration also delivered strong support to schools and better results for students (the sumo-wrestler of administrations?), I’d be all for it.

But it doesn't.

In Seattle, a fat Central Administration hasn't delivered better results for students. A growing Central Administration is slowly strangling good schools and it's not helping schools with large numbers of struggling students.

Now, you could tell me, as SPS management is saying, that Central Administration is enormously reduced. Which... is kind of true, in a shell game, telling only a narrow part of the truth sort of way. It's sort of like if I said that I am 5'7". Which, if I'm wearing 4" heels, I am.

Crappy! Chart! Thursday! Truthy SuperAnalysis vs. Urban Legends about Central Office Cuts!

2011-02-03T11:45:00.000-08:00

District statement – okay. There are really TWO statements (so! exciting!) for Truthy SuperAnalysis™! here.

Despite the picture of Abelard attempting to eat my camera strap, neither statement is about goats. One is from the district, and one is from the president of the School Board. Let's remember to keep the comments clean, because… well, because. It’s polite? And clearly, my bitchy commentaries are all about Being A Polite Lady.

Speaking of Being A Lady – if you’re short on things to do this Saturday night, the hockey club I skate in, Seattle Women’s Hockey Club, is holding its annual fundraiser, for which there is hockey to be watched and beer to be bought.

I love the fact that there’s a club that gets adult women to try a team sport, and works to keep fees down and the culture friendly. I love that there are women willing to try hockey, often without knowing how to skate or anything about hockey. That the two can come together? With beer? Kinda awesome. Just sayin’.

Plus, watching is like the best episode ever of the Three Stooges. On Ice! With lipstick! And, okay, with chicks apologizing to one another for knocking each other over in a hockey game. And sure, that’s not very macho, but it’s one of the many things that makes me love chick hockey. There’ll be beer. There’ll be hockey. There may even be really, really good doughnuts. And you can heckle me to your heart's content.

So, you know, you could do worse things with your Saturday night than supporting women’s athletics (while drinking beer and eating doughnuts). Sadly, Don Cherry and his jackets will not be in attendance. But you yourself could come in a blazer that is a delicious homage to a Vegas showgirl crossed with a pattern from the Rejected Wallpaper Hall of Fame, and since a reasonable number of people who will be there do actually watch Hockey Night In Canada, they will probably get where you’re going with that, especially if you say "real old-time hockey" alot.

Right. I got waaaaaay off-track there from saying bitchy things about the Seattle Public Schools. Let's try again:

District Statement (this one’s from the 2010-11 budget page):

“We are attempting to keep budget cuts away from our schools and students. We have:

Enacted a Districtwide hiring and spending freeze to save an estimated $6.5 million.

Made plans to use $4.4 million in reserves.

Cut 85 positions in our central office to save $6.5 million”

And the current School Board president (from an email copied onto the West Seattle blog forums): “Central staff cut: this particular question seems to have become an urban legend for some. The district did in fact cut approximately 85 positions from central office as it promised, and is now close to the averages of other Puget Sound districts in a number of central office expense metrics. More central office cuts are a certainty to meet the budget targets of this next fiscal year”

Actual Factual Facts!

Well, at least the two statements are consistent with one another. With the facts? Not so much.

Let's talk breakdown. And introduce Crappy! Chart! Numba! One! (and here's the link to a larger presentation)

27.7 FTEs lost their jobs with SPS. FTEs are full time equivalents, which mean there were more individuals, but some were half time or three quarters time or somesuch, so FTE doesn't map precisely to number of people. Take a moment to consider that that had to have been dreadful for those people. Losing a job is wretched. I think Central Administration jobs do have to be cut to protect school budgets, but that is a very different thing than being glad that people were fired.

6 vacant budgeted positions got cut.

I couldn't verify 27.5 cuts. I requested the public records for cuts made in March in October, asking for the names and positions of people cut. For 27.5 FTEs, SPS didn’t provide names, only “by seniority.” Well, that’s great, and I get that with seniority, the person in the actual position may have moved to a position they had seniority for, booting someone else out, but… you can't tell me in November who ended up getting cut in March?

It's possible that some of these positions really got cut. It's also possible that some didn't. Based on the overall hit rate, I would guess those 27.5 are split pretty evenly.

21.7 FTEs in cut positions are still employed by the district. And look, I understand that people apply for open positions. Although… in the same department? With very similar job appearances? Reporting to the same boss? With the same or better pay? Uh, sure. Whatever. Keep in mind, though, that someone snagging an open spot also means that they don’t come off the books, and cost reductions didn’t really happen. Wow. That's alotta italics in one paragraph.

2 positions were simply filled by other people. There was within-position turnover, not a cut.

I'm going to use a small sample set, highly compensated employees (salaries over $90K), as a way to give a sense of how some of this ended up playing out.

The above Crappy! Chart! shows planned cuts and actual expense. You may want to hit the link to the slide presentation, because goodfreakingluck trying to read the chart here. The taller bar is the actual expense, and it's taller because (spoiler alert) the district didn't save money on this group of employees. They increased their expenses.

As for the positions:
The School Support director left. However, the position is still there, on the books. Someone else is now filling it. The new person is getting paid less than the old one, though.

Planned savings: minus $120K
Actual savings: minus $13K.

The old General Counsel left. And seriously, who are we kidding? Does anyone think the district’s going to say, “Actually, we don't need a general counsel anymore.” If you do, I have a great little... technology?, yeah, technology company to invest in, called Jimmy Choo Technologies. I’ll keep very careful track of those shiny red... er, those new investments for you. Call me!

So. New General Counsel comes in.

Planned savings: minus $161K

Actual savings: increase in pay. Plus $2K.

Title I Director became the Director of School Support, apparently managing, amongst other things… Title I. Apparently the person applied for an open, grant-funded position. In the same part of the organization. With many of the same apparent responsibilities. In a “lean” central organization. Um, okay. Let’s say I buy that. The employee is still an expense and, in fact, got an $18,000 raise. Please raise your hand if you would like to get fired like that. And now, everyone, please consider how silly you all look holding your hand up in front of your computer.

Planned savings: minus $114K

Actual savings: plus $18K.

Business Technology Manager. The person who was there isn't with the district. I don't know if he was fired or retired. As frustrated as the falsity of some of the claimed cuts makes me, I can't wish getting fired on people, so for his sake, I hope he found a job elsewhere. His position was not eliminated. There's currently an interim person filling it. When you bother to have an interim person in there, you’re not planning on taking the position off the books.

Planned savings: minus $112K.

Actual savings: minus $6K

We have 3 people who stayed, at the same pay: a program manager, a database manager and the former student discipline manager. Details about their titling may have changed in minor ways, but it doesn't look like much else did.
Planned savings: $283K

Actual savings: 0

We can chitty chat about the Education Directors, but the district did take them off the cuts list pretty quickly (although it is a leeeeetle hard not to ask why they ever were put on the list of cuts), so I won't fuss too much on it. SPS management somehow forgot to mention that comp for each position would be upped by an average of $9K, and it also slipped their minds to pass on that a new job would be created all special-like for one of the former Ed Directors.

Planned savings: 0

Actual savings: Plus $164K

In sum, $790K in expenses (excluding the Ed Directors) was planned to come off the books for these people.

And the total savings were: There weren't savings for the highly compensated employees reviewed. There was an expense increase of about $165K.

Truthy SuperAnalysis™ Says: Dudes. So not 85 cuts or 6 milllllllllllion in savings. SPS isn't even a in a believable “approximately” range of 85. Pants in the JSCEE are not completely, totally out-of-control ablaze here, but may be smoking heavily.

The only urban legend is tale SPS is telling about 85 cuts. There were not 85 FTEs cut from the “central office” and $6 milllllllllllllion in savings was not realized.

As much coverage as I just gave the details, the issue really isn't each individual cut or non-cut, no matter how galling some of those details may be. The issue is honesty, transparency and accuracy from the district to the board and public.

And the issue is also that I mentioned my goats, fancy shoes, hockey and bitched about the district in a single post. It's like a Gordie Howe hat trick, only, you know, with, um, 4 things.

Resurfacing, With a Wee Bit of Wine Advice

2011-01-19T22:30:00.000-08:00

So, um, yes.

I’ve been a bit quiet.

It’s not because I’ve had nothing to say. But from before Thanksgiving until a little after the New Year I was sick (let's hear it for my couch-potato immune system! Or... not.), and since then, I've been slowly, slowly creeping back from being sick.

I played an awful lot of Plants vs. Zombies in December, less because I luuurve it and more because I spent the month unable to lie down comfortably without painfully hacking up a lung, and yet too exhausted to actually do anything. I know! So! Funs!

This last round of being sick felt an awful lot like being underwater, sounds tinnily muted, everything seen through a dimming, muffled lens of blue.

As I’ve resurfaced, I’ve been busy enough taking a few deep breaths as I've come back up that Crappy! Charts! have not been… top of mind.

It's a strange sensation, to feel like you fell asleep to your own life for a bit. It happens to me many a winter (Note to immune system: you actually have a job. It's supposed to involve fighting disease), but I never quite get used to it. Before you feel all bad for me and how haarrrrdd it is for me: my folks live up the street. My mom and dad both cooked for me and helped mind my kids so I could rest (and you would not believe the baby harp seal face my mom makes when I get really sick - a face often followed by some delicious homemade soup). Stumpy hauls Curly and my boy to their early ice times on weekends to let me get more rest. I'm not exactly beset by misfortune. But IF you still feel so bad for me and my dysfunctional immune system that you have to send me a ginormous Barney's gift certificate, well. By all means.

Never fear, though. Crappy! Charts!, like MacArthur (although, um, maybe instead of all heroically, kind of... snarkily?), Shall Return.

As for the word of wine advice? Never buy a wine that shares a name with the swelling of lymph nodes associated with diseases like the bubonic plague, syphilis and gonorrhea. That name? Bubo. Yeah. Not so appetizing, is it? Stumpy innocently grabbed a bottle of wine, and found out, after I shared the reasons for my previously undiscovered name-based aversion, that he shared the aversion, too (amazing how talking about “swelling” “bubonic plague” and “gonorrhea” takes away a thirst). It probably didn’t help that the wine sucked. Hmm. Tastes bad and shares a name with nasty swellings associated with filthy diseases? Not even for cooking.

Crappy! Chart! Thursday! Simple Cons: Beating the Last 17% Out of a Dead Horse

2010-12-05T19:03:00.000-08:00

I wasn’t going to post about 17% Miscommunication-Gate, which has mostly been beaten to death while I’ve been holed up with antibiotics, cough medicine, Tylenol, and lots of tea. There's probably not a ton more to say about this.

But sometimes it’s fun to beat a dead horse. So, here goes.

District Statement

This is long and Charlie Brown grown-up wah-wah-wah-wah, even excerpted, so bear with me. And try to stay awake.

The Superintendent sent this letter to various members of the “Seattle community.”

“In 2008, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) published a conservative data point aimed at determining the percent of students that graduate from SPS ready for a 4-year college. This specific data point is complex and one that districts across the state and the country grapple with as they try to quantify college and career ready. College readiness measures can be defined in multiple ways: the minimum requirements necessary to graduate high school, minimum requirements necessary to apply to a 4-year college, minimum requirements to successfully enroll in a college or university or meeting the necessary requirements to succeed in and graduate from college.

At the time we calculated that 17% of our students graduated from SPS college and career ready, we used a very aggressive standard to determine the percent of SPS students that were college ready based on our understanding of what is needed to be admitted and succeed in college, not simply the minimum requirements to apply.

This specific data point sparked significant public dialogue. In 2009, we chose not to include this statistic in the initial release of the district scorecard because we wanted to review it further; we publicly announced it was under review. In 2010, after additional research and discussion, we revised the statistic on the district scorecard using reduced math and science requirements as well as a reduction in the minimum core GPA from a letter grade of “B” to a “C” that are more in line with the Washington Higher Education Coordinating Board (HECB) minimum requirements to apply to college. Further, at the 11/17/2010 board workshop, the district stated that the statistic changed and provided an explanation.

In retrospect, this review should have been accelerated and we should have been more proactive, both internally with staff and externally with key stakeholders, when the original statistic was held back in 2009 and was under further review. In addition, we should have been clearer that this represented a standard more rigorous than the minimum HECB requirements.”

Actually, I can’t go past 4 paragraphs. Just reading it this far has me trying to stab a pen through my hand in order to stay awake.

You wanna to read the whole thing? Good luck. There's just a leeeeetle more bureaucratese to slog through. It’s available here.

Actual Factual Facts!

Factual! SPS did publish a data point in 2008! And it did spark significant public... something. "Dialogue" isn't the right word since that implies that SPS was actively engaging in back and forth with the public. Which, um, SPS is not exactly renowned for.

Not Factual! Pretty much everything else in the letter.

The data point in question is “Graduates meeting high school credit requirements for 4-year college,” [emphasis mine] and was one of 16 highlighted goals in the Strategic Plan.

The Superintendent spent her first year on the job authoring this plan.

Despite all that work on the plan, somehow a different metric, "Graduates prepared for 4-year college," is what was "assessed" and now appears in the district scorecard. Obviously, something changed.

At the June 4, 2008 board meeting (tune in at about 1:18:30), when the school board approved the Strategic Plan, Michael DeBell asked about this precise data point. He said that he felt 17% was too low.

The answer he received was that SPS used the Higher Education Coordinating Board's (HECB) definition of minimum college admission standards in order to determine how many SPS graduates met high school credit requirements for 4-year college. HECB's standards had been revised for 2012; the claim was that SPS used HECB's 2012 definition.

Curiously, nowhere during this explanation did the Superintendent pause to note that SPS wasn't actually using the 2012 HECB standards.

Today’s Crappy! Chart! is just a table that walks through the differences between those HECB standards and what the Strategic Plan presented as HECB standards. However, despite the genuine crappiness of the chart, I certify that it meets the minimum Crappy! Chart! requirement standards, as measured by me after a snork of cough syrup or glass of wine, whichever is handiest at the time of standards determination (Ha! That wasn't bad bureaucratese!). SPS added a science course and bumped the GPA up a point. Those two alterations were enough to knock a startling number of kids out of the running (29% of SPS high school graduates, if I recall correctly).

Truthy SuperAnalysis!™

Dudes. Totally gnarly epic fail.

The percent of SPS graduates meeting credit requirements for college was supposedly calculated by HECB standards, but... the district didn't use HECB's standards.

The Superintendent’s letter completely flubs effective minimization of the problem. I’m a little looped on my cocktail of medicine, cough syrup and Tylenol and I still don’t buy what the Superintendent’s selling in her letter. That the letter is in such sleep-inducing bureaucratese doesn't help.

I get that getting busted is no fun at all, and the forced explanations and apologies that go hand-in-hand with getting busted are deeply tiresome to make. Still, when you have to sell that an enormous misrepresentation was actually just a wee "miscommunication," you have got to work the hell out of that explanation.

There was ample time to correct members of the public who were misled by the deeply misleading data and came to the conclusion that by saying "requirements," the authors of the Strategic Plan meant... "requirements."

There were direct questions on the data, and in answering those questions, the Strategic Plan authors represented their 17% figure as conforming to a standard. Which... it didn't.

So why didn't the district calculate the actual percent of SPS graduates meeting credit requirements for college using the 2012 HECB standards (as they said they had)?

There's the conspiracy theory guess: management didn't want to do any work to improve that particular stat and hoped, in 2013, to slide the real number in and then voilà! they'd have met the goal without doing any work. That seems like a bit of a stretch, even to someone as suspicious as me. It looks like there was either intent or incompetence, although a combination is a distinct possibility.

In the absence of an honest explanation from the district, we can only guess.

Truthy SuperAnalysis!™ says: Whether by intent, bumbling incompetence or both, the Strategic Plan authors misrepresented how many SPS graduates were meeting credit requirements for college, misleading the board and public.

And Abelard says:

Are you sure you don't have some raisins?

A Goat in a Coat, but no Red Shed

2010-12-02T11:22:00.000-08:00

Someone asked for a picture of my goats in their coats, which is yet another thing my fancy shoe budget has taken a hit because of. That's right. My frivolous shoe budget gets lower priority than winter coats for a couple of goofball goats. Poor frivolous shoe budget. I loved you while I had you.

I don't have a bias against photographing Abelard, but he's deeply, deeply interested in snacks. If the camera comes out, he immediately trots over to see if it might be a snack, despite the fact it looks nothing like a corn chip, watermelon slice or raisin (his enthusiasm for snack investigation means I spend more time than I'd like wiping goat drool off the camera). Pictures of Abelard often come out like this:

Which is great if you want to blurrily inspect part of his schnoz, but doesn't quite convey his fashion sense.

Goats and Snow

2010-11-23T12:21:00.000-08:00

They're pretty sure they hate it. Given that they live in an unheated shed, I can't really blame them. I spent a winter living in an unheated stone house, and it at least had a stove. And even with a stove, I came to the conclusion that I am a big fan of indoor heat.

Stumpy's all for popping on some antler headgear and taking pictures of them. Which is kind of funny. Although they'd probably try to eat the antlers.

More Shoe Talk

2010-11-09T17:52:00.001-08:00

Yup. I still love me some impractical, high-priced shoes. And boy, am I tired of talking and thinking about More Serious Matters.

Do I love the impractical, extremely expensive shoes pictured below? Uh, well... I enjoy them, but more in the way of enjoying the spectacle of fashion than in a way that gets me to briefly consider knocking over a couple of convenience stores to raise the purchasing funds.

Unless, of course, I was attending a formal ball with a yeti theme. In that case, these are the perfect shoes.

Crappy! Chart! Thursday! Vintage Edition!: Closure 2008-09, West Seattle North

2010-11-04T09:50:00.000-07:00

I got my start on doing crappy charts about public schools during the 2008-09 closure process. I know, you’re thrilled to learn about my scintillating crappy chart history.

Just wait! It only gets more exciting from here.

I saved my vintage crappy charts from back in the day (okay, not quite two years ago), because… there’s enough storage on the computer, and as often as not, once I hit "save," crud stays on the computer. I’m pretty sure I have saved grocery lists from 2003 on there somewhere, neatly saved in a folder labeled "misc2003."

Anyway. The other day, thinking about all the problems in the NSAP, it occurred to me to go back and see how my projections played out.

Warning: If you hate I-told-you-so’s of any stripe, now would be a good time to go check out the Don Cherry Jacket site.

If you’re still with me, take a look at the vintage crappy chart (the whole long presentation can be looked at here) and the then/now chart.

The thing is, I actually wasn’t completely right.

I was conservative.

Things are worse than I projected. So, please give me a brief moment to say: I knew it! I told them so!

Okay. All done.

There’s plenty of material here for me to snark away, but I have to be honest: I 'm really troubled.

Sure, my vanity got hurt a little bit when district staffers ignored my input, and pretty much said, “Oh, honey, this is terribly complicated. You just don’t understand. We’re professionals. We do understand. So don’t you worry. Everything's gonna be fine.” But the injuries to my vanity don’t trouble me (well, much).

What upsets, disturbs, troubles, frustrates, annoys and deeply, deeply angers me is that in the brief time I’ve been watching the district, I’ve watched many, many community members bring forth rational, considered issues with district projects. They all get the same response from the district as I did – total dismissal, without even a glancing consideration of the information they’ve brought forward.

If the work of SPS staff was uniformly sensational, that would be one thing. But it’s not. Not helping matters is that if a director has questions about issues raised by the community, that director asks... the same staff who wouldn’t consider the issue to begin with. And staff blows it off. Again.

On a snarkier front, it’s not, um… reassuring when the paid education pros are worse at making enrollment projections than a slightly deranged hockey-playing, goat-owning housewife who noodles with projections in her spare time.

Less snarkily, it would be utterly unreasonable to expect district staff to always be right just because they’re paid professionals. Most people do, at some point, make an on-the-job error. However, that staffers dismiss relevant information makes their mistakes seem idiotic.

It is one thing to miss an issue. We’ve all been there. It happens. It’s human. But it’s another to refuse to consider an issue when it’s brought your attention and then make a mistake that didn't have to be made.

Anyone from West Seattle have any thoughts on this one?

Crappy! Chart! Thursday! Simple Cons: “We’re Solemnly Addressing the Audit”

2010-10-28T14:53:00.000-07:00

Yup. I’m still harping about the claims SPS is making on its levy FAQ. Let's take a moment to note that Crappy! Chart! Thursday! is on a Thursday, demonstrating my (dilatory) commitment to aligning titles to dates!

SPS is not scoring well on the Truthy SuperAnalysis™ so far. The claim du jour isn’t likely to fare much better.

District Statement
Q: “The State audit of the 2008-2009 school year resulted in a number of findings. What is the district doing to respond?”
A: “The School Board and the Superintendent are committed to being good stewards of public resources. A comprehensive set of strategies have been put in place. Progress will be reported to the public monthly at the Audit and Finance Committee (a monthly meeting has been added devoted specifically to audit response); at School Board meetings; and at several special “oversight” board work sessions that will be scheduled during 2010-2011.”

Actual Factual Facts
Factual! There were “a number” of findings in both audits. The "number" of findings in the accountability report was 13, and the "number" in the financial report was 7.

The below chart (this may be easier to read) may help you put the "number" of those findings in "context" by letting you see the "number" of findings in the worst audit reports ever released in the state (okay, since 1997). Seattle has 3 of the top 5 spots in the Audit Report Hall of Shame.
The Audit & Finance committee has added a monthly meeting just to address the audit, and plans to have oversight workshops. All of this is factual.

Truthy SuperAnalysis!™
Dude. Worst auditor's report ever.

What the public doesn't seem to have fully twigged to is that the state auditor's office reports problems that they find to district staff months before reports are released (with notes on who each findings was communicated to, with dates). I use present tense because this is standard operating procedure for the State Auditor's office. The auditor's office lets districts know about issues well before the issues become part of audit reports. As a policy.

Which, hmmm.

Interesting that district management didn't find the motivation for their "commitment" to being "good stewards" until after the report was released in July 2010, quite a few months after the auditor's office had updated them about the many, many ways they weren't being good stewards.

And very, very interesting that, apparently, members of the board found out about the report... at the exit interview with the state auditor.

That's right. District staff somehow forgot to inform the board about the seriousness of the audit; the board found out from the auditor's office just before the audit was released.

Does that sound like a "commitment to good stewardship" on the part of management? I think it sounds more like a commitment to good stewardship when people are paying attention, but I'm kind of judgmental.

And the response to the audit might be less than robust. If you look at the audit response log (longer and more detailed than the district summary), the district might have an... unusual view of a problem being "addressed."

Let's have a quick look at issue AE3.1 (page 6), "Superintendent did not disclose financial relationship with vendor." District response for the problem is "Superintendent has publicly disclosed all applicable relationships (October 2009)." Problem is categorized as "completed." If you want a timeline/fuller picture, I just posted it.

Let's imagine this scenario in the private sector, shall we?

So. We have, in our imaginary scenario, the CEO of a company. Our prez also sits on the board of a worthy non-profit, "Committed Ruminant Adorers Zealously Into Equality Stuff (C.R.A.Z.I.E.S.)," a group that promotes goats as urban farm animals and pets and works to reduce the social stigma of goat ownership. No problem (aside from the fact that whoever thought of their name is clearly the soulmate of the person who first named the South Lake Union Trolley). Being on the board of a non-profit is not a big deal, and often expected of CEOs.

However, the company's board decides that the company needs to increase charitable giving. The giving committee on the company - several of whom only got their positions through their relationships with the prez - decides that the worthiest recipient of their charitably-intended dough is... C.R.A.Z.I.E.S. The prez says nothing to the board about her relationship with C.R.A.Z.I.E.S. FYI: The prez receives no compensation for being on the board of our imaginary non-profit.

During a routine audit, an external auditor confirms that a) the prez is on the board of C.R.A.Z.I.E.S. and b) notes it was really, really, really not kosher for the prez not to let her company's board know that she was on the board of an organization that stood to benefit from the company's money.

So. Do you think the prez disclosing the relationship and stepping down from the board of C.R.A.Z.I.E.S. would be enough for a private sector board of directors?

Uh, no. No it wouldn't. Undisclosed conflicts of interest are frowned upon. Disclosing a conflict of interest after the fact doesn't "fix" the problem. The following courses of actions would all be possibilities:

1) Prez gets fired

2) Prez gets fired and relationship with C.R.A.Z.I.E.S. is terminated

3) Prez stays on job, with a censure and some kind of punishment, relationship with C.R.A.Z.I.E.S. is either terminated or fully and very critically re-examined, and an investigation into the prez is undertaken to see if there are any other ethics issues that the external auditor might have missed.

Upshot?

I don't agree that this issue has been "completed." It's public money - if anything, there should be a higher standard of disclosure, ethics and conflict of interest. I don't think the Superintendent should absolutely be fired over the issue. However, the relationship with NWEA, and what benefit SPS is deriving from MAP, should be fully and very critically re-examined.

If you disagree with me, I'm interested to know why. I will, just a leeeeetle snarkily, leave this issue with a quote from the Strategic Plan:

"At Seattle Public Schools, we see a city where: District leadership and staff model excellence and accountability."

Huh. Well, moving on.

The Audit & Finance committee has set up additional meetings every month just for the audit. It's a start.

However. Having meetings about a problem doesn't mean a problem gets fixed.

The board could meet every day to discuss oversight, but if they don't provide oversight where it counts - at votes, board meeting discussions, committee meetings and workshops - they still won't be fulfilling their duty of oversight.

Oversight and governance are not passive.

On the same line of thinking, putting processes "in place" - no matter how comprehensive, strategic and benchmarked - is still different than fixing a problem. I can make my kids come up with a comprehensive, strategic process (aligned with our core family values) for making sure they get their homework and chores done. And yet, making Curly and my boy create a process is not the same as the little squirrels doing their homework and chores. A crazy thing called "supervision" is required.

Whew. That was alotta material to cover. Of course, the two audits, between them, were 131 pages o' problems.

Truth SuperAnalysis™ says: Believe the problems in the audit are fixed when you see change in the way things are done. New! meetings!, procedures! and! policies! may be where you've gotta start, but a genuine commitment to good stewardship will be shown in district and board action.

To date, there's been no action demonstrating a genuine commitment to good stewardship.

Just the Facts, Ma'am: NWEA, MAP and Conflicts of Interest

2010-10-28T13:33:00.000-07:00

As many people are aware, SPS's current Superintendent had a conflict of interest issue in the recent audit.

It was an exception, rather than a finding, and so although the problem was reported by the auditor's office to SPS, it isn't part of the report (it is publicly available, so don't get in a twist about it not being blared from the rooftops).

Here are the basics of the problem, in the words of the auditor's office:

"We noted the District entered in a contract with a vendor for approximately $402,000. The Superintendent is on the Board of this vendor (Northwest Evaluation Association) and did not disclose her relationship to the School Board until after their approval of the contract."

And here's a basic timeline.

Spring 2008. SPS hired a consultant to assess different types of assessments. The consultant wrote a paper (titled, thrillingly, "Developing a Strategic Student Assessment System in Seattle Public Schools: Research, Stakeholder Priorities And Policy Analysis," by Jessica de Barros).

August 2008. Dr. Goodloe-Johnson joined the board of NWEA.

2008-2009. After an extravaganza of assessing assessments, SPS staff decided NWEA was the best fit. I have heard a number of accounts of how this went but haven't been able to verify - if you've got verifiable skinny on it, please pipe up in the comments ("I heard" doesn't count as verifiable skinny).

June 2009. staff asked the board to approve a contract with NWEA. The board approved it.

Fall 2009. After multiple members of the public came to board meetings to bring to light the current Superintendent's involvment with NWEA, the Superintendent announced at a board meeting that she was on the board of NWEA, and explained that because the position was unpaid and she hadn't been involved in the bidding process, there was no conflict of interest. She finished by saying: "So I wanted to just bring that up publicly at this point and actually mention it again so if there’s any questions or concerns that clearly, there’s not a conflict of interest and I wanted to say that."

April 2010. State Auditor's office informs SPS staff that there was a conflict of interest/ethics violation on the part of the Superintendent. Their quote's up at the top of the post.

Fall 2010. Audit log reports that the issue was "Superintendent did not disclose financial relationship with vendor," that the response to the issue is "The Superintendent has pubicly disclosed all applicable relationships" and that the issue is "completed." Not on the audit log is that the Superintendent announced that she has resigned from the board of NWEA.

So. That's what I have on an outline of basic facts on this as an issue. You can decide for yourself what it means.

Crappy! Chart! Thursday! Simple Cons: "The Levy Will Help Save the Keeeeeeeds"

2010-10-23T19:48:00.001-07:00

I'm back, but probably not better than ever.

Better, worse, or still just digression-o-rific, I'm sticking with the usual format: district statement, basic facts, snarky commentary/analysis - this time accompanied not by one, but two! Crappy! Charts!

It's all very un-exciting.

Although... I do have a recent Don Cherry jacket picture. His fashion choices remain as comfortingly cornea-chafing as ever.

Maybe he's trying to show he's got what it takes to be an announcer on Battle of the Blades, which... at first I thought was a spoof reality show because it's so awesomely ridiculous. Dancing with the Stars on the ice! In Canada! With NHL and figure skating stars! It really has to be seen to be believed. Don Cherry and his impressive selection of taste-free jackets would look positively subdued on that show.
Um. Anyway. Moving on to the business at hand.

District Statement:
“$25.5 [million] will be available to help reduce the number and severity of cuts we need to make due to decreased funding and increasing costs.”

Naked Actual Factual Facts!
To be clear, the $25.5 million in the district statement refers to money from the $48.2 million Supplemental Levy (currently on the ballot) that will be "available" to offset cuts due to decreased funding.

In 2011-12, the district anticipates a funding gap of $28m. If this levy passes, $14.5m in levy revenue will be available to SPS in 2011-12.

In 2011-12, SPS has already committed to spending the levy money as follows, and as shown above (Where'd my data come from? SPS's Levy FAQ and this, with contract expenses highlighted on page 5. More readable versions of the crappy charts in this post are on dropbox):

● $5.9m, textbooks. This is for textbook adoption, not just textbooks. It may, as the Language Arts adoption did, include expenses for consultants – for LA, SPS spent $750,000-ish on consultants. The district hasn't said whether or not they'll be hiring consultants for any of the adoptions, but... they sure do luuurrve them some consultants. Professional development for teachers is also part of the $5.9m in "textbook" costs. Is that bad? Not necessarily, but keep in mind, this line item is more than simple replacement of materials.

● $.8m, Implementation of Teacher’s contract. Total implementation at $2.4m. I've assumed the cost spreads out evenly over 3 years rather than falling primarily in year one (and given standard distribution of implementation costs, it would be fair to assume a higher percentage of cost in year 1). Rather than noodle with complicated assumptions about the cost distribution, I will stick to even division - so, FYI: I'm lowballing year 1 costs.

● $2.7m for 1% pay increase for teachers. The two year cost is $5.4m – I'm making the assumption the cost is evenly split between 2011-12 and 2012-13.

● $1.53m, collaboration time for teachers. 3-year total cost of $4.6m. Again, I assumed the cost will likely be about equal for each of the three years.

● $1.7m, career ladder stipends, additional STAR mentors, stipends for level 1 schools. 3-year cost of $5.1m. Little reason to think that this cost won’t distribute evenly across all three years.

● $1m. First year investments. What’s that? Who knows. Sounds like implementation, but it’s got it’s own line item and no explanation. Whatevs. It's there. It's a million bucks. Moving on.

● -$.73m for the TIF grant. SPS obtained a 5-year TIF grant, which will offset the three-year costs of the teacher's contract by $2.2m. Again, I assumed an even distribution. For 2011-12, it takes off $.73m from the total committed expenses.

Truthy SuperAnalysis!™
The already-committed expenses for the supplemental levy revenue add up to $13.63m. The TIF grant offsets these expenses slightly, which brings the total committed levy revenue down to $12.9m. 89% of year one levy revenue is already spoken for before the levy's passed. Not a penny of that 89% will offset cuts.

SPS is staring down the maw of a $28 milllllllllion a budget gap in 2011-12, and has known that since at least the spring. Yet SPS management approved committing to expenses that expand SPS's budget obligations, knowing: a) how much levy money would be available in 2011-12 and b) what the shortfall for 2011-12 might be.

Irresponsible fiscal planning, ahoy!

But... what about that $25.5 million in levy funds available to offset cuts? Right now, the three year total in levy funds that haven't been snatched up for anything is $25.5m.

Howev-ah. No promises have been made to use the money to close budget gaps or protect schools. The district said that $25.5m will "be available." But SPS has not said that the remaining levy money will be used to protect schools from budget cuts - they've said it's "available," which is not the same thing. It looks like a loophole to me, kids.

And look, I know this may make me sound like a paranoid kook (with goats!), but unless it's written in the blood of senior management and at least 4 board members, I wouldn't count any declaration from SPS as a promise. Although... that would be a really macabre way to make a promise. And a document that's a biohazard and a half.

Anyway. Right now, we're talking about 2011-12, the year that schools and the district will need the most relief.

For 2011-12, SPS has committed to expanding its budget, using levy funds. Virtually no levy money will be left to offset an enormous budget shortfall. The $1.6m available will reduce the $28m gap down to... a still pretty freaking gigantic $26.4m – a not-at-all-whopping 6%-ish reduction.

So how will the rest of that gap be closed? I'd bet that it's likely to come out of reducing budgets for schools and student programs. Again.

However "groundbreaking" and "historic" it may be, I doubt the new teacher's contract will improve instruction in schools so much that nobody will notice the cuts school budgets will have to endure in order to support the first year of the contract... cuts that could be seriously mitigated by actually using the levy money to, well, mitigate cuts.

$3.4 million of the entire levy (the $1m for first year and $2.4m of "implementation") is just for Central Administration implementation issues. That's 7% of the whole levy - and 18% of the $19m teacher's contract. That's a lotta money to get something off the ground. It doesn't sound like good stewardship of public resources. It sounds like top-heavy administrative costs.

I've said this a couple times, so pardon my redundance, but consider this one more time: SPS, this spring, had already forecast the budget gap, and knew how much levy money would be available in 2011-12. And yet they moved forward with committing the lion's share of levy funds for 2011-12 to increasing the budget, leaving a tiny portion available to "reduce the number and severity of cuts."

Someone tell me: how is that kind of planning for the keeeeeds?

Truthy SuperAnalysis™ says: Dude. It's not.

Crappy! Chart! Thursday! Simple Cons: "Central Administration Is Soooooo Much Smaller"

2010-10-21T08:27:00.000-07:00

It's late in day 2 (ish - I've got a sick kid at home) of nit-picky scrutiny of district claims.

Will finicky parsing lead to any discoveries beyond dangling participles? I don't want to kill your suspense, but, um, yes. Yes, it will.

Usual format: district claim, followed by basic facts and then analysis of said facts. To make it super-exciting, I've included a bona-fide crappy chart.

District Statement (from the levy FAQ):

“There are 110 FEWER positions in the Central Administration budget for 2010-2011 compared with 2009-2010 ADOPTED budget. (reduction from 356.8 staff to 246.6 staff -- this is a combination of correcting for misclassification in 09-10 and reduction of central office positions)”

Naked Actual Factual Facts!

Professional development coaches were the staff "misclassified" in Central Administration. Their primary job duty is overseeing the professional development of teachers. Coaches can neither hire nor fire the people they train, so SPS felt coaches didn't belong in a division with "supervision" in the name (coaches were budgeted in Supervision of Instruction, which is part of Central Administration), and so reclassified coaches as... teachers.

SPS’s CFOO stated (page 19) there were 116.5 professional development coaches in SPS in 2009-10 (costing $11.1 million).

However you think coaches should be budgeted, there's a leeetle issue with the district's math. It's wrong.

356.8 Central Administration FTEs - 116.5 "misclassified" FTEs = 240.3, not 246.6. While that's not a huge difference, it's worth taking note of. Because if this is a "combination" of "reductions" and "corrections," than... the 2010-11 FTE number would be lower than the subtraction of coaches from Central Administration, not higher. But it's... higher.

So, moving along past the PR department's questionable subtraction skills... let's take a moment and note that the district blurb starts by talking about "Central Administration" and finishes by saying that there were "reductions" to the "central office." At first glance, these terms seem interchangeable. They're not.

There is a genuine budget category from OSPI for Central Administration. The OSPI category of Central Administration has clearly defined budget subcategories and accounting guidelines (and everything!). That's not the case for "central office." Since it is not an official category, the district can choose to define "central office" however they want to.

Truthy SuperAnalysis™

This is a totally basic con.

Using "Central Administration" and a phrase that sounds like Central Administration but has no actual definition is an SPS all-time favorite. Anyone remember "Core Administration" (make-believe category the district used in budgets for a while)? Yeah. Good times. Using both "Central Administration" and its seeming doppelganger in the same paragraph leads the reader to believe the two categories are the same thing. But... they're not. It's a classic. Don't confuse a con being class-ic with being class-y.

In this example of one of the district's Very Favorite Simple Cons, the "Central Administration" doppelganger is "central office."

"Central office" exists only as a colloquialism. The district can choose to define it however they want to. This may come as a shocker, but... SPS's definition isn't available anywhere on the SPS website. Hmmm.

The "central office" reductions list from March 2010 included 3 laborers, 6 vacant positions, 5 Education Director positions, 1 Title 1 Program Director and, well, a bunch of other "reductions" that raise eyebrows a bit. Let's give those particular cuts a closer look.

Laborers are central administrators how? Oh... they're not. Looks like those folks were canned to pad the numbers. Vacant positions are a cost concern how? Sure, they get budgeted, but they have no actual cost associated. The 5 Ed Director positions weren't eliminated - the district reorganized those positions. There are still 5 Ed Directors. There was no reduction. The former Title I Program Director, Scott Whitbeck, is now the Director of School Improvement, a new position... so no actual FTE elimination there, either.

Still awake? I know. Budget stuff is dull. It casts into question the district's "reduction" claims, and as much as I'd love to delve further into that list - because there's more questionable stuff on it - it bores even me, so let's just steam ahead, call bullshit on the number of reductions, and move on. Please. If you've got questions about other stuff on the list, hit me with it in the comments.

"110 FEWER positions" in this year's Central Administration budget? Uh, no. I don't think so. Nice try, keeeds.

We just did this in Naked Actual Factual Facts!, but subtraction is so much fun that I can't resist doing it again, this time including a hard-to-read chart. Dark blue is central administration in 2010-11, light blue is central administration in 2009-10. The difference between the two is that one pair of columns includes coaches for both years, and the other excludes coaches for both years. You'll note in both cases, dark blue is a little bit ahead of light blue.

357 - 116.5 = 240.5 Central Administration FTEs for 2009-10. The district, for 2010-11 has reported that they'll have 246.6 Central Administration FTEs. Well, whaddya know!

When you compare 2009-10 (without coaches) to 2010-11 (without coaches), there are more Central Administration FTEs in 2010-11 than there were in 2009-10.

Central Administration got a little bit fatter. Again. And tried to cheat the numbers on the scale by setting the scale incorrectly. Again.

Crappy! Chart! Thursday! Simple Cons: "The Levy Goes Directly to the Classroom"

2010-10-20T23:07:00.001-07:00

District Statement:

“$16.8 of the levy funds are committed to the new teacher’s contract – these dollars go directly to teachers (and therefore the classroom)”

Naked Actual Factual Facts!

$2.4 milllllllion bucks of the teacher’s contract – 5% of the entire supplemental levy and almost 15% of $16.8 million mentioned – will go to “implementing” the contract, which includes adding 3 jobs not in schools, but in… Central Administration.

Truthy SuperAnalysis™

Totally truthy until the dash! After the dash – a telltale sign of wavering levels of truthiness in SPS – the “facts” get a leetle less… factual.
If you buy that the whole teacher’s contract goes “directly” to teachers (and “therefore” the classroom), I have some timeshares near Hanford to sell you (priced to move!).

Crappy! Chart! Thursday! Simple Cons Multi-Edition! The Explanation!

2010-10-20T22:56:00.000-07:00

A friend and I very occasionally played a game in high school called: Convince Someone To Give You Their Lunch. The idea was that despite having brought lunch, you conned another kid into giving you their lunch (no threats of any sort were allowed). Was it obnoxious, inappropriate and unethical? Well… sure. But it was also pretty fun.

And it was so easy. People are so nice. They want to believe. Which means that quite often, suckering them takes little to no effort. You can string two unrelated sentences together: “My mom went to Atlanta. I don’t have my lunch” and without having lied (precise, unabridged version of truth: my mom went to Atlanta weeks ago to run a race and has long since returned and never makes my lunch anyway, which, by the way, is in my locker), have left loads of room for the listener to infer all kinds of nonsense. Most people jumped straight to the conclusion that a perfectly able-bodied teenager was helpless in the face of mom being away and so without mommy to make it, had no lunch at all – and possibly no breakfast, either (I didn’t add that I’d made my own lunch since 2nd or 3rd grade – I was the last of 4 kids). And they’d just… give me their lunches. Sometimes I’d hit the same target more than once, and to my amazement, despite the fact that I almost always admitted I’d been running a con on a bet once I won, the con would work a second time. On the same person. Who already knew I’d just been working them over to win a bet the first time I did the same thing to them.

However questionable the ethics of our little game may have been, the lessons I learned from it came in handy when I needed to get a Zimbabwean bank to open during a strike. And look, if you need a third world bank to open in a strike, it's nice to have some skillz to make it happen.

On a simple con like my lunch con, you need to keep three things in mind: chutzpah, truth, implication.

You gotta have the chutzpah to brazen it out and say true but unrelated things that will create inferences (remember: I didn’t imply it, suckahs, you inferred it) in the mind of the person you’re conning (also: using a narrow sliver of truth, instead of a lie, will allow you to keep things straight in your mind). It will be hard not to feel a little bit bad hoodwinking a nice, trusting person. But with practice, the twinge in your conscience will dwindle and let you enjoy the perks of Being A Horrible Person.

Also, look, before you call me dreadful… well, okay. Maybe I am. Still. This is the sort of thing that happens when public schools don’t keep nerds adequately challenged. And I’m talking about running a con, not being nice to puppies and babies. So. Keep your eye on the ball and let’s keep moving.

My youthful experiences with running small-potato lunchroom cons did not, sadly, give me a spidey sense for when I myself am being conned (I can be pretty gullible, and usually, I don’t really care if I’m being conned or not), but it did give me the ability, sometimes, to spot a con and appreciate its structure.

Which (finally!) gets me to my point: SPS is quite, quite practiced at the kind of simple con I used to run at lunch. They’re not ninja-level, but on simple cons, they do okay. They have a secret weapon that the rest of us don’t get: people are too harried not to trust the school district – so they’ll be busy, ask themselves “why would a public school district lie?”, take a look at their overloaded schedule and just… let it go. Basically, SPS gets a serious boost because people want to believe. (I wish I had a secret weapon like that. Instead…I have goats.)

Anysnoozles, SPS’s all-time favorite is linking two unrelated truths and allowing inference to brew and stew. They go to that well again and again (and again. And again).

Let’s chart it, shall we? The format will be slightly different than the usual difficult-to-read powerpoint exported directly from excel. Instead we'll run with several issues, each in its own post, and within the post divided into three categories:

District Statement (pretty much like what it sounds like)

Naked Actual Factual Facts! (me trying to convey the facts minus as much snark as possible)

Truthy SuperAnalysis!™ (um... truthful analysis. Possibly not as super as the TM and exclamation point would like it to be.)

And because... Halloween is coming up? I'm really cranky and tired? I've missed so many Crappy! Chart! Thursday! charts, including a long-promised sequel on performance management? Well, for whateve reason, I've finally gotten off my charting rear, and I've got a coupla days of workbook examples for Everyday Cons™, SPS-style.

More Importantfully Impactful

2010-09-24T22:10:00.000-07:00

Yes. I am making fun of all of you who say “impactful.”

Are there made-up words that still, somehow, give better expression and meaning? Sure, but they’re often poetic, and I’m pretty sure ee cummings is not going to rise from his unpunctuated grave and sign off on "impactful" as being even slightly poetic or expressive. So. Please. I ask you, not for the love of grammar (because… meh. I can’t get myself all worked up about dangling participles and split infinitives), but for the love of beauty in language: cut it out. And for those of you in the EDUCATION BUSINESS using the word (dudes. You have access to people who care and know about dangling participles and gerunds gone wild): it makes you look like buzzword bandwagoneering buffoons. So, different angle, same message: stop it.

Follow-up Crappy! Chart!

2010-09-16T13:10:00.001-07:00

This chart is hard to read, so I've also posted the slide on dropbox.

Like or don't like capacity management and the NSAP, preliminary research indicates it's not really working out as planned. Or, you know, "working."

The 17 schools have 9,944-ish students at them (and look, the current numbers at these schools are shifting, so take it as a ballpark), and they were under-budgeted by 700+? That's closing in on a 10% miss, which seems... high. Although, let's keep in mind that for the district, coming within 10% of the target has, in the past, counted as "meeting" the target. Dude, I'm pretty sure that we're not going to tell district kids that coming within 10% of an "A" counts as an "A" (because... it's a "B"), so why does district management get grade inflation? Oh, right. It's like the joke about dogs licking their balls. Because they can.

Anyhoodles, I seem to remember something about the APP split being because Lowell was sooooo overcrowded. But, hmmm. In 2008-09, Lowell had 528 kids enrolled, and now it has 542. Yeah, splitting up a program really fixed that bit of overcrowding. Brills, daaaahling, absolutely brilliant.

Crappy! Chart! Thursday! & the NSAP!

2010-09-15T14:41:00.000-07:00

Um. Yeah. It's Crappy! Chart! Thursday! and I still got almost nothin' in the way of actual charts.

Although, let me take a moment to brag (and draw your attention away from the not-very-data-rific chart) and say that Crazy Goat Lady emerged victorious from the "who wore it better" chart-off! Woooooooooo! And it was a scientific poll of over 10 people (6 or so may have voted twice. Still. Scientific!).

So, what I do have? Still. No. Sequel.

However, there's all this fuss about Garfield being over-subscribed, so I started to wonder: what other schools are oversubscribed? And so I looked up 14 schools I suspected might be over-enrolled, and guess what? I found: 14 schools that were over-enrolled (based on functional capacity). I got the numbers because I am like a stealth super-espionage-y... person. Okay, I used that super-secret-spying instrument called: The Telephone. Obviously, my sample cannot claim to be super-duper-scientific, but even so, it doesn't really make me think that the New Student Assignment plan is as super-duper-scientific as the district marketed it as being. I keep typing "super." I don't know why. Maybe the people who voted that I have problems have a point.

If we're going to be fair for a moment (sigh. If we must), you have to note that there will be a certain number of people who are unhappy no matter how carefully a new student assignment plan is executed. So, what's the reasonable level of pissed-off-ness? 5%? 10%? I would think under 10%. 10% would represent 4,500-ish kids, and if you look at it by number of kids... that's really too many kids getting screwed over by a new plan, even in Year 1. So... what's a good number? I myself would say under 2,000 kids, which would be under 5%. Maybe that's too little? I'm not sure. But that would be what I would aim for, in terms of not pleased with results.

These 14 schools have around 8,500 kids at them. Remove Garfield and you've still got over 6,500 kids at ridiculously over-crowded schools. I think even if you say 10% is an acceptable level of Year 1 unhappiness, you've exceeded your unhappy limit.

If your school has been stuffed to the gills, how happy would you be? I'd think at least a wee bit annoyed. Not at the parents and kids who came in, but at the district for doing a lousy job of planning.

Also, in a digression of a semi-different note and because I really have no other way in mind to wrap up this post: I would kind of love to see what happened if SPS management turned into a wedding planning company. I think they could get their own reality show for that: Worst Wedding Planners In The World. Or at least an Almost Live skit. If Almost Live was still around.

Sliders Instead of a Sequel

2010-09-10T12:00:00.000-07:00

So, it turns out that the first couple of days of school are a little nuts, especially when you throw in hosting a birthday party for a 5th grader, helping coach a couple of soccer practices, getting the other kid to after-school activities, and a little PTA crud. That's a long way of saying that I don't have Crappy! Chart! Thursday!: The Sequel! just yet.

What I do have, though, is a way to make your weekend happier (as long as you don't keep kosher, because this is about as kosher as a bacon-and-cheese-wrapped crustacean): Spam sliders.
Yes, you read that right. Before you get grossed out at the super-tacky-Spam-ness of the concept, allow me to point out that Spam sliders are served by a celebrated local food truck, Marination Mobile. My kids looooooove Marination Mobile and their Spam sliders (if I was pointing you to a menu item, I'd point you to their tacos). It's gotten all kinds of foodie press. Their sliders are pictured below, with one of their tacos.

So... maybe Spam sliders have a little cred? Okay, they're still pretty ridiculous. But they are also quite, quite tasty. And you can make them at home, although you will have to be willing to stare down the grocery clerk when you purchase slider buns, Spam and cabbage and you get a "what they hell are you going to do with that?" look, because... well, it'll happen. Either that, or you'll have to go to a couple of grocery stores and purchase the makings separately.

If you're wondering why I made Spam sliders, it's because my boy asked if I would make them for his birthday party. And I'm kind of a sucker.

Spam Sliders: An Actual Recipe

Ingredients:

-Can of Spam (or more, depending how many you want. You can get 8-ish sliders per can of Spam)

-Slider buns

-Soy sauce

-Sugar

-Cole Slaw (a long note on the cole slaw: go with your favorite recipe, but make sure it's tart and go very light on the mayo - this cole slaw shouldn't be even a little gloppy. It should be more like a tart cabbage salad. Remember, it's going on top of fried Spam. I use a small green cabbage sliced very, very thinly, half a red onion, a grated carrot, 1/2 a cup of red wine vinegar that I reduce by half, and toss in mayo a little at a time until it tastes and looks right. I soak the red onion in water and vinegar to make it tarter and to take the onion-y bite out a little).

Directions:

Turn the oven on to 275-ish, and pop in as many slider buns as Spam slices you'll be frying. Slice the Spam into 1/4" ish slices (you don't want to go thinner than that, but you don't want much fatter, either), and pop them into a frying pan, on medium heat. While they start to cook, mix about a quarter cup of soy sauce with maybe a teaspoon-ish of sugar. Brush the spam lightly with the soy sauce mixture. When it's brown on one side, flip it, brush the other side with soy sauce, and fry until both sides are browned. Flip one more time, for about thirty more seconds.

Put the Spam on the warm slider buns, top with cole slaw, and serve.

Crappy! Chart! Cagematch!: SPS vs. Crazy Goat Lady... with Voting!

2010-09-05T10:54:00.000-07:00

You should read this. I've included a wee .jpeg so you can admire its crappy-chartness right here, right now.

If you scroll down to about page 3 on the link, you can admire, in better resolution, the district's very own crappy! chart!. Strategies (and this is for realsies, not me goofing around with Satiric Bureaucratic Titles) include "Ensure Excellence in Every Classroom" and "Strengthen Leaders System-Wide." Which sounds alot like "Make Stuff Better for kids" and "Make Stuff Better," just with Self-Important Capitalization And Titling. I've popped the other day's crappy chart in, as well, so you can contemplate the difference between a spoof "analysis" of Performance Management and a professionally produced summary of The Accomplishments Of The Strategic Plan.It's hard not to notice the SPS's luuuuurve for Making Every Little Thing into An Acronym-o-rific Title. And also that "Status" doesn't really mention any "results." I know. Picky, picky.

Anyway, the poll's in the sidebar. Vote away, even if you're a dead Chicagoan who's already voted twice.

Crappy! Chart! Thursday (ish)! Fun with Performance Management History!

2010-09-02T21:08:00.000-07:00

Seattle Public Schools is, we're told, All About Accountability. The daily reality is... hmmm. Much different. Still. Let's pretend we've got accountability. While we're at it, I'm going to pretend I can afford the you-must-be-joking level expensive but extremely fun McQueen peep toes with bedazzled skull decorations. Because ridiculous shoes make me happy. Sigh. Where were we? Right. Accountability.

The Performance Management Framework is part of The Strategic Plan. It's intended to create additional transparency, further its goal of everyone being accountable, and basically... make stuff better. Individual schools and the district as a whole are supposed to have annual, clear evaluations in the form of "report cards" which will allow everyone to see how they're doing. High-performing schools making progress with students can earn additional autonomy, and we can all have a look at what they're doing that helps their students succeed. Schools with poor performance and struggling student progress will receive additional assistance and supervision from the central office. The MAP test would allow everyone to gauge how efforts are working, and make adjustments accordingly, at multiple points during the year. For all schools participating, there would be additional funding based on their performance needs.

This all sounds fine in theory. Don't you want struggling schools to get additional help so their students do better? Shouldn't schools that are doing well by their students get some additional decision-making freedom? Do you hate babies, puppies, mothers and apple pie? Hint: You should only be answering no to the last question.

The idea behind Performance Management makes sense. The transparency it would give to everyone - to staff at schools, to the central office, to the community - would be a good thing. The increased ability to compare what efforts do and don't work and what sticking points might be could be great. And for those of us who only clean our proverbial houses (ahem. Not that I know anything about that in the literal sense) when we think someone might be coming over, it would hopefully promote increased accountability.

The SE Initiative, a district intervention in 3 schools (Aki Kurose, Rainier Beach HS and Cleveland HS), was the initial pilot for Performance Management.

All three schools have struggled with academics. Aki and Rainier Beach have been bleeding enrollment over the course of the last decade. The basic goal of the SE Initiative was to make things better at all three schools. Yes, the official wording was significantly more pompous than "make things better." The district explicitly stated that the SE Initiative would "inform the development of a comprehensive school performance framework." (p11, and yes, a long way of saying "it's a pilot")

So, did the SE Initiative work? On numerous fronts, no.

Enrollment is up a little bit at Aki and Rainier Beach. So that worked... a little. Even so, Aki and Rainier Beach are both woefully under capacity. I will briefly note that the glittery magic of functional capacity analysis reduced the capacity of under-enrolled schools like Aki and Rainier Beach, but conveeeeeeniently found that over-crowded schools like View Ridge and Schmitz Park had puh-lenty of room. Right. Anyway.

Academically? The program failed. Academics went up and down a little bit, but never hit the "met goal" mark (which meant coming within 10 points of the goal).

And transparency/accountability? Failed. The best document that I have reviewing the overall performance of the SE Initiative is one I obtained through super-sleuthing (okay. Someone sent it to me). And it pretty much... sucks. Take a look at it. Three years, and the best analysis they can provide is "progress made (y/n)" and "goal achieved (y/n)"?

No line item for total annual project cost, much less a line item breakdown of how the money was spent at each school, or whether the spending moved the student achievement needle. No note of tactics. Just whether there was progress or if the target was met. And I'll say again: the target was considered "met" if they came within 10 points of it. That's much like saying I got an "A+" because I came within 10 points of it. Which would be a... "B+". Still. Whatever. Those are the metrics they settled on. Maybe that's okay.

How-ev-uh. Given the significant lack of relevant information, at some point, you'd think someone would say, "the analysis of this pilot sucks." And since the SE Initiative was intended to "inform" a larger, rigorous performance framework, who in hell would say "Looks great! Let's... expand this!" ?

Unfortunately, SPS's board and management.

In 2009-10, Performance Management expanded to add 9 more schools, bringing the total number of schools piloting the "framework" to 12. They were:

1. Dearborn Park Elementary

2. Maple Elementary

3. Olympic Hills Elementary

4. Roxhill Elementary

5. Schmitz Park Elementary

6. Stevens Elementary

7. Aki Kurose Middle School

8. McClure Middle School

9. Mercer Middle School

10. Ballard High School

11. Cleveland High School

12. Rainier Beach High School

Results? Dunno.

Spending? Dunno. Well, publicly, dunno. The FAQ helpfully says that the Alliance for Education helped "support" the effort of creating the scorecards (dudes. For realsies? You needed a freaking grant to think up the scorecards?) with a grant of... oh, wait. They don't say how much it costs. However, a handy-dandy public records request indicated that the 2009-10 spending for Performance Management was $2.8 millllllllion ($1.5m from baseline and $1.3m from the Gates Foundation... which must have been passed through the Alliance for Education and then on to the district? Maybe. I dunno.)

Overall Goals? Dunno. Well... presumably to make things better for students? Let's go with that. We'll call "Make Stuff Better for Kids" a goal. In district-speak it would probably be more like "delivering on our commitment of ensuring a high quality school for every student so that all students graduate from high school prepared for College!, Career! and Life!"

Tactics Implemented to Achieve Goals? Dunno.

Any Tactics Changed to Optimize Results? Dunno.

To be fair(ish), it's possible that all of this will be reported on in detail in the Quarterly Strategic Plan Update. It's also possible that I will get my very own fairy godmother who will put the bedazzled-skull McQueens under my pillow the very same night that rigorous detail on Performance Management progress to date is publicly given. I don't know with absolute certainty whether either of this things will or won't happen. If you don't like obscenity, skip to the next paragraph, because I can't say this without swearing: I can sure as fuck guess what's likely, and sadly, it doesn't include a pair of kick-ass McQueens under my goddamn pillow.

So what do I know? I know that I can provide metrics (and a crappy chart!) for what I don't know, and then measure and benchmark the lack of information across multiple areas. Wooooooooo! Accountability, here we come!

Given the sketchy details and assessment for the SE Initiative, which involved 3 schools instead of 12, I'm not going to hold my breath that we're going to get more detail than I've provided in the above chart.

So. There seems to be a leeeeeeettle misunderstanding, by SPS management, of what a "pilot" is. In most places, a pilot is a small-scale project used to test the design/feasibility of a larger-scale project. Design issues in the pilot are often remedied if the project is moved forward to a larger scale. Often, a pilot provides quantitative proof of the viability of moving forward on a larger scale. This is how most people and groups think of pilot projects.

For SPS? We just keep expanding, baby. Changing course because of "data" and "results" is for sissies. And speaking of expanding...

For 2010-11, Performance Management will be rolled out in an additional 25 schools, bringing the total schools participating to 37. $5.1 milllllllllllion additional dollars will be allocated to participating schools, with grants ranging from $440,250 (Cleveland, with a 2009-10 FRL of 66.8%) to $24,000 (Brighton, 2009-10 FRL of 80.1%).

Given the financial shortfall in the operating budget, and the belt-tightening going on in schools across the district, you kinda have to ask: where's this five point two milllllllion dollars coming from?

As it happens, I know the answer to that, from page 10 of this presentation. It comes from the following funds: Title I ($2m), LAP ($.5m) and FRL ($2.1m).

But, kids, that's going have to be for the Crappy! Chart! Thursday! Fun with Performance Management History: The Sequel! That's right. There's (maybe. If I feel like it) going to be the first ever Crappy! Chart! Sequel!

It's historic. It's thrilling. It's sunny out.

Later.

Crazy People for Pemco Commercials, Ahoy!

2010-08-28T09:06:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned that my continued research about the antics of the Seattle Public Schools makes me feel a little like a whacko crank.

Hey! Guess what! Even the [fill in blank] said that, yup, yup, it shorely was a [fill in mis-management, mis-conduct or mis-whatevs] to [remainder of issue, often involving management or school board]! Lather, rinse, repeat. It would be ridiculous, at this point, to be surprised.

If my OCD-like behavior in following school district issues was my only quirk, I could dismiss it as a wee, not-quite-charming eccentricity. I do make a great chocolate cake, and a truly delicious chocolate cake makes at least one bit of weirdness almost charming. But even delicious cake probably isn't enough to balance out the pile-up of quirks I seem to be acquiring. I play hockey, which often raises an eyebrow or two. And... well, I have goats.
So aside from me proving my bonafides to the Seattle Goat Mafia by whacking a couple of unsuspecting rhododendrons (and boxwoods. and other shrubs. It was like the Arbor Day Massacre in my back yard), having goats has also involved gathering fresh forage.

Which sounds harmless, right?

It is, in its own way. Goats can live on straw, a mineralized salt (loose or block) and plenty of fresh water. But they're browsers, and they do like them some fresh green stuff to munch on. As it happens, they adore blackberry leaves (and blackberries are classified as a noxious weed). So, on the plus side, I'm doing my citizen-y duty by removing blackberries and feeding them to my goats. On the minus? I now tool around on errands with an improvised cane carrier (it's a lot like a log carrier, only I made it myself with duct tape and "sewing"), leather gloves and pruners. When I spot a lush patch of blackberry while out and about, I stop the car, leap out, clip away, and load up the car with blackberry canes. Sometimes I even load up on top of my hockey bag.

Crazy? Leeeetle bit. I wasn't much thinking about it until the other day, and someone more or less said... "wait. You do all this school board stuff, right?" And I nodded. "And you play hockey?" And I nodded. "And you have... goats?" And I nodded. And then I realized that yes, I am a freaking Pemco commercial.

"Hey, crazy northwest hippie hockey playing school board haranguing goat-keeping housewife, we're a lot like you. A little diff... no. No, we're not. Because you, lady, are insane, not just 'a little different.' "

Crappy! Chart! Thursday (ish)! How Bad? Purdy Bad

2010-08-17T10:45:00.000-07:00

So, the songs I sing about Seattle Public Schools have some regular lyrics and themes that crop up again and again. Usually there are lyrics (and themes!) about the overgrown central administration. There are ballads about the lack of bona-fide scrutiny from the school board. I sing about using money that should directly benefit students for other purposes (district’s imagined reply, a very non-punk-rock response: “because we here at Seattle public schools are committed to an excellent education for every student, we are, in accordance with the strategic plan, strengthening our infrastructure and systems to better support our teachers in their important work.”). I carry on about misdirection and a lack of honesty. There are heartfelt lines about the milllllllions of mis-spent money. And, of course, there are crappy charts. And because that's all so cheerful, here's a happy picture of some beautiful beach weather:

Okay, it's totally gray and grim. But pretty. Anyway. That's a whole lotta schtuff to squeeze into one song, when you think about it. Maybe I should make a prize for the person who comes up with the best poem/song using all those themes. Obviously, it wouldn’t be a haiku (although: serious bonus points if you can get all that into a haiku).

As an aside (okay, as another aside), you have to admit, it would be pretty fun to if Dr. Evil sang that song. He'd get great inflection on millllllllions. He would probably make it something of a love song, because Dr. Evil would have to appreciate dipshit bureaucratic maneuverings that keep the public in the dark and spent said public's money in idiotic ways, but, well. Okay. I’ll stop there. Still. It could be fun, is all I’m sayin’.

Anyway. With all the similarly-themed harping that I do, I sometimes feel a bit… repetitive. And insane. My dad sometimes calls me Dona Quixote (Thanks, Dad. That makes me feel so much less crazy). I worry that maybe I’ve gotten a little too much of an axe to grind, and can't see things with even a veneer of objectivity.

And then (cue the clouds opening, rainbows pouring out, and Dr Evil singing my song, accompanied by angels. Or maybe sharks. Singing sharks. With friggin' lasers on their heads.) I read the two reports on the Seattle Public School district that the state auditors office issued this year. Well, I read them again. Don't look at me funny. It's not like I was reading Anna Karenina.

Just in case you like to read light novels for your summer reading (weirdo), I'll chart out some of the findings. Let's start with comparing accountability reports - we'll take a look at how many areas the auditor examined for each of the state's largest districts (plus Bellevue, because I feel like it) and how many areas they found problems in. Guess who had problems in every area the auditor's office examined? I'll give you a hint: it's not Vancouver. And, in chart number 2, you can learn that only 7 districts in the state have had some kind of reported finding every year for the last 4 years. In that time, approximately 120 other districts had at least one finding, but didn't have them every. single. year. Guess which large district is one of 7 district in the state to have adverse findings every. single. year? It ain't Tacoma. So this second one is kind of interesting, but I'm not really sure how important it is, or if it distracts from serious raised in the audit reports. Is district size a relevant issue here? Sunnyside (~6,000 kids) and Snohomish (~10,000) aren't huge, but they don't qualify as teeny, either. Vashon and Quillayute Valley (which I probably spelled incorrectly) are both over 1,000 but under 2,000 (so... mid-small?), and Darrington and Tahola are both below 500 (pretty teeny).

Could persistent compliance/operational issues in smaller districts be due to a lack of the specialized resources needed to self-audit? It seems like it would, but then, of course... there's SPS (which has its own internal auditor). Go ahead and start working on your haikus to explain that anomaly. I'm going to go to bed, and dream of Dr. Evil singing my songs, and consider whether sharks or angels would be better accompanists.

Cagematch Crappy! Chart! Thursday!: Irritating vs. Important

2010-07-28T22:14:00.000-07:00

Okay. Technically, this is not a Crappy! Chart! Thursday! However, it's summer. The SPS's official response to the recent reports from the State Auditor are pretty much a phoned-in Charlie-Brown-grown-up wha-wah-wha-wah-excellence-wah-wha-accountability. I feel pretty okay about not including an actual chart.

Plus, I should admit: I loathe Powerpoint. Yes, I use it to illustrate nerdy crud, but... I really, really don't like it.

Anyway.

This summer, I've been thinking quite a bit about the difference between things that are important, and things that are intensely, maddeningly irritating. Sometimes, it's hard to tell the difference, but mostly? Not. As it happens, I've been getting my face rubbed in both this summer (and yet, it's still been a pretty good summer), so I've been given plenty of opportunity to make sure that I can differentiate.

Important? Curly had surgery last week. It was "routine" (an odd description of a patient experience of surgery if I ever heard one, no matter how workaday it is for the doctor), and went well, but I'm the kid's mom, and it sent me into orbit with anxiety. Which made some sense, considering that the kid has both asthma and multiple drug allergies, and thus, my anxiety about her reaction to anesthesia had at least a small amount of rational brain attached. It went well, and she's doing fine, which is lovely. That kid is one tough nut, and as it turns out, not shy about milking my anxiety for extra popsicles. In addition to Curly's surgery, I have a seriously ill relative, which puts a wholelotta stuff into perspective.

Irritating? Just after I wrote checks for ice hockey for the kids, the dryer and vacuum showed serious signs of being on their last legs. Really? You want to break right now, you stupid inanimate objects? I want to use that money to buy skates for my ever-growing children, not a goddamn new... vacuum. Who the hell ever wants to buy a new vacuum? Not me, that's for certain. Incredibly irritating. Why now? Why both? What the hell did I ever do to the dryer that it chooses now to give up and die an impressively squeaky death?

Important? The State Auditor calling out the School Board for ineffective oversight and district management for ineffective management, resulting in the worst auditor's report ev-uh (well. okay. for at least as long as they've posted them online - since 1997).

The auditor issued two reports this year that take place #1 and #2 for the highest number of adverse findings for SPS ev-uh (and when you say ev-uh, say it like it rhymes with leath-uh). In addition to being SPS's personal worsts, the two reports issued this year are the worst reports that the auditor has issued for any district in the state (let's go ahead and enunciate properly and say: EVER.).

In fact, it looks as if in the State Auditor Report School District Hall of Shame, Seattle not only has the gold, silver and bronze for the state, but has 50% of the top 10 worst spots. Ouch. That's not really the kind of "excellence" the Strategic Plan is aiming for.

Reports from the State Auditor like the two issued this year make one seriously question the ability of district management to effectively manage the district (and yes, saying this I mean: more seriously than before) and the board's ability to provide any kind of real oversight.

Irritating? The Superintendent's use of her district-issued credit card to pay for a catered retirement party. Do district employees who have devoted their careers to the district deserve some sincere recognition? Absolutely. But... in a year (2008-09 was what the audit covered) in which 5 schools were closed, teachers were RIF'd and school budgets cut, is a catered party paid for with public money appropriate? Methinks... not. With great respect to people who have given their professional lives over to serving the district and its students, I still say no. That the Superintendent used her district credit card to pay for the whole shebang? Should be fine. I mean, district staff has reassured the public that it's all okay, and traditional, and it's the same district staff that's assured us that nope, nope, Central Administration is not experiencing serious growth as schools are experiencing cuts (of course, that growth was "reduced" by counting somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 millllllion Central Administration expenses as "teaching," despite the fact that it's not teaching. Still. Nothing to see here. Move along).

Muddying the waters further is that in addition to a party being an unallowed expense on a district card (weird. Who's so uptight as to not authorize taxpayer money to par-tay?) is that it also appears the district violated the contract that the district negotiated with the unionized food services for the district. Uh, oops. It's more than a leeetle awkward when it's revealed that even district leadership is incapable of following their own rules and contracts.

Also awkward? That the auditor, whose reports usually take pains to find something nice to say about the district they're issuing a report about ("That Ken in HR makes a great cup of coffee. Too bad the department is in shambles."), publicly noted, sans compliments, that the "District's Board and Management have placed public resources at risk" is, well... actually, that's important to take note of in the middle of a bunch of irritating findings.

Still, I have enough perspective, despite being peevish, to say that: a) $3,800 is not a whole lot of money in a budget of over half a billlllllion bucks, and b) it is possible that there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this audit finding (although... I might be willing to bet, say $3,800 that it's not probable).

So, okay. That's it for Irritating vs. Important. Not a chart in sight. I have, however, included a couple of pictures of my whacked-out goats. It's almost the same, right?

Olive & Abelard

2010-07-19T16:07:00.001-07:00

I don't think I've ever typed: these are my goats. And yet, these are my goats, Olive and Abelard. Abelard is standing up. The adjustment to life with livestock has left me kind of quiet lately.

What Would Be More Fun?

2010-06-26T19:27:00.000-07:00

What’s more fun than taking 3 kids camping for a couple of days, waking up on the morning of departure at 6:30a.m. and packing up quietly while the kids sleep until waking them at the last minute, hurling camping equipment into the car because the last minute really, really was the very last minute, squeaking onto the ferry as it's about to cast off (literally. The crew had to open the gate that prevents people from driving into the water to let us on and the ferry was moving as I turned the engine off), driving home, painting a shed, priming its trim, sealing its floor and measuring out and cutting studs to frame an interior wall?
There’s a right answer, and it is:Lying on the floor with a glass of wine.

Actually, the camping was really fun (unless excited grade school children are not your thing, in which case... well, it wouldn't be any fun at all).

But lying on the floor after such a festival of outdoor wholesomeness is notsobad.

And indoor plumbing after a couple of days of cold taps and outhouses that were not enthusiastically limed? Rocks.

The End Is Nigh

2010-06-19T21:25:00.000-07:00

There are things that I’m good at. You want a mouthy nerd? I’m your girl. You're looking for someone to help you navigate the perils of the vicious shoe hyenas braying for marked-down Louboutins and the joys of discovering your very own Pucci, marked down 90%, at the Mario’s Super Bowl Sale? Again, I would be a good person to call. Review of the layout of the Roman Forum or highlights of Italian Romanesque architecture? You’re in luck. Someone to tell you where to buy crazily delicious chocolate or pastries? Yum. Can do. Are these useful skillz? Well, it depends how much you like chocolate, old architecture and reduced-price fashion. If you like none of the above, despite the fact that there is clearly something wrong with you, we could still talk hockey and Don Cherry’s jackets.

Anyway. I am, as I've sometimes mentioned, accident prone.

Yep. That very simply frame was hard for me. Handy, I am not. Still, I got that sucker up there without sending myself to the ER.

So I probably wouldn’t be the woman you would call for home improvement projects, or to walk through an active construction site with you. There would be nails to step on, screwdrivers that could slip in stabby ways, saws that could skitter the wrong way, ladders that could be knocked over… there’s just a lot that can go wrong. There’s a reason I play hockey, and that’s because although there’s physical contact, I am covered in pads and be-helmeted. Well, and also because it’s crazy-fun.

But, I digress. Again.

Our anniversary goats will be arriving at the end of the month, which is looming. We now have a shed, but… our salvage-yard windows require caulking, the stupid shed requires priming and painting, fencing has to be put in, and Stumpy felt strongly that the shed required a floor.

So… on Wednesday, I caulked (that stuff is weird. I felt like I was outlining the windows with toothpaste. Really sticky toothpaste). Thursday? I made a frame for a dutch door we'd found marked down, and then primed it and the door (the nine window panes on the top half of the door struck me as a very bad idea by the time I finished priming). Friday? More priming.

You can see the tricksy, nasty way the top of that stupid door wanders away from the bottom half, waiting for unwitting (or dim-witted, take your pick) people installing floors to look at the bottom half of the door before they stand up.

And today? Feeling foolishly intrepid, I went to find floor tile remnants with the kids today – and at the price of about 25 cents a square foot, realized that I could save money that could possibly then be plowed into a trip to Italy, where I could eat chocolate, ogle fashion and tour old churches. Thinking of these things, I bought those stupid floor tiles, some special stinky glue, and a plastering trowel.

And then I attempted to install a floor. By myself.

I’m pretty sure that me going all DIY and trying to install a floor is right up there with “plague of locusts” as a coming sign of the apocalypse.

Although, since I hit my head phenomenally hard on the top half of the dutch door (which I now bear a grudge) when I stood up to get my face away from the floor full of stinky glue, it could just be the aches in my head talking.

The Goat-i-versary

2010-06-16T21:18:00.000-07:00

Stumpy and I are about to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary. Apparently, it's The Crystal Anniversary (really? Laaaaaaame.), but we are celebrating it by... acquiring goats.

That's right. Goats. We've built a goat shed in our miniscule back yard (goats are much like me in that they are both contrary and prone to getting pneumonia, and so need a little house to keep them out of the nasty weather - and they are NOT coming in my house), are planning out fencing, and the actual livestock will soon be arriving. The kids (human ones) and I are duking it out about names - do we keep the current names of the goats, or re-christen them? It's been a lively dinner-time debate. You could argue that I fulfilled the crystal portion of the gift by buying windows at a salvage yard. But it seems like kind of a stretch. And usually, come any gift-giving time, I am mercenarily pricing out impractical shoes (that have just gone on sale, ma certo), not second cutting orchard grass, salvaged windows and salt licks.

So, yep. We're joining the Seattle Goat Mafia. Because nothing says "happily married" like belonging to Seattle's Cosa Goatra.

SPS Administration and Don Cherry’s jackets: Bad Choices All Around

2010-05-29T19:49:00.001-07:00

Many a Crappy! Chart! Thursday! has come and gone with nary a peep from me. Look, stuff has been goin’ on. It may seem weird, but now and then I tear myself away from the thrill of staring at district finance figures and do Other Stuff.

And today, I don’t even have a crappy chart (it's not Thursday, anyway), just a little game to score for fun.

Squaring off? SPS’s total audit findings vs. the next 14 largest districts in the state’s audit findings, combined. SPS total students (as reported here, on OSPI): 46,430. The next 14 biggest districts total students: 310,288. Who will have more negative findings from the auditor? The suspense is... probably not even close to killing you. Still, have a drink (you might need it) and read on.

One of the other things I’ve been doing is watching hockey, which, if you watch it on CBUT (is there any other way to watch hockey?) also means watching Don Cherry’s jackets (which you can - and should - follow on this blog).

And… wow. I know the jackets are his gimmick and all, but still. Wow. Tonight he was wearing one that looked like the cracked-out love child of a New York City cab and Liberace, only worse (pictured below). It was… attention-getting. The jackets pictured above are a little understated by comparison.

And I will use this as a not-very-graceful lead-in to something else that got my attention: the recent State Auditor’s report on Seattle Public Schools.

All kinds of troubling shenanigans were highlighted, several of which have been brought to the district’s attention for years. That's right. Years. Imagine, just for a moment, how understanding your employer would be if they notified you of a serious error in your performance, and you continued to make it for years. Also, think of the interviews in which the Superintendent would say "you wouldn't run a business this way." And you would run a business by... repeatedly ignoring an auditor evaluating your operations? Uh, o-tay.

Anyhoo, in all the train-wreck-ish spectacle of the report, what really got my attention was this comment from the auditor:

“As a result [of errors and omissions], financial statement users do not have accurate information to evaluate and understand the financial position of the District.”

That's right. The district's financial reports are so riddled with errors and omissions that even complete nerds (because "financial statement user" is clearly code for "nerrrrrrrrd") can't get an accurate picture of what's going on. I sat there, staring at the screen, completely gobsmacked, in almost the exact same way that sometimes one is left speechless as Don Cherry talks about a good hit, and all you can do is stare at his jacket instead of watching the replay. And then I thought, Holy Incompetent Bozos, Batman!

And then I thought: maybe I’m being rather unfair. "Holy Incompetent Bozos" is a little on the bitchy side. Okay. It's a lot on the bitchy side. So I thought, maybe other districts have a bunch of unfavorable-seeming findings from the state auditor. Maybe other districts blow off the auditor’s findings, too.

So, it being cold and damp outside, I went through the State Auditor’s reports on the largest 15 districts in the state of Washington (okay. I was going to do the Top 20, but I got through 17 and abandoned ship because it was really, really boring), to see what other districts did. I scored it, to make it easy to play from home.

Score:
Number of unfavorable findings for Seattle: 7
Number of unfavorable findings for other 14 districts (I'll note, again: combined): 2

Hmm.

7 to 2. And that's not a score you want to be on the winning side of.

The score looks even worse when one considers that one of the unfavorable findings – for Northshore district, over documentation – amounts to only part of one of the findings for Seattle. And it looks even worse when one reads over other reports, and learns that other districts fix the problems that the auditor finds. Kent? Fixes the problems before they even get into the report. The auditor's there, looking through their financials, and says, "you know, it looks like this might be going on" and the Kent staff looks into and fixes it right then.

Not a single one of the other 15 largest districts in the state ignores the auditor's findings. They all take it seriously, and take steps to fix the problems that the auditor identifies.

I'm sure it's because other districts simply don't understand how to create a foundational framework that will ensure Excellence for All to effectively move forward with benchmarking best practices which will allow the issues the auditor has identified to be resolved.

So what will make at least 4 board members stand up and say: Enough, dudes? Don Cherry, speaking during public testimony? Actually, that's not a bad idea. Tonight's jacket might be enough to hypnotize them into taking decisive action.

Curse of the 1,000 Crunches

2010-05-23T22:07:00.000-07:00

Or: Kvetching About Lost's Final Season.

So, look, it's a commercial break and all, but I'd like, once again, to note my objections to the fact that the writers of Lost have regularly deviated from the classic storytelling device of ancient Greeks and Shakespeare: a hot guy running around without his shirt beats a deus ex machina any day. If it was good enough for Euripides, it should be good enough for pop culture.

But, no. This season, the devotees of daily sit-ups and eschewers of carbs and fat? 1) Have kept their shirts on, even in circumstances (like, walking down the street) in which it would make sense to remove their shirts and 2) have died. I call it curse of the 1,000 crunches. Sayid? Devoted to crunches. Also? Dead. Jin? Stuck with the regimen. Also? Dead. Sawyer? Look. Great dimples. Still quite fit. But I think he has allowed a cookie to pass his lips this season, and may have dropped to only 500 crunches a day. Also? His character is still alive. Same goes for Jack. The season has been awash in disappointing deaths and campy writing (in ways both good and bad, because sometimes camp is like a glitter-encrusted shoe - tasteless, but fun, but also in the genuinely bad - it looks like the writers took more than a few drunk days and let the interns do the writing).

For me, the disappointment culminated in the episode called Ab Aeterno. Despite my hopes for a hilarious montage of shirtless male abdomens, the episode was not all about highlighting six-packs and men behaving like shirts were kryptonite. So sad. That's been the freaking season.

I think the basic rule of thumb here will be that characters who've done their sit-ups are doooomed (Richard, that means you and your hidden stash of guy-liner), and characters who haven't (Claire! Because you were knocked up!) will survive. Place your bets; it's the very, very end (and a very special episode. With an end that you never! saw! coming!... if you were six and your mom allowed you to stay up that late).

Post-show note: Wrong about Richard, but the curse of the 1,000 crunches left Hurley in charge.

Calling It Even With the Girl Scouts

2010-05-16T21:25:00.001-07:00

I've had my issues with the Girl Scouts and the way those big-eyed twerps sell irresistible product that makes my pants really, really tight. It's possible that I have called them adorable little minions of Satan. Which, okay, might be getting a little vitriolic towards a bunch of little girls, but I can eat a box of Samoas so fast that I hardly know what's happened, and it goes straight to my ass. And, well, I don't have a lot of willpower about not eating delicious things, or saying no to big-eyed girls trying to raise money for their troop's camping trip (yes, I should probably write a check and not take the cookies. But the cookies are so good). It's probably a good thing that I actually enjoy exercise.

This year, however, as I began my ritual cursing of the Girl Scouts because my pants felt like too-tight sausage casings, something really, really nice happened.

The goal-scoring floodgates opened. At first, I couldn't figure out what had happened. I wasn't exercising. I hadn't been practicing. I hadn't been thinking about how to learn to make a move (something I am notorious for not being able to do. Tricksy on the ice, I am not). No. In fact, the only thing that I could think of that had changed was 5-10 additional pounds on my ass, which in hockey? Is not necessarily a bad thing. And the reason, besides regular winter cake-weight? Girl Scout cookies.

If it had only been a hat trick, one game, I might have still felt kind of resentful. But... this is braggy and show-offy and annoying, but it's never, ever going to happen to me again, so I may as well crow: I scored 5 goals in a game. And had an assist (same game). It would have qualified me for greedy pig status (it's rude to keep scoring after a hat trick, unless the score is close), but the game finished at 6-5, my team's win. And it kept happening. Hat trick. Goals and assists and goals and assists and... I was so happy. It didn't matter to me that a shrimpy, legally blind 8-year-old with a fear of the puck was tending net, because, look, you just shouldn't get choosy about what kind of goal to get happy about, especially when you and everyone on ice around you knows that you will never again score 5 goals in a game.

So I decided (and I'm sure this is very exciting) to call it even with those big-eyed, pernicious purveyors of pant-seam doom.

Although... my bathing suit is looking awfully small just about now.

Thanks, Mom

2010-05-09T10:45:00.000-07:00

In many ways, I take for granted the gifts my parents gave me, in part because those gifts are so deeply embedded in me, as a part of who I am.

My love of travel? Probably more than a leeetle related to criss-crossing the country in our old push-start VW van (if you didn’t park that thing pointing downhill, you were gonna be really, really sorry) and waking up in campgrounds all over the country to the smell of ashes, coffee and dew.

My relative unconcern with food as “good” (carrot sticks) or “bad” (chocolate cake), and subsequent enjoyment of food as part of my life? I do not recall my mother ever, ever saying anything like “a moment on the lips, forever on the hips” or remarking on my appearance in an unkind way (okay. There was the perhaps less-than-chic phase in which I was experimenting with black lipstick, boots and torn fishnets when she finally said, without actually criticizing my appearance, that I wasn’t allowed to buy any more black clothing). I do remember her regularly endorsing a day-following-birthday breakfast of birthday cake (with a big glass of milk). And, since she was a championship marathoner, the woman ate like a horse. Actually... she ate more than most horses, as marathoners are apt to.

Any feelings about sports being “girl sports” or “boy sports?” Uh, not so much. My mom signed me up for ice hockey when I was 5, and embroidered little flowers at the neckline of my jerseys. I played on almost exclusively on boys’ teams until I was about 12. My mom was a ferocious advocate of sports for girls, and for the reasonable application of Title IX, and she was a tremendous athlete herself. I wasn't kidding about the championship marathoner bit; she could run fast.

But of course, as a child and young woman, I didn’t think about it at all. I travelled. I ate happily. I played sports without worrying about what people would think. I took the gifts my mom gave me for granted, as I hope my own children will take my gifts to them for granted.

But I do not, as an adult, take those gifts, or the love that came with them, for granted.

As I raise my own children, I have near-constant, small realizations of how very much my parents, and my mom, gave to me.

And so I have to say: thank you, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day. You gave me, and all of your children, more than we can ever give back to you. I love you.

April Is Totally the Cruelest Month

2010-04-12T09:05:00.000-07:00

We had a balmy idyll of a weekend (well, except for the small part of it where I crunched numbers and trotted off to the community meetings of school board members for a little bit of advocacy. Yawn.). The air felt like a caress on the skin. Trees everywhere were haloed with a delicate verdant haze. The sun shone. The birds chirped. The kids bounced and chattered with sunny delight.

And yet, I thought of T.S. Eliot, never the cheeriest of poets:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire

And I thought: Boyfriend totally understood what happens to many a chick with a limited budget on a fine spring weekend. You enjoy the day. You feel the sun on your face, the breeze in your hair, but somewhere in all that pure, delicious physical enjoyment of the day, you realize that it would be really nice to, say, enjoy the spring evening and go on a date with your significant other. And then you think, it’d be fun to dress up for that. And then, you think through your closet while watching the lilac buds fattening in the sunlit air and think, dammit, I don’t have anything to wear that will make me feel as springy and fantastic as this. And then you think, well... just a couple of really cute accessories might do the trick. And then you think: no budget for that, cookie. And then you think of T.S. Eliot's lines about April. Or, well, I do. Is it materialistic and kind of revolting? You betcha.

Still. If I could sort out the budget problems blocking purchases of frivolous and impractical accessories, I might need a dress to go with the new accessories. Or, if it was spring luncheon instead of a date, a really bitchin’ giganto hat.

DIY Crappy Chart Results?

2010-04-09T19:33:00.000-07:00

I can't really say that I missed Seattle, or that I thought or talked about SPS much while I was away. We talked about biodiversity, and funky animals, plate lunches, spam musubi, shave ice, palm trees, chickens and fish. Curly and my boy made purchases at the Hanalei liquor store (spam musubi). I touched a computer once in two weeks, and it seemed like... one time too many.

Curly demonstrated her exceptional ability to get injured in seemingly safe situations by getting stung by a bee. While swimming with me, about 100 yards out from shore. A drowned bee floated into her, and stung her.

But I'm back now (despite both kids asking tempting and astute questions about homeschooling and Kauai real estate prices), and what I'd love to know is: did you nerd out on the WSS data? And if you did, what are your thoughts?

Bat-Signal for Nerds: DIY Crappy! Chart! Thursday!

2010-03-22T19:25:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be away for the next couple of weeks, and have no real plans to think about district data. Which is good, since Curly and my boy just roll their eyes when I say, "You know, I was thinking over the anomalies in the data..." (as we all say now and then. Right? Right?) and go back to talking about how much fun it would be to be alien pirates. I can see their point, really. Pirate aliens are much more interesting.

So, since I won't be churning out terrible, difficult to read charts... you can.

I went down for the count with something nasty right after the school board meeting last week. So I sat at my computer, feeling truly wretched and quite cross about it, and... tapped in the WSS allocations for almost every school in the district (nothing personal, homeschool, Interagency and Middle College, but sometimes enough is enough). Which means that you can run the data six ways from Sunday, starting on a Monday.

Obviously, please download the doc (if possible. I haven't tried it) before dorking around with the contents. If you'd rather just have me email you the spreadsheet, give me your address in the comments, and I will send it along. Eventually.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tEPEjCqm1PaHI4fpbGa9DyA&output=html

OR (and thank you, Dorothy, for the info, because I am shamefully clueless about this stuff):

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5541381/WSS%20data%20google%20docs.xls

Education Etiquette Gets Its Own Post + Title & LAP Info

2010-03-17T12:15:00.001-07:00

This isn't a new post. I went back to yesterday's post, and rather than tack an explanation of how district policy changes intersect with the district's undiscussed funding habits to the end of my ever-thrilling musings about how much effort to put into school lunches, and the delights of Vietnamese-style chicken salad, I decided to slap it up in its own post. Ta-da. Try to contain your excitement.

SPS receives a number of different federal and state grants to help support disadvantaged students. Whether or not a kid is in need of extra help is often measured by whether or not a kid qualifies for Free/Reduced Lunch (FRL). Free/Reduced Lunch information is generally used to get an idea of how many poor kids are at a school, which matters because academic disadvantages often follow financial ones. So when you see "FRL%" you're pretty much being told about how many poor kids are in the building. Is that over-simplifying? A little, but not a lot.

Three examples funds designed to help poor kids: Title I (federal), LAP (state), and FRL (which I know less about). I'm going to spend the most time on Title, a little on LAP, and virtually none on FRL funds.

Title I.

The district gets to decide how to allocate Title I money, which is often referred to as "Title." There are other numbers in the Title line-up (II, III, etc.), but I'm not covering that right now. Title I is intended to help supplement at schools with high FRL %. The district decides what the "FRL threshold" is for schools to receive Title status and funding. For 2009-10, SPS raised the threshold to 55% FRL. In 2008-09, it was 40% FRL. Why? I'll get to that in a bit. Above a certain FRL% (I think it's 75%), a school must be designated a Title school. Up to that percentage, though, the district has discretion. The yellow portion of the column is what's allocated to schools.

31% of all Title I money (the green part of the column in the chart) must be held back for the following items: payment of tutoring companies (called SES providers), transportation, professional development and family involvement. A district may choose to spend more than that on any one of those categories, but they are required to "set aside" 31% of Title dollars for those expense categories.The biggest expense is usually tutoring companies. At Title schools, poor students are eligible to receive free tutoring, and the district is obliged to pay the tutoring service, up to 20% of all Title money they get. However, that 20%? It's also a cap. The district does not have to pay a penny more than 20% of total Title funds to tutoring companies.

LAP (Learning Achievement Program)

LAP money is, in many ways, a state version of Title money. However, SPS has generally distributed it to almost every school in the district, based on the number of FRL-eligible students in the building, or based on the number of kids achieving below grade level. Honestly, it's been explained to me both ways. The key difference between LAP and Title? No hold-back requirements. And, as of 2009-10, the district started a policy that schools will receive either Title or LAP, but not both.

So. What made me so snarky when I first tried to post this is that there's a leeeeeetle bit of dissonance between the rationale the district has given for raising the Title threshold to 55% and what it looks like could be happening (note my very non-slanderous use of "could" and "appears." It's cuz I'm trying to be a little more grown-up-ish).

Over the last couple of years, the district has been distributing less and less LAP funds to schools, and spending more and more on... centrally-directed projects (the blue section in both charts). In 2009-10, the district distributed $1.9m of LAP funds to schools (and no, I'm not counting STEM here, kids, but I'm not counting it in the centrally-spent stuff, either), but used $3.2m — 61% of the fund — for centrally-directed projects.

How much of Title went to centrally-directed projects? $3.9 milllllllllion dollars. 27% of all Title money that could have been distributed to schools wasn't.

And the thing is? In this letter, the Superintendent very explicitly states that the "Title threshold" was raised from 40% FRL to 55% FRL because of rising expenses from tutoring companies. She goes on to note that the costs of payments to tutoring companies are "mandatory expenses that the district must cover in our budget." This portion is... true. The district, as discussed, must pay tutoring companies who tutor Free/Reduced Lunch-eligible kids at "Title" schools, up to 20% of total Title funds. But do you remember how there's also a cap on that expense? Somehow, the Superintendent forgot to mention that. Also unmentioned? That the district was holding on to an additional $3.9m which could have been distributed to schools.

So, look. There was a choice involved. Schools with high populations of disadvantaged kids could a) continue to receive funding so that they could provide those kids with additional academic support OR, b) the district could keep Title money to spend on centrally directed super-strategic projects? Hmmm. I didn't see any mention of that decision in the letter.

And that's what brings out the snark in me. If the Superintendent really believes that this is the best option, that super-strategic, extra-aligned projects are The Very Best Course Of Action, why not be honest? Why not say "I made a decision that it was better to cut annual funding to many schools off rather than use my oft-spoken of 'creative solutions' to make strategic projects less expensive." Okay, I might have snarkily loaded that suggested statement just a little. But you get the idea, right?

There is a huge issue of transparency and honesty here. I don't agree with this particular course of action, but I only even learned about it because I am a huge nerrrrrd.

Agree, disagree. Whatevs. In this case, where you stand on the issue is less important than that the district isn't even telling you about it. Disagreement is part of public education — but secrecy shouldn't be. Schools and the community should be able to see what is happening, so that they can advocate for or against it. But you can't even begin to have a reasonable discussion about something that district leaders refuse to tell you about. (also, I get that I sound so sincere just now that it might make you want to puke, but get a barf bag and let's keep trucking)

Just a little thought: if I can name three funds off the top of my head that are being skimmed from (Title! LAP! FRL!), do you think it's possible that there might be a fourth, fifth and sixth fund we don't know about yet? Hmmmm.

So. On a bitchier note, since SPS has not been particularly forthcoming about what, exactly, is being funded with the Super-Strategic Secret Projects Slush Fund, I've compiled an incomplete list of centrally-directed projects funded from Title, LAP or FRL:

1. MAP professional development (LAP carry-over!)

2. STEM planning and implementation (LAP!)

3. Performance Management ($3.1 millllllllion dollars in total, with $2 mil out of Title and another $1.1 mil out of FRL monies!)

4. the “Early Learning Institute” (professional development, Title!)

5. coaches (all of the above!)

6. other super-strategic stuff that I’m sure is “aligned” to the strategic plan, and also aligned to _______________. [I’d appreciate if you would go all Mad Libs in the comments and tell me what else the "other" super-secret strategic stuff might be aligned to. Keep it clean, which means “my ass” is not an acceptable Mad Lib entry for a blog that my mom reads].

Okay. Explaining and lists are over.

And now: the educational etiquette of the... moment.

It is considered polite, when using public money for projects, to inform the public about what you're up to.

I'm pretty sure Emily Post will back me on this.

Still. Too. Fancy.

2010-03-16T10:58:00.000-07:00

I have a basic rule about clothing: if you're going to cry if it gets wrecked, it's too expensive. There are a couple of exceptions (like my favorite dress when I was a girl, which my mom made, and saved, and which became one of Curly's favorite dresses). But mostly? If you're going to cry if it's ruined, it's not the best idea.

I have learned, through trial and head-exploding error, that a relatively similar rule applies to school lunches. If I am going to want to throttle the same child that I am trying to nourish because he didn't eat the fancy lunch I made: too fancy. Example in question? Vietnamese-style chicken salad.

It's actually a deeply simple salad. Shred some chicken and cabbage, chop up some cilantro. Throw in a handful of bean sprouts and dress the whole thing with a dressing made with lime juice, fish sauce, sugar and rice vinegar (and fresh minced chilis, if you like spicy, which I do. My kids? Not so much). Toss it all together and you've got a bowlful of awesome. I gave my boy a taste before packing it into his lunch, and his eyes widened as he said, "That is goooooood." And then, well, I've already mentioned that it's possible I nearly throttled him when I learned that he spent his lunch chattering with his buddies instead of eating his damn lunch.

So as easy-peasy as the salad is, I cannot recommend making it before you've had morning coffee, in case you find yourself blearily shredding chicken in the kitchen, trying to get everything together before anyone has to hustle out to catch a bus. The memory of getting lunch ready while every fiber in your body screams for caffeine might add to feelings of resentfulness if the kid then doesn't eat the lunch.

So, again, the take-away: if a lunch is involved enough to make you want to throttle the kids if they don't eat it, the lunch is too involved.

Vietnamese-style Chicken Salad

2010-03-16T08:18:00.001-07:00

-leftover chicken, shredded (I used leftovers from roast chicken and it worked quite well), about a handful per serving
-cabbage, sliced into thin ribbons, as if you're making cole slaw, a small hanful per serving
-about a handful per serving of bean sprouts
-about 1/4 to 1/2 cup chopped cilantro

For the dressing:
-generous pinch of sugar, or to taste
-juice of one lime (about 2-3 tablespoons)
-equal amount of fish sauce as lime juice
-half as much rice vinegar as lime juice
if you're making more than 2-3 servings, you may want to increase the amount of dressing

Put the salad ingredients in a bowl. Pour the dressing over it. Toss.

Yes, it's crazy-easy. No, I don't know why something this easy made me so cross with my boy when he didn't eat it.

Crappy! Chart! Thursday! Admits Trust Issues

2010-03-11T07:48:00.000-08:00

So... I don't really trust the district. I know. Shocking.

Why?

Well, as is my habit, I made a chart to show why. Well, to show one of the reasons why. Last year, there were cuts-o-rama. Discussions about what to cut started back in December of 2008, and those discussions evolved. Adjustments were made, bla, bla, bla, yawn. You would expect that, right? Sure.
Would you also expect that a proposed $5m in Central Administration cuts would dwindle to zippo, zero, nada, while cuts to schools (these are what are euphemistically referred to as "WSS Cuts") went up from initial proposals? Hmmm. Maybe not. But that's what happened. Central Administration cuts that were proposed quietly dwindled into to zero, and schools? Schools took it in the teeth.

The handy-dandy crappy chart o' the day shows a timeline, from December of 2008 to fall 2009, when OSPI F-195 budget reports were filed. School closures are green; those pretty much stayed the same. WSS cuts, the blue line, started lower, stayed stable, bumped up, and then went down a leeeetle bit, but finished above initial proposals (by the by, WSS cuts sound nice and harmless, but you need to react to it like someone just suggested you get an episiotomy for fun. WSS cuts are cuts that will directly affect students). Central Administration is the red line. In December 2008 (page 4), they were proposed at $5m. In January, (page 8), they quietly dropped to $4m. By June, they'd mysteriously dropped to $3.8, and in the Ever Fun Operating Budget (page 13), they were listed at $3.1. But if you checked the F-195 filing on OSPI (and... I did), even if you were nice enough to subtract out the $6-7m of ARRA funds from Central Admin (and... I was), Central Administration expenses weren't pruned back by $3.1m. They weren't pruned back at all. Did those 5 schools still close? Yup. Were class sizes raised? Yessirree. Were other cuts still made to the WSS? Uh-huh.

Compounding my trust issues, it turns out that Central Administration raises (excluding cost of living and step raises, which means... it excludes a lot of raises) have come to $800k (page 20) since July 2008. That's an annual additional expense, kids, and I'm going to be a little redundant and say that the $800k only tells part of the story about downtown raises, given the "not including" disclaimer in there. Why fuss about it? Because schools are scraping the barrel. Even if you divided that amount by the 90-ish schools in the district, I defy you to find me a principal right now in SPS that could not tell you, within 30 seconds, 3 things that they could do with an extra $8,000 to $10,000.

You could say that I am being unreasonably crabby, because pink slips, supposedly around $5.4m of them, are being handed out downtown. And... you might have a point.

However, schools took it in the teeth last year, and it's happening to schools again this year. I hear several board members saying "cuts are planned to Central Administration for $6m" but there's almost no discussion of the fact that there were cuts planned last year and nothing happened. Does that make it any easier for someone getting a pink slip? No. Does it make them easier to hand out? No. But this should have happened a year ago, and, just as schools are going through Round 2 Of Pain, it should be a second round downtown, too. Schools should not be suffering worse cuts than administration. But they are.

Update: the district eliminated 77 positions, to the tune of... maybe around $5m? It's hard to be certain, because I personally would not count, as they do, firing and then re-hiring 5 education directors at over $110k a pop in salary as "eliminating" a position. I would also not count not filling 6 vacancies as elimination or savings. Nor would I count 2 resignations as part of the cuts made. So, they count 90; I count 77. Even so, it looks like some pain was passed around downtown. However, it also looks like the district padded their numbers a little bit. 3 laborers and 9 administrative assistants (1 under "admin secretary, 1 under secretary, and 6 under "senior administrative assistant," 1 under "clerical")? Maybe they really were extra fat; not every single director should be running around with an assistant. But to the suspicious mind, it's also possible that those people were fired because they'll bump up the total numbers: smells like cannon fodder. And those positions can be easily re-filled as a non-FTE expense through a vendor. But that is only if you are as suspicious as I am. And I don't think you want to be that suspicious.

Hat Trick, Crappy! Chart! Thursday! style: Advice, Chart & Riddle

2010-03-04T19:24:00.000-08:00

It's Crappy! Chart! Thursday! with its many exclamation points, and a hat-trick in the style of Crappy! Chart! Thursday! Which, well... I have three things to say, and not much connecting the points, so I will use flimsy reasoning and a gimmick to force a connection.

Anyway. I don’t know if it’s the spring weather, but I have seen an awful lot of women lately wearing leggings. Not a skirt-leggings combo, not a long tunic/very, very short minidress and leggings combo, nothing. Just chicks trying to pretend that pants are leggings. Which… no. No, leggings are not pants.

I get that leggings are comfortable. I get that with a knee-high boot, especially if the boot fits the calf tightly, that zipping pants in there can be tricky, if not downright impossible (and let me say, as an aside: do not, under any circumstances, think that it would be best to wear gaucho pants to deal with this vexing issue, because gaucho pants are quite possibly as ridiculous as sequined genie pants).

But the thing is, leggings are not pants.

I know I’m reiterating what the folks over at Go Fug Yourself say all the time, but they’re right. I’m right. Leggings are not pants. They’re close. Only, so much easier, because you don’t have to deal with all the fit points that vary from woman to woman. However. Still. Not. Pants.

A couple of similarities, sadly, does not make something the same as.

So to sum up this piece of advice? Leggings are not pants. Please don’t wear them like they are. Thank you.

Second. Professional development coaches for teachers are not teachers. They may have been teachers. They may be certified as teachers. But a teacher, in a school district, is someone who’s primary job is to teach STUDENTS, not teachers. And a coach’s primary job? To help the teachers do better. Not to teach gen-u-ine students. Do I understand that some schools use their coaches as both teachers and coaches? I do. And, in fact, a coach could, in such cases, be split-billed. But the time they spend training? Doesn't count as being a classroom teacher. So, advice point number two: professional development coaches aren’t teachers. Do not get confused on this issue.

And we’re on to my somewhat related riddle (to the issue of coaches vs. teachers, not leggings vs. pants). It's going to take me a little explaining before I get to my riddle/question.

http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dhmkb8qr_112jfdmwsdd

So... I'm a little suspicious that there may be some shuffling around of funds and categories to conceal (not in an illegal sense, but in a tiresome, banally misleading one) the way money is really being spent in SPS. Why? I was, while avoiding weeding, looking at the school look-up doohickey produced for the school board budget workshop. While this document shouldn’t be taken as final (it's "for discussion and comment"), it probably gives a pretty good idea of what’s coming down the line (and also, appears to correspond pretty closely with the budgets that have been sent to schools). And the thing is… the total budget for all schools comes to about $304m.

So... wait a second.

The total budget is $558m (ish). And school budgets include stuff like the principal, the teachers, counselors, librarians, supplies and instructional assistants. And if $304 is spent on all that, this means that about 55% of spending in the district is in schools.

Which is kind of weird. Because the district says in its very own operating budget that “In addition to Teaching, and Principal’s Office activities, the majority of Teaching Support staff and activities occur in school buildings.” I know. Bla, bla, bla, bla bo-ring. Still. You might want to pay attention.

The district said that for 2009-10, it planned on spending 61% of its budget on Teaching, 5% on Principal’s Office, and 14% on Teaching Support. Weirdly, Instead of adding to 54%-ish, that total comes to 80%. Hmmm. It might be one thing if we were dealing with a plus/minus of 5% or so. But we’re looking at a plus/minus of over 25% of a $558 miiiillllllllion (no, I couldn’t resist) budget. I get that I'm doing a little bit of an apples to oranges comparison, because the $304m for schools is for 2010-11, and I'm comparing it to 2009-10 and doing a little extrapolating. Still, $64m is a lot of inconsistency.

Usually, I see weird numbers, investigate them like I'm some kind of bizarre terrier, and more or less sort out why they’re anomalous.

But I can’t tell you why there is a $68 million discrepancy between what the district says it spends on teachers and the principal’s office, and what the district says it plans on spending to fully staff every school in the district. But it's a pretty significant chunk of change. I could guess where it's being spent, but I am cynical, and suspicious, and my answer might rhyme with "Ventral Defenestration."

You might have noticed that there is a crappy chart. I’ve gone ahead and posted the link to google docs, so that besides the terrible bitmap, you can read it a wee bit more closely.

So my riddle is this: do you know why there’s a discrepancy?

And that’s all for the Crappy! Chart! Thursday! version of a hat trick. Advice, chart, question. Good night.

Update: Maureen's comment rang a bell about a public information request I'd filed about the central office. It yielded me a not-very-useful spreadsheet at the time, as it included OTs, PTs and the like, which I could see were central costs, but not central administration costs. However, it's useful as it pertains to this question. I went through it and totted up every nurse, OT, PT, psychologist, IA, teacher, instrumental music teacher and anyone who looked like they worked in a school (no. I didn't put coaches in there), and whose actual job was to work with students. The salary total came to $12m; throw in benefits (which, if one looks at district salary and benefit expenses, appear to run at about 27%, so let's say we're at $16m-ish. The schools that are opening this fall will likely run $2m to $3m a pop (I actually ran some averages based on enrollment sizes for elementary schools), so let's chuck in an additional $6m to $9m. And let's imagine that there are $15m of teachers and principals on leave. So, from $68m as a discrepancy, we would be able to say the discrepancy has dropped $37 or $40m-ish, leaving a $28 to $31m discrepancy.

Except. The discrepancy I noted is between the total being spent on schools and Teaching Activities plus Principal's Office.

Another gander at the Always Fun 2009-10 Operating Budget reveals that nurses, OTs, PTs, counselors and the like are billed under Teaching Support, which... would remove that money from the noted discrepancy. The description about the Teaching Support segment, by the by, also mentions that coaches are included in the category. Huh. Does this mean we have more coaches than the district is letting on? I don't know.

Anyway. So... add in the opening schools ($6-9m) , and maybe some teachers and principals on leave ($15m?), and I think we're probably still looking at some $40m in dissonance.

Shoes, Skiing & Spam

2010-02-26T13:06:00.000-08:00

Seattle has been unseasonably warm and sunny of late (although we’re back under a more usual gray at the moment) – so it figures that this was the year that instead of saving my pennies for something deeply expensive and frivolous that rhymes with "Emilio Pucci on sale," I blew the budget on ski passes for the kids and myself. If you’ve been following the Olympics, you’re well aware that there have been problems with having enough snow at Whistler and Cypress Mountain. Both of which are north of Seattle. Snow has been a distinct issue. So, I intentionally passed over gazillion inch, glitter-encrusted, insanely priced shoes (I wasn’t drunk or feverish at the time, either), and for the first time in years, entirely skipped that perfect confluence of consumerism and contact sports (aka: the Mario’s Superbowl Sale).

The Mario's Superbowl Sale is like that, except with Prada. And shoe hyenas.

And I did this for... ski boots. And snow the consistency of wet sand. And, oddly (given my long-standing affection for impractical, over-priced fashion), I couldn’t be happier about it. I'll repeat: not drunk or feverish. Really.

The kids don’t really care about conditions (as long as it’s not raining). I don’t really care about conditions (as long as it’s not raining). So on school breaks, we’ve loaded up the equipment I cobbled together from used purchases, sales and hand-me-downs, driven up to the pass, and cruised contentedly around together.

They had last week off from school, and the whole week was suffused with brilliant sunshine. The snow in the sun was so brilliant as to be nearly blinding; in shadow, a deep, luminous blue.

I have to admit (while hoping that Stumpy doesn't read this post), no pair of shoes can give the deeply physical happiness that being with Curly and my boy did over the last week– cruising behind them like a bundled-up sheep dog, riding the lifts with them, eating lunch outside in the sunshine with them and listening to their chatter.

The T. Rex, however, feels that shoes are the true key to life happiness.

The sunshine was a wonderful bonus, but the happiness itself – amplified and intensified by seeing their delight in everything – made the entire week itself feel sunlit. Hmm. That’s very earnest sounding. Earnestness and the intentional forgoing of fancy shoes? Maybe I do have some kind of fever, after all.

Anyway. I mentioned that I blew the budget on the passes. I blew the rest cobbling together equipment. Skiing is incredibly fun, but also? Crazy expensive. Manolos can look pretty cheap compared to a ski habit. We had no budget for lodge lunches, which in some ways is a good thing, because lodge lunches are maybe, maybe one step up from school cafeteria lunches, just much more expensive.

So before we head up to ski, I make and pack lunch. The kids are pretty fond of quinoa with seaweed and avocado (courtesy of Tea and Cookies), chicken salad with crostini, and prosciutto butter sandwiches. But their very favorite ski lunch, which makes them literally cheer? That Hawaiian convenience store staple: Spam musubi. If you’re not acquainted with it, it's pretty simple to prepare. Take a can of Spam. Open it. Shake the Spam... loaf? Loaf seems like a good word. Shake the Spam loaf out of the can. Slice it (you should be able to get a minimum of 10 slices). Fry the Spam, brushing it with a soy sauce with just a little sugar mixed into it. Then take your hot fried spam, sandwich it between some rice, mash it down a little, and wrap the whole thing in nori, mushing it down again so it’s nice and compact. I usually use a piece or two of rice to hold the nori closed. Ta-da. Spam musubi.

I do get that it doesn’t sound appealing (and I don't want to go all Obi Wan on you and tell you to trust in The Force that created Spam musubi, although... you should consider it), but it is some kick-ass picnic food, if not particularly kosher. Those suckers are surprisingly good.

I admit, I purposely made Spam musubi on our last day of skiing together, so that the kids would cheer me happily as they munched their lunches in the sunshine. And they did. And it was pretty damn awesome.

I cannot promise that the people you make Spam musubi for will cheer, and insist that you are The Best Person EVER. At least not the first time you do it.

Gordie Howe Hat Trick, Indeed

2010-02-07T19:57:00.000-08:00

If you have ever seen me, you would snort, right away, at the idea of me getting a Gordie Howe hat trick. I am not usually one to so much as trash talk. I am bigger than a Chihuahua, but even so, on ice, I'm about the human equivalent of one. For me to throw down gloves against another player... well, it would be simpler to attach a "please kick my ass" sign to the back of my jersey.

Stumpy doesn't usually make my hockey games, since he supports my hockey habit by doing this crazy thing called watching the kids. But last night, he came out to watch my game (and brought me a cold beer. In the locker room. Immediately after the game. That, with hockey players, is gwounds for Twoooooo Wuuuvvvv.).

Except he called the babysitting (hi, Mom and Dad!), during the game, to let them know that I had racked up a Gordie Howe hat trick. I am no Gordie Howe.

I'll just say: it wasn't a fight. It was just, erm... "roughing." And turns out, holy smokes, that ref sure could put her hand up quick.

Crappy! Chart! Thursday! Discovering Math Edition: $10.3m - $2.4m = $11.1m

2010-02-04T08:39:00.000-08:00

Okay, I count... a bunch of slides in this thing. So I am going to consider myself averaged out on the next... bunch of Crappy! Chart! Thursdays! and pretty much completely blow them off. I know it sounds nuts, but there are things I like better than being a nerrrrd.

And yesterday provided me with a compare-and-contrast what I like better: nerdiness, or other schtuff. I got to read to one of the classes at my boy's school, and, look, it may not sound awesome, but it was. The kids cheered when I came in (it's not the first time I've read to them), they giggled gratifyingly at the different voices I used for the characters, and they mobbed me for a group hug when I left (awesome. even if the huggy little Petri dishes may land me an antibiotic reunion as a result).

http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dhmkb8qr_65snhqjhf6

After that? I dressed up, put on lipstick and make-up (I hate public speaking, and want to weasel out of it. Weirdly, putting on make-up makes me feel like I can't back out of it. Because if I didn't stab myself in the eye with the mascara — which has been known to happen, and holy crap does that hurt — I am somehow obliged to go through with it), and trotted off to a school board meeting for my very own 3 minute talk, and watched the board vote in funding for STEM, a program that I think could be wonderful, but that the district cannot afford. And the district doesn't always have the best track record on execution/implementation.

I have reservations that go beyond financial — ultimately, I think it's a program that will largely serve kids who will achieve anyway (I don't begrudge achievers a great program, but I'm troubled by one that gives them one by very probably removing the less-achiever-y kids from the building). If you were sucking it up at math, you might decide to buckle down and do better. But would you sign up for four years of catching up, at a school where your lack of math skills would affect your performance in almost every subject? Would you miss participating in sports or after-school activities? I am a nerd. I was a nerd (although not a math nerd). At thirteen or fourteen, there is no way I would have signed up for that if I'd been behind in math. And as my persistence at crappy charts may show, I can be something of a glutton for punishment.

However. It's in. And the school faculty that attended the meeting were visibly delighted. I disagreed with the vote. I was disappointed (but not surprised) by the vote. Even so. I cannot find it in me to say anything to the Cleveland faculty but a very sincere: mazel tov. I wish you every success.

At any rate, choosing which part of my day was better: cheering midget army, or be-lipsticked dull meeting? Hmmmm. Tough choice.

A not-very-quick note on the charts: I think (of course I do, I went to the trouble of making lousy charts about it) that it behooves everyone to do a little sorting through some of STEM's funding. Not because of STEM itself, but more of the ripple effect one program can create on funding for everyone else.

The remainder of the charts are follow-up on Central Administration issues. Which I also think are pretty interesting. You know how the district said they had reduced the number of coaches by $2.4 milllllion? Um... that may not be quite the case. Unless by "reduce" you mean "added $800,000 of 'em." That's right, kids, district leadership did their math like this: $10.3m - $2.4m = $11.1m. Hmm. Someone learned their math using the reform method. The plus side of reform is that you still get points for having a great verbal explanation, and I am sure a really terrific one is all set to go. If... by terrific, you mean "we at Seattle Public Schools are committed to an excellent education for every student."

What I find a little concerning about the coaching investment is that coaching is just one tactic in a professional development strategy. So if the district is spending $11 milllllllion (yes, I love trying for the Dr. Evil inflection on millions and billions, and I love beating it to death) on coaches, how much are they spending on professional development as a whole? Use your Discover-sh-schhmovering math on that.

Crappy! Chart! Thursday!

2010-01-28T14:43:00.000-08:00

I'm going to start with a recap.

In October, I produced a fancy set of charts. It was boring and budget-y, in the way of many a power point presentation, but relevant in a nerdy way. The upshot of the fancy charts: SPS's central administration was tooooo big. And it looked like the fastest growing segment in central administration was Supervision of Instruction.

The district responded that, well, um, you see, they had "mis-coded" $10.3M worth of coaches (although judging from the CFOO's financial report about a month later, p23, it would appear that it was ack-shully $11.1M of coaches), and if you just counted the coaches as teachers, everything was ducky. No problems here.

That's pretty much the end of the recap.

The thing is, kids, if you take a quick peek on OSPI (at the always scintillating F-195 budget reports), where, according to SPS officials, "this year, the 'miscoding' of coaches to central administration will continue," you'll find something that looks like this.

Okay. The slide is fuzzy and pixilated. But guess what segment of SPS grew last year, when every single other budget segment got chopped back a little? That's right: Central Administration. And even if you subtract coaching out of it (and puh-leaze, let's not get all literal-minded about "if you can't hire, fire or promote, you're not part of Supervision of Instruction, even if your primary job duty is to manage the professional development of another person" because it's just a dumb argument), guess what still grew? Yup. Central Administration.

The thing about the whole coaching investment* remaining stable (instead of getting the chop, as classrooms did in the form of increased class sizes in grades 4 and 5), is that if you read the Operating Budget for Fiscal Year 2009-10, you'll come across a little something that indicates that SPS's investment in coaching was pruned back last year by about $2.4M. Except. It wasn't. Unless there are even more coaches running around the district than district leadership is letting on.

Let's take a look, shall we?

So, I get that the charts for Crappy! Chart! Thursday! really do suck, but... that's kind of a separate issue (for which I am willing to be bribed to improve, FYI).

In the bar chart above, each long bar is a year, and represents Supervision of Instruction, which is part of Central Administration. The green bit represents coaches, who now will be classified as teachers (the light blue is the remainder of the Supervision of Instruction segment). If you wanted to be cynical, you would say that this could make it harder to sort out growth in coaching if you hide the segment in with teachers. But none of us are cynical, right? Of course not. Anyway, it turns out that no, 28 coaching positions for a sum of $2.4M didn't go away. Coaching remained stable - and Supervision of Instruction grew. Again.

Do I have a point? Well... maybe not yet. But I have a whole lotta questions, like: does district staff really plan on increasing class sizes (again) and protecting the coaching expenses (again)?

And most of all, I want to ask: Dudes, what is up with this?

*So, I said this back in November, but I should say it again. There could be a valid case for the district's decision to invest so heavily in coaches. However, the district should make that case, clearly, thoroughly and openly, and acknowledge that there are also valid counter-arguments, particularly when keeping coaches may mean cuts to classrooms. And that I've seen, it hasn't been done. And that's where my beef with the segment is: there is no public rationale for it. It is clearly a spending priority for district administration, but there's been no disclosure of why.

Saying that it "aligns with the Strategic Plan" by the way, is not the same as making a rational, clear case.

Tacky, Yet Awesome

2010-01-27T09:54:00.000-08:00

Curly and I embarked on a luridly absurd craft project* before Christmas. She really wanted a wreath. I was a bit tired of evergreen and red ribbon, and somehow (no, we hadn't been out drinking. She's eight), we hit upon the idea of making one. Of making this one. Which: tacky, but awesome, right? Right? Dissenters may feel free to maintain a tactful silence.An added bonus? It seamlessly makes the transition from “I left my Christmas wreath up for a leeeeeetle too long” to “we’re getting ready for the tacky sentimentalism of Valentine’s Day early” (which should probably include about four exclamation points and hearts instead of dots over the "i"s).

*Only a few flamingoes had to shiver, naked and feather-less, for this to be made.

Crappy! Chart! Thursday! Is Back!

2010-01-20T16:26:00.000-08:00

I know. Thrilling. Because who doesn't sit around on a Wednesday afternoon and think: "You know what I could use? A data-filled nerd-o-rific Power Point presentation!" Everyone, right? Oh, wait, no. Power point is mind-numbing.

So, anyway, rather than tell you stories about my ability to cause pain to big-eyed little girls, or how much fun it is to have an infection that involves lots and lots of coughing when your ribs are bruised, or the compelling saga of Antibiotics: Round 2!, I've got enough charts to semi-sort of even out all the Crappy! Chart! Thursdays! I've been blowing off.

Enjoy (and if it's hard to read here, click on the google docs thing and you should be able to bring it up).

Note (added 1/22): The district put some window-dressing up about how LAP funds are allocated to schools bla-diddy bla. So. Let's talk turkey about LAP, since I just had a loooverly conversation with a couple of very nice LAP supervisors down at OSPI (ASAP! VIP! RSVP! Sorry. I just wanted to add some more acronyms). LAP is state funded, and SPS (more acronyms!) counts it as a grant. Districts get a pot of money based on the number of students they have who are performing below grade level (although I should geekily admit, the LAP funding calculation appears to have some FRL data in it. Wow, this is acronym-o-rific). The districts then get discretion on how to spend their dough (as long as they follow rules that come with the dough). As it turns out, the LAP pot I estimate in my charts may be smaller than the total pot of LAP dough the district gets.

While for the most part, the district must do stuff that only benefits the kids who aren't achieving, LAP money can be used for professional development, and there ain't no percentage or dollar cap on that (hmmm. Anyone else wondering how many coaches are funded with LAP money?). If a district decides that they do not wish to put LAP money into schools receiving Title I money, that is at the district's discretion. Also, the district can carry-over up to 10% of all LAP funds they get to the next year. More than that, they lose it.

So, what exactly did district staff say about LAP funds Wednesday evening? Well... "The LAP funds are allocated to schools [emphasis mine] based on the demographics of schools." Not quite, kids. The funds are allocated to the district, and the district can decide how to allocate.

Maybe a little more on this later, because I don't know about you, but I smell a financial shell game. Frankly, I'd rather smell brownies in my kitchen, but hey, I'll take what I can get.

Hockey Kebabs and Other Inedible Holiday Appetizers

2009-12-21T10:10:00.000-08:00

What, you ask, is a hockey kebab? Well... I am. If that sounds a little painful (think person, skewered on hockey stick), it was. The time I got butt-ended and it left a nasty bloody mark on my ribs was positively comfy by comparison. Owza.

On the embarrassing minus side: it was my own damn fault. I went for the puck along the boards at an awkward angle and had the tooooooo laaaate thought of “this is really not a safe way to be holding my stick just here” and then: Ka-bam! Ke-pow! Ow. Ow. Ow.

On the plus side, it looks like my ribs will have a nice, festive red and green (and black and blue) bit of décor for Christmas. And this may sound Pollyanna-ish, but I am really glad they’re bruised, not cracked.

So. Some people have already suggested that being accident-prone and playing hockey might not really be the most intelligent pairing ever. I would answer 1) being accident prone and playing a sport in which you are COVERED in protective equipment is a pretty good idea, and 2) Come on. You know if I took up knitting, I would be the victim of some kind of tragic and freakish knitting accident.

It's a Death-Threat Free Holiday!

2009-12-16T22:35:00.000-08:00

I realized at some point today that I no longer eyeball the car door handle as I go to open it when it's parked in front of the house (in case it's been smeared with feces during the night). I haven't had to call the police about death threats (the kind directed at me) in a really long time. And the deafening silence of not being called a rhubarb-stealing whore?I gotta say, it's better than carolers.

May your holidays be free of being called a whore and threatened with death. That may not sounds all merry, merry, but don't knock the joys of a death-threat free holiday.

The Mixed Nut Dish of Doooooooooom

2009-12-10T11:39:00.001-08:00

It’s come to my attention that not only has it been over a month since I’ve posted a thing, but that I still have a grudge against nuts. I'm going to conveniently ignore the former and chatter about the latter.

I’ve anxiously let Curly eat some Nutella. Marcona almonds have made their way back into our kitchen (Which is all kinds of awesome. Those suckers are tasty), but… I still eye nuts with suspicion. I come perilously close to saying (in as close to a Clint Eastwood voice as I can mentally produce) “You’re not gonna hurt my baby, are you, nut? Because that would make me mad. And you don’t want to see me mad, nut.” And then I think: I am completely insane. It feels like only a few stops down the line after mental conversations with food will be talking about how my neighbors turn invisible, sneak into my house and steal my coffee and social security card. And... I’d rather not BE the crazy neighbor. And yet despite my awareness that it is moderately k-k-k-crazy to bear nuts a grudge, my complicated and rather hostile "relationship" (yes, I get that the "relationship" is all in my head. Really) to an inanimate agricultural product continues.

I still see Christmas cookies (with nuts) and think “f$*#ing nuts.” I look at holiday treats (with nuts) and think “goddamn motherf&*^ing nuts,” and then, then I lay eyes on the mixed nut appetizers which are so often laid out (and you can’t blame people for doing it – they’re easy, they go well with drinks, etc) and think… well, you get the idea. My thought bubble is generally hostile, expletive laden and unfestive.

Should I have more to say after a month of nothing? Probably. Is it Crappy! Chart! Thursday! with nary a chart (again)? Yup. Do I have a chart? No. I've randomly included an old picture of a hot springs at Yellowstone on a day it was snowing (ala saying "Look! There's fish climbing up that tree!" to try and draw attention away from the topic at hand). The snowfall, by the by, was also the first day of summer. Despite the season/weather dissonance, it was incredible to see.

H1N1 and Crappy! Chart! Thursday!

2009-11-05T21:41:00.001-08:00

Curly has the swine flu. Since the kid has inherited my cheap lungs, it was screwing up basic breathing enough that we went off to the doctor, who, in addition to carefully inspecting how Curly's breathing was doing, ran the swine flu test and confirmed the porcine origins of the kid's illness.

I was up for several hours in the middle of the night, contending with Curly's fever and cough. I am so tired I may as well be drunk. Still, I've blown off a couple of Crappy! Chart! Thursdays!, so I figured I may as well throw something up here.

I went to today's school board Audit & Finance Committee meeting (I know! So! Exciting!). Given that the report I posted early in October was on the agenda, I was pretty curious to see what the district had to say. It was about what I expected.

Quite a bit of attention was given to the fact that it is genuinely, actually, in-disputably true that the budget SPS presents to the public doesn't correspond with the budget reports SPS files with the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) for the good state of WA. And then the district said, "We'll get them to match! Yay!" Which is a good first step. Even if it is a little snarky of me to include the "yay!"

I think I get a tiny bit of snark. The district prepped a 14 slide response to my fanciest set of crappy charts ev-uh. But the hoi polloi (and I count as such) is not supposed to speak unless spoken to at committee meetings. So I didn't get to say a word about the district's response. Bummer, dude.

But if you're me (and I am!), you'd be asking: but what about the MONEY? Because matching budgets are almost as wonderful as finding just the right accessories for an outfit, but the major issue here is the amount of money being poured into administrative issues, most particularly Supervision of Instruction (on OSPI Supervision of Instruction counts as Central Administration). Supervision of Instruction was $14M in 2004-05, and by 2009-10 had grown to $31M. Thasalotta growth. I wish my shoe budget would grow like that.

Fortunately, SPS has a solution to the growth in that segment. The solution is to decide that $11M worth of coaches (111 coaches) – the teaching coaches, who basically provide professional development for teachers – shouldn't be billed to Supervision of Instruction, but to TEACHING. Because, the coaches don't technically supervise teachers. I mean, c'mon. They just coach them, and tell them how to do their jobs. But they don't supervise them. So they should be billed to Teaching Activities, because also? Sometimes they "model" teaching methods to the teachers they're coaching, with ACTUAL students in the exact same room. So that counts, right?

If I had a few more glasses of wine (say, two bottles), and closed both my eyes, I think I could see their point. But the thing is, I haven't. So I'm... annoyed. I don't think that the finance guys should be expected to address whether or not the growth is justified (that's an operational issue), but they should acknowledge that's the growth is significant. Magically re-categorizing it and then saying "look! Central Administration is now in line!" just doesn't quite do it for me.

Anyway, crappy charts. I've been mulling over how PTAs spend their money, and how the district spends its money. I think that it's really interesting that 100% of the PTA funds the district lists as donations go to supplemental staffing in schools. It feels like there's quite a bit of dissonance between what the priorities are for schools (teachers working with students) and the administration (coaches), and right now, I would say that the district has failed to lay out a case for the investment they're making in coaches. There could be a case for the number of coaches (and no, I don't mean that in a snarky "I COULD win the lottery and spend it all on shoes!" kind of way). But I think the district should make their case, clearly, thoroughly and openly, and acknowledge that there are valid counter-arguments. Saying that "coaches are strategic" isn't making a case.

More Camping: Lopez Island

2009-10-30T13:01:00.000-07:00

I was interviewed on a radio show last week (Yes, me. Sadly, it was about being a nerd instead of in in-depth discussion of shoe trends), and the host asked if being a nerd was a hobby for me (I paraphrase. He said it in a nicer way than that). And… I realized that the honest answer was "yes."

This promptly led to another realization: I really, really need to get some better hobbies. Because budget data is BORING. I could attempt to argue that my shoe-love is a hobby but 1) it’s more of a calling and 2) I can’t afford it, which makes it tough to put in the category of Things I Do.

Anyway.

Curly and my boy have strongly and repeatedly requested a cease and desist on discussions of school district issues, unless it relates to their upcoming field trips, and they also want to know: do I plan on chaperoning?

Well played, keeeds. 1) they raised a legitimate gripe about the of-late single topic of discussion by grown-ups in our house and 2) totally put me on the defensive. Because although fall is lovely I am NOT hoping to go on 2 outdoor field trips in late October/early November with elementary school students. At all. I’ve done my time on that sort of thing, and it usually ends with me having an unpleasant reunion with antibiotics.

So. I’m going to write about what may have been my favorite weekend of the summer (there were a lot of candidates, so it doesn't nab the title definitively), when we went camping on Lopez Island.

Am I aware that Crappy! Chart! Thursday! came and went and there was not a single chart? Erm… yes. But there are other things in life, and it behooves all of us to think about them now and then. Also, I'm a little tired of charts. So no charts.

I’ll lead with the kvetching, so it’s out of the way. Odlin County Park, where we camped, is next to a ferry route. That may not seem like a big deal, but on a foggy morning at 6am, you realize just how goddamn FREAKING loud a foghorn is. So, 6am: ferry foghorn. Crows going beserk in a ferocious rebuttal to the foghorn. Then the noise dwindling down to silence, with just the sound of lapping water. Then: FOGHORN. And crows. And back down and then… yep, about like that, until we surrendered and got blearily up. Even with the joy of a 6am Sunday ferry using its foghorn, I would go back to Odlin in a flash.
The setting is serenely beautiful. The campground is just about on the beach, and the kids promptly started playing with some other boys there. They all scrounged some kelp tubes, which allowed them to shoot water at one another (fill kelp tube with water, and then put your mouth to the slimy end of it, while pointing the other end the way you want to shoot, and bloooow. Gross, but effective), and build kelp tube volcanoes (build a mound of sand to hide the water-filled kelp tube, and blow to create an eruption), and generally get happily dirty and soaking wet. The view of Shaw and Canoe islands across the water was deeply serene. I found myself thinking: I love it here. Time for a nap. And then the kids jumped on me, but remembered in the nick of time that I would undoubtedly restrict access to bakery treats if they so much as tapped me with a slimy, wet kelp tube. No kelp whackings for me, but no nap, either.

Instead, the four of us went and saw seal pups out by Shark Reef, did a thorough survey of the bakery’s offerings, and ambled around the campground. And we kayaked, which was fantastic. The kids are finally big enough for kayaking with them to be genuinely fun, instead of a mix of panic (because they do something unwise near frigid waters with current), frustration (because of whining or mulishness), exhaustion and a small dab of pleasure. It was great, even if it was tiring. It was so great, in fact, that I have started poring over the Cascadia Marine Trail information. The price of double sea kayaks that will work for camping trips has deterred me a little bit. If it comes to a decision between Rome and a pair of sea kayaks, I’ll be eating gelato in a piazza, thanks. I’ve been on enough disastrous canoe trips to be well aware of just how awry a camping trip in boats can go (VERY. while trips to Rome? Not so much). We went to the farmer’s market, idly cruised the island, walked around the campsite, and watched the kids play on the beach (because it would seem that nothing says fun like throwing dead crabs and kelp at one another while mucking through the low tide sludge and then rolling around in the sand).

Our list of things to do for next summer is already longer than can be completed. The kids want to go back to the Redwood Forest, and they want to see Sequioia National Park, too. They want me to take them to Yellowstone. And San Juan. And Ashland. And, and, and. Lopez is firmly on my list.

Details:

The San Juan County parks are on the expensive side for campgrounds (Odlin runs $19-22 for those of us who car camp. San Juan runs $30-40, and $40 is steep but if you ever manage to snag site #18 it is worth every damn penny. Shaw runs $14-18), but they are superbly located and well-tended.

We rented kayaks from Outdoor Adventures in Spencer Spit State Park and the guy there, whose name I have forgotten, took the time to walk both kids through what they were doing, point out to Stumpy and I a couple of options for an hour-long paddle and make sure everyone was comfortable with what they were doing. Having sea kayaks instead of sit-on-tops was a huge plus.

The bakery on Lopez is expensive (island costs; the same issue hits you on the other San Juans), but nice. It's in town, in the shopping center across from the supermarket. Their fruit pastries were particularly good.

$800 Sequined Genie Pants and Other Expensive Mistakes

2009-10-22T12:13:00.000-07:00

I'm going to go a little lighter from now on for Crappy! Chart! Thursdays! (every third? I don't know yet). I just don't quite have it in me to turn out a chart a week without eventually resorting to charting my desire for fancy shoes as it compares with my ability to purchase fancy shoes. And as fascinated as I might be by the chasm separating those two things, even I can see it would be l-l-l-lame to actually chart it. Today, I admit, I rummaged around in my old charts to see if I had some grungy old thing I could chuck up here. No dice. So... I made a new chart for Crappy! Chart! Thursday!, in revolting shades of orange, because we are (as Curly is reminding me NON-FREAKING-STOP) getting ever closer to Halloween. So, first, let's all briefly remember my fanciest ev-uh Crappy! Chart! Thursday! from a couple of weeks ago. That slide pack is actual, bona-fide, gen-u-ine nerd-o-rific analysis. I researched and analyzed and verified until I was cursing my nerdiness, because it totally interfered with ogling clothing I can't afford on net-a-porter and my conversations with Stumpy got extremely monotonous (ME: "Honey, do you think using CAGR here explains this the best?" Stumpy: "Hmm. Maybe you should switch to a line chart and illustrate the growth in overall percentage terms instead of going with CAGR again." Yeah. Sexily fascinating conversations.). Anyway, I was trying to point out: please don't consider this is full-on analysis. It's preliminary. Should you use it to inform yourself further? Sure, but it's a springboard, not The Definitive Answer.

I have gotten my fashion ogling fix in the last couple of weeks, since I've been spending a little less time with budget data (getting dropped on my head has enforced backing off on the geekery, becuse I find that spending too long staring at a screen magnifies the stupid concussion headaches). But... I also had a couple of public records requests come through (and I will say for the SPS public records point person: she has been unfailingly polite, nice and helpful to me, even though, as my father likes to point out, I am a professional-quality pain in the ass), one of which had salary information for the central office. It will take me a while to wade through it, particularly since I've got other stuff to do. I've got a soccer team to coach, yard work to catch up on, a painting I am closing in on being 18 months overdue on (oops), and crud like laundry and dinner. There's more to life than being a SuperGeek! (which I am considering for a Halloween costume. My Batman nerd-belt would have a calculator AND a slide rule. Take that, Evil Data Sheet!).

Anyway. One of the things keeping me from wading through a data sheet of salary information was that I was hypnotized by the utter, delightful, mesmerizing insanity of these pants on net-a-porter. Where do you wear $800 sequined formal genie pants? Hmm. I think I'm stumped on that. I don't know how to go about charting it. Because you could do a survey, and it might be safe to say that 99/100 women who are on hallucinogenics would STILL refuse to wear them. Anywhere. Even if they were paid to. While staring, I could not help but think, mantra-like: oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear. Which, as it happens, is exactly the reaction I had when I realized that there are 43 people in the central administration earning over $100,000. Dollars. Not Zimbabwean dollars (I think $100K in Zim would maybe get you a stick of gum nowadays, because Mr. Mugabe appears to think that insane inflation is fabulous. Huh. Maybe he would wear the genie pants). No, we're talking USD, baby. And the thing is (as I understand it, anyway), the only person who earns more than that in most schools is the principal. Hmm. So... in salary alone, without counting benefits, SPS spends $5.5 million on its top 43 administrators. If you want to chuck in the over $90,000 set downtown (and heck, why wouldn't you?), you're up to $8.5 milllllllion dollars (please use your best Dr. Evil voice for the millllllion dollars). That seems like a mistake. Not the calculation. No, the mistake seems to be the amount of money being poured into central administration during (say it with me!) a budget shortfall. Did I mention that's all those millions don't include the benefits? Right. Benefits NOT included. Benefits often add at least another 30%-ish, just, you know, to be clear about that.

I think spending this much money on the district's top brass is a mistake. Just like buying $800 formal sequined genie pants would be a mistake. I guess it's a bonus day - a crappy chart AND a useful fashion tip.

Crappy! Chart! Thursday! Takes the Week Off

2009-10-15T09:56:00.001-07:00

I got dropped on my head. It’s not as echoingly painful today, but I unless someone feels like sponsoring Crappy! Chart! Thursday! (gift cards to Barneys, with plenty of 0s, would be considered a reasonable form of payment, and I’m pretty sure are medically proven to accelerate healing in female Hispanic hockey players with a love for impractical and absurdly priced shoes), I’m taking this week off from chart geekery.

Cage Match: Lobster vs. Gladiator

2009-10-13T14:08:00.000-07:00

I persuaded my boy that replicating the uniform of a Manchurian banner man would be really tricky, and then veered off topic to talk about Roman centurions and gladiators… and I totally sucked the kid in and made him want to be a centurion. And we ordered a costume.That’s right: ordered. No sadistic mommy-version of Project Runway for Halloween, as we’ve had for too many years. Instead, I can watch my gladiator and lobster battle it out in their store-bought costumes, and I will have neither pierced fingers (sewing is not my forte) nor second-degree hot glue gun burns.

On the downside (and when you get down to it, utterly unrelated*, as, by the way, is the photo), I am concussed, and have a monster headache. Saturday night, during a hockey game, I got launched onto my head like a short Hispanic projectile. I don’t usually complain to refs, but this time I was all: Dude. PAY ATTENTION. Because although I am fine with them not calling all of the trips and hooks I get, and don’t get too fussed about the old clutch-and-grab or punching in the corner (which the refs can’t usually see, anyway, but is still considered Poor Etiquette, as is butt-ending, another tough-to-see cheapie), hitting from behind is not cool. In any league, checking or not (and old lady hockey is non-check). At all. And it was the reason I landed on my head. At any rate, my doctor has forbidden exercise of any sort for at least a week (cleaning the bathroom, it turns out, counts as exercise. I checked with my doctor. Heh.), and no hockey for two to three. Which is kind of a bummer, because I love to skate.

So while my brain tries to recover from being bounced extra-hard, I can at least happily contemplate an October free of sewing and hot-glue guns. And sort out a way to get the lobster to attack the gladiator, because that would be AWESOME.

And yes, my brain-bruising appears to have led to extra all-caps... ness. I’m pretty sure I can come up with a chart for Crappy! Chart! Thursday! that handicaps the lobster vs. gladiator cage match, and how it was totally worth the dent in my frivolous shoe budget.

*As long as I'm going for random bits of news, check out the shout-out Cake Wrecks got in the New York Times.

Crappy! Chart! Thursday! Attempts an Upgrade

2009-10-08T08:03:00.000-07:00

It’s Crappy! Chart! Thursday!, but I spiffed the charts up AND, well, tried to embed all of them in a power point presentation. The google viewer thing is less than optimal, but an attempt with a different converter scrambled the whole thing like a bad omelet. I've included a link to a document below the viewer. Try to contain your excitement.

Can I remember, when packing a soccer bag for my boy so my folks can get him to soccer practice, remember his CLEATS? No. Do I go to the grocery store with the intent of buying things for, say, an omelet, and neglect to buy eggs? Um. Maybe. Can I run CAGRs and log scales for all kinds of different categories (although no log scales this time. Which probably would get snarking from strategy consultants, since using one gives a slide pack a nice geekily-competent vibe)? Yup. And no, I don’t know why I can do one and not the other. Incompetent at daily life but super-nerdy? You be the judge. Or, um, maybe don’t. I’m not sure that I want total honesty on that front.

Anyway, enjoy the charts, which are all about cost efficiency in the Central Administration of Seattle Public Schools. Geeky? Sure. Interesting to see what’s happening with taxpayer money?

And if you want a non-microscopic view:
http://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AVRHgOkrxGL8ZGhta2I4cXJfMGZqbjZqampz&hl=en

Well… yeah. It kind of is, especially when it turns out there’s a disparity between what is presented to the public and what’s filed with the state (the totals come to the same amount but categories within the budget are very different). If you want to know where I got all the information, sources are listed at the bottom of each slide, and the very last page lists all sources. Take a look for yourself.

If you’ve got questions, fire away in the comments and I’ll see if I can answer them. But let’s not go down the primrose path of corruption and eeeeeevil. I don’t have answers to questions like that.

Camping and Cabins on Camano Island

2009-10-06T12:29:00.000-07:00

Camano Island is barely, barely an island. You just about have to break out a magnifying glass to see the slender thread of blue that earns the place its island stripes. Both times we went there this summer, the kids peered out of the car windows as we went over the bridge, inspecting to make sure that there was a trickle of water to verify that we were, indeed, going somewhere that had earned the title of “island.”

So, to start: I cannot recommend camping on Camano. The campsite is well-run, clean and in a pleasant location. But that ground was far and away the absolute pebbliest, hardest, most uncomfortable ground we camped on all summer, and we did alotta camping. It’s not as if I just chuck the tent on the ground and set it up without going over the ground even a little to try and get the worst offenders out of the way.

I should add that we camped shortly after the monster heat wave (okay, Seattle’s version of a monster heat wave), when Seattle hadn’t seen any measurable rain for many weeks. So you should probably take my fussing with a generously-sized lump of salt; we went to that campground at the point when ground throughout the region was baked to a bumpy lumpy, rock-hard consistency. The campground has the virtue of being located first-come, first- serve, which, with enthusiastic little campers jumping out of their skin to Go! Camping! is an undeniable bit of appeal, even if you have to arrive by 2pm on a Friday to get a spot for a summer weekend.
The thing is, Camano also has some kick-ass little cabins at Cama Beach State Park. Which are possibly the worst-kept secret in the region, but they’re fantastic if you can get one. That's a big "if." They book 9 months in advance for most reservations and 18 for group ones (but you get kicked back to regular reservations if you drop below the minimum group number), so although it may seem crazy, you’d best get on the phone ASAP; they’ve already got a loooong wait-list for July 4th weekend, 2010.

The cabins are tiny. Wee. Itsy bitsy. You might be getting the idea that they are not large, and they are not. Nor are they private; you can't quite reach the next cabin from your window, but almost (I'm short, so perhaps someone with longer arms would be in luck). The whole place, although neat as a pin, has the friendly, shaggy feel of a campground, with the same kind of requests on quiet hours (which is to say: don't stay up drinking and talking loudly with friends past 10pm and the folks with kids won't encourage their little hellions to run around screaming before 7am).

The cabins have hot and cold running water, refrigerators, and a microwave. Note the lack of “oven," “stove” or “bathroom” in the description. You have to bring your own linens, pots and pans, cutlery, and schtuff. Technically, camp stoves and the like are forbidden, but we brought our little camp stove to use outside in case it appeared that sensible use was allowed, and noticed that many people brought considerably more elaborate stoves and grills. Enforcement on camp stoves and grills appears to be on a common sense level. Unless you score one of the deluxe cabins (you get a teeny tiny bathroom with your teeny tiny cabin), you will be heading to the bath-house. Which is clean, and has actual hot water for the token-operated showers (and if you've ever taken a frigid camp shower, you will appreciate how nice it is to have hot water, not "hot" water). You have to schlep all your gear down the hill, either in a wheelbarrow or by taking the shuttle. Effectively, it’s camping with a roof. And indoor heating. It’s an old fishing resort from the thirties that’s been fixed up by the state parks. It retains, in a quietly alluring way, the feel of a place from another era. The place as a whole is absurdly, wonderfully, wholesomely idyllic. The Center for Wooden Boats has their Camano Island outpost at the end of the double row of cabins, which only adds to the charm of the location. They rent boats and crab-pots (I cannot really relate how much Curly wanted to rent a crab-pot and cook up some fresh, squirming crabs, and yes, this is the same kid who will be dressing as a crustacean for Halloween) and there are sometimes sailing lessons. Curly and Stumpy were going to head out for one, but it was blustery and wet enough that it was a no-go, at least for a 7-year-old. On Saturday mornings in the summer the Center has toy boat building, with a couple of different wood boat shapes for the kids to choose from, and hand tools they can use. Curly and my boy were over the moon about their toy boats, which were given the place of honor at the front window. We stayed there over Labor Day weekend and managed to snag one of the waterfront cabins (you can see from the view out the window; if that's not waterfront enough for you, consider renting a houseboat). The weather was blustery and autumnal, which made a roof and interior heating really pleasant to have, especially with the view of Saratoga Passage and Whidbey from the front window (complete with the toy boats). We would go outside and practice rock-skipping, or run around, and because of the long views across the water, we could see squalls as they approached. When the squalls arrived, we would head inside and play board games until the weather improved. I am going to note for the record that Miss Scarlet and Professor Plum can suck it. I am a little weary of Clue. And Monopoly. Still, even with the overload of board games, it was delicious being snugged into a cozy, tiny cabin with Stumpy and the kids. Adding to the enjoyment was the whole not sleeping on the ground thing, which, as much as I enjoyed camping over the summer, was a nice change of pace.

I’ll say it again: call them NOW. Get yourself on a waitlist, because the place is not a secret, and will only become less of one.

Lobsters, Charts and Shoes on Crappy! Chart! Thursday!

2009-10-01T09:03:00.000-07:00

I know that it's Crappy! Chart! Thursday! (and look, I know it doesn't have the same ring, but maybe it should be every other, or every 3rd Thursday of the crappy charts), but... my mind is full of unchart-y questions. I do still have a couple of charts. On the un-chart-y front:

Curly wants to be a lobster for Halloween.

On the one hand: fantastic. I do not have to sort out a way to keep a shivering princess in a gauzy dress warm, nor do I have to put my foot down about her not being allowed to dress in in a costume that makes her look like a baby hooker. Nor – and this may be the best part – do I have to make the costume.

On the other: really? How does a little girl with a fondness for pink decide that what she wants, really, reallyreally wants, is to dress as a scrumptious crustacean? Sure, this is the same kid who named her beloved stuffed T-Rex "Rainbow" and never even considered that Rainbow could be anything but a girl T-Rex. She and Rainbow also have matching dresses. They play Go Fish and hockey together (card-playing pictured below). She even dressed as Rainbow one Halloween. It was awesome. But I digress. Again. Anyway, this is the same kid who has the fashion sense to pick out these gladiator sandals (rubber soled, I might add, so that she can run, jump and climb in those suckers). I've long adored her shoes, but this is the first pair, ever, that made me ask if they came in my size and... score! They did. In black, even, so I can continue to dress like a grumpy, schlumpy Sicilian widow. With kick-ass shoes. But... lobster?

Anyway. It'll remain a mystery, I guess. On to charts. I mentioned that last year the State Auditor released a report looking at central administration functions in Seattle for 2004-2006. Recapping: the State Audiot told Seattle Public Schools that they had waaaaaaay too many administrators. SPS responded to the auditor by saying that they were more complicated than other districts in the state. SPS continued to staff up in the central office. End of recap.

The chart below compares students per Central Office Employee for a bunch of the biggest districts in Washington state. For the sake of fairness, the second chart gives you a gander at just how much bigger Seattle is than the next largest district.

So, it's quite a bit bigger, no? Spokane, the #2 in the state, comes in at around 27,000 to Seattle's 42,000. The thing is, even if SPS is more complicated, its size SHOULD allow it to achieve some economies of scale, especially on the administrative front, and thus, have many, many more students per central office staffer than other districts. Or... at least be about even. If you're having trouble reading the chart, Seattle is the shortest pairing in the chart, which means it's the furthest below those two little dotted lines (the lower line is the average for 2000-01, the upper one is the average for 2008-09) indicating the average. If you look, you'll see we've gotten less efficient. Quite a bit less efficient, as it happens. Bummer, dude.

Things You Can Learn By Eavesdropping

2009-09-29T15:37:00.000-07:00

I was recently in an un-named location, waiting. I'd neglected to bring anything to read. So I eavesdropped shamelessly on two women nearby, who were chatting about loans they knew about in their social circle. On the observation front: wow, thatsa lotta personal loans flying around, and do their buddies sure tell who lent who money and whether they paid it back or not.

On the lesson front, I have this:

It's fine to lend money to a woman with a stripper name. But not it if she has a boyfriend named Dwayne or Travis.

It's Crappy! Chart! Thursday!

2009-09-24T23:32:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's that time. Time for another not-easily-readable data geek chart.

What can I say? The kids (Or my snot-sharing little soccer team. Or possibly the hockey locker room. If there's a place with a nice, revolting biohazard-y vibe, it's a hockey locker room) shared a back-to-school cold. I feel dreadful. So instead of pictures of food, or something about the various Puget Sound islands we camped on over the summer, I've got a chart. And it's not even very good. As long as you're here, you could take a peek.

Or, you know, not. There are things that are more fun than Crappy! Chart! Thursdays! Like lying on the couch, feeling lousy and hoping this doesn't end in antibiotics. Again.

Anyway. So, FRL is Free-Reduced Lunch, and is often used as a way to get a handle on poverty rates. If you've come this far, you may be clued in on that. If you're struggling to read it without a magnifying glass, the light green represents where levels were in 2000-01; the dark green brings it up to 2008-09 levels.

One of the things that I find interesting about the information on this chart (which may enlarge? I dunno. I don't test it, I just type and post.) is that of the 8 largest districts in the state (and Bellevue), Seattle had the least change in the percentage of FRL student population. In fact, between 2000-2001 and 2008-2009, its FRL percentage only rose by 1.1%, from 40.2% in 2000-01 to 41.3% in 2008-09.

Even Bellevue and Kirkland, fairly well-off districts, had a larger demographic shift than that. The Kent, Evergreen (Clark County) and Federal Way districts all posted double-digit shifts. I don't want to pooh-pooh Seattle's percentages, but it is interesting that the district with the smallest demographic change on that front (and others. I betya can't wait for another installment of Crappy! Chart! Thursdays!) also happens to have... yes, you can probably see where I'm going, but I'm going there anyway... the largest central office growth. It's also the largest district in the state, so you would think at some point we'd get this thing called economy of scale. Nah. That's crazy-talk.

Uh, anyway. In theory, it would be the smaller districts, dealing with big demographic changes, struggling with central office bloat. But... it's not. It's the biggest district (rhymes with "Shee-attle"), that's dealing with the least demographic change. Hmm. If Tim Gunn looked at demographics instead of whacko dresses made of paper and groceries, he would be very concerned.

At Last

2009-09-22T08:33:00.001-07:00

Break out the Etta James and the champagne, baby (or a cheap bottle of Blanquette de Limoux)!I also finally, finally finished painting the flowers on my wall by adding the yellow stamens. It's not a startling difference, but it's kind of nice to be done. Just in time for it to need to be repainted.

After a whole lotta testing and talking, Curly’s allergist is cautiously encouraging us to re-introduce tree nuts that are not the pernicious, treacherous macadamia nut. He’s still of mind that the macadamia is evil, and Curly’s Life With An Epi-Pen should continue to have an epi-pen in it, in case a malicious macadamia nut tries to get my baby.

I have to admit, it’s more than a little unsettling to intentionally hand the kid food that, a month ago, would have had me doing a slo-mo dive across the room (complete with the slo-mo “Noo-oooooo-oo-oooo!”) to snatch it away from her. When Curly asked for salted marcona almonds, I started to squirm with anxiety when she’d eaten about six, and asked her to stop. I told her that we could try macaroons the next day, but I needed a little time to ease back into a friendly relationship with tree nuts. Curly looked at me as if I was talking ca-razy (because… I was), but consented. Macaroons were being offered. So who cares if the chick offering them is a little whacked?

Still, the doctor okayed careful reintroduction of nuts other than the dreaded macadamia.

And by careful reintroduction of other tree nuts, I am quite confident he meant: give the kid some Nutella.