PORTSMOUTH RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL BUDGET FOR 2010-2011 - IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO SAY YOU CARE AND STAY HOME

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Uploaded by jmcdaid | May 04, 2009 | 0:43

Councilor Karen Gleason says schools must get back to basics

It is not enough to care and stay home.

The Portsmouth School Department proposed budget would mean an increase of $0.29 per $1,000 of house appraised value, an effective increase of 2.54%, and the increase on an average $350,000 house of $100.

There was a fight going on June 23, 2010 at Town Hall last night - Portsmouth, Rhode Island Town Council Budget Hearing 7:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m.

There is only one reason not to attend the Portsmouth RI Town Council Budget Meeting July 14, 2010, 7:00 p.m. at the Portsmouth Middle School

if you are available

and you want Portsmouth Public Schools to be what they need to be for 2010-2011.

That reason is that you don’t care enough.

The 5-2 voting tradition on Portsmouth School budget by the town council is based on getting rid of the union at any cost. When we wake up and see what we lost because we weren’t available to show up – many will be stunned. Those members who vote to level fund (keep it where it was last year) the school budget say they care about the education of our community’s students. But that is not believable by watching them.

While the vote was 4-3 at the June 23 meeting, it is only a vote that is provisional. It will change back to 5-2 - scoring a savings of $100 increase (on a house appraised at $350,000) over the upcoming tax year at best for those who want taxes to remain the same as this past year. Even if we get the increase of 21 cents per thousand provisionally voted for June 23, it doesn’t allow the School Department to receive what is needed to keep competitive sports at PMS and PHS, music, art. And this is after the School Department already cut needed special education teachers. The Portsmouth Taxpayers Association members are attending these meetings. The handful of us that stayed through to the end at 11:00 p.m at last night’s Town Council meeting can’t change the direction we are headed without more taxpayers showing up who truly care about the schools’ offerings. It is not enough to care and stay home.

The vote June 23 was to move the tax rate per thousand dollars from last year’s $11.26 to $11.47 in regards to the school budget. That isn’t enough, but better than what will most likely get voted, if any indication of past voting and comments will tell how the council members’ votes will fall in the end. The Portsmouth Taxpayers Association is in control of the current Town Council, so expect the school department’s budget to get what the Taxpayers Association wants.

We only will have control of what the council votes if we pressure them to vote a reasonable budget. (And for future budget years, if we vote for reasonable candidates in the upcoming election). Paying teachers according to what the Portsmouth Taxpayers Association members and their representatives feel the teachers deserve is what is driving the contention. The desire is to break the union – it came out repeatedly. And the children are the ones who lose out while adults play in a political playground with the community’s future.

What do you expect from the Portsmouth Public Schools? And at what cost will you be willing to give up what we have come to expect from the schools?

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Uploaded by PortsmouthSchools | June 09, 2010 | 9:57

June 2, 2010 Portsmouth RI School Department Budget Meeting

Website for Portsmouth RI

Students who want to go to college will be filling out applications to be accepted. It will be difficult, if not impossible, to apply for music or sport's scholarships at colleges if we don't have sports teams for scouts to come and watch the potential sports students or music and arts classes for potential college majors.

Not only do people look at tax rate when moving into a community, but a huge impact on worth of homes is the community public schools. But this fact gets lost in the effort to keep taxes at a level funding.

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According to the Town Charter, a "Budget Referendum," can be done with the required number of citizens signing a petition to do so. And the question to be voted on is written by the petitioners and verified as a valid question by the Town Clerk.

Stay tuned for a possible "Budget Referendum" to fund our community's students learning opportunities.

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$1.2 million increase was asked for by the Portsmouth School Department for 2010-2011 year - it was voted down by a 5-2 vote by the Portsmouth Town Council with the vote to "level fund" the school department. It would have increased the taxes $.29 per thousand dollars of appraised house values in town.

When I went to high school gasoline varied in price between 17 and 28 cents a gallon. Just saying….

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Uploaded by wane | March 05, 2010 | 0:45

COLUMBIA CITY VS. WAWASEE BOYS HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL

When I was in high school - graduated 1967 - my dad was the high school basketball coach in this very gymnasium. He was the very first coach of what was then a brand new school building and a newly consolidated county-wide high school....then called Columbia City Joint High School - as it joined many high schools in one. In Indiana, "Hoosier hysteria" is what we call basketball.

Dad with the CCJHS basketball team behind him when I was in high school

Dad and his daughter- moi

DEAR PORTSMOUTH RHODE ISLAND TOWN COUNCIL - ABOUT THAT 1.2 MILLION DOLLARS

Yesteryear
1988
Melville Elementary School
Ms. Hammel, Music Teacher
Providing an evening music workshop to parents with their children
to let the parents experience being a music student
along side their children

This Year
I attended a meeting tonight, June 9, 2010, to bring attention to the cut in the Portsmouth Public Schools budget by 1.2 million dollars for the upcoming 2010-2011 school year. This will be a disastrous cut for our community, for our children and education. And the other reason for the meeting was to organize so that we can make an impact on the Portsmouth (Rhode Island) Town Council hearing to be held next Tuesday, June 15, at 7:00 p.m in the Portsmouth Town Hall chamber.

The state of Rhode Island is cutting educational aid funding to communities and if we don't pick up the slack, the children's education will be greatly diminished. This is nothing new. I have seen this happen starting when I was in college and the administration decided to eliminate the thriving music department. Then at the contractual March 1st deadline to send out "pick slips" (termination of employment) in my second year of teaching, I received my pink slip. And this, then, began a career-long effort to keep music in our schools.

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Uploaded by jmcdaid

June 2, 2010 Budget workshop at which the Town Council voted to tentatively cut $1.2 Million from the Portsmouth Public School proposed budget. Councilor Karen Gleason speaks to Superintendent of Schools Susan Lusi when she is asked to speak about the budget.

SCREAM NOW OR SCREAM LATER
NOW, WILL BE THE EASIER SCREAM
If parents don't "scream" every time this "slash and burn the education" is in the cards, the whole education system will fail. And when we have practices of firing entire teaching staffs as was the case in one Rhode Island town this year, because of low performances of the students, I would like to ask what we expect to happen when we can't get a grip of civility and find funding for the students of today?


Town Council Members of Portsmouth, Rhode Island

Town Council email addresses:
pmcintyre@portsmouthri.com, hlittle@portsmouthri.com, kgleason@portsmouthri.com, khamilton@portsmouthri.com, jplumb@portsmouthri.com, dcanario@portsmouthri.com, jseveney@portsmouthri.com

More contact information can be found here:
http://www.portsmouthri.com/frames.htm

Contractually all pink slips had to go out in March, so legally cutting more teachers isn't going to work. And the state mandates that the students get the arts, so what they will get is a "spit in the eye" of music, art and physical education most likely. It is hard to water down music in a schedule, for example, that has traditionally only taught music to elementary students once a week for less than an hour. You try teaching something or learning something that you have for 45 minutes or less a week. And the other cut likely is sports. As Ms. Leveque said at the meeting at the Portsmouth Middle School June 9th, it isn't like we can cut second grade.

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Uploaded by jmcdaid

Melville Peter Deffet as a 3rd Grader


Parents forming an excellent train for the song
Little Black Train

My letter sent to the Portsmouth Town Council and copied to the Portsmouth School Committee:

June 9, 2010

Dear Member of the Portsmouth Town Council,

My name is Sandra Hammel, live in Portsmouth, taught music in the Portsmouth Public Schools starting in October 1973 and left after 29 years. All those years I stood up to keep music in our community's schools, attending many School Committee and Town Council meetings and going out on a limb to preserve the minimum of giving the students a weekly music class at the elementary level. Minimum. Music classes should be every day. Music skills are those very skills that the very young benefit from because they develop and nurture the readiness skills needed to learn to read - auditory processing skills, such as auditory awareness, auditory memory, auditory figure ground, auditory discrimination, etc.

A quick google search brought this up:http://www.succeedtoread.com/auditoryskills.html
"A common weakness is in auditory discrimination skills. For example, many poor readers do not 'hear' differences in letter sounds. To them, the five short vowels sound almost exactly alike." Music lessons develop the abilities of the child to better discriminate differences of sound and therefore helps the child be more successful not only in the music classroom, but in the reading lessons. This is not "new" news, but well accepted for multiple years. However, many even who should know these things, don't. Oftentimes, teenagers who drop out of high school, do so because they have struggled with their reading skills which affect so many of the subjects required in high school. So if we are serious about keeping our students in school until they graduate this should be on our radar screen of what is a priority.

And rationalizing of the inclusion of music in our schools using this argument isn't the only reason for music's existence in our community's schools. Because this doesn't begin to express what is so advantageous from the standpoint of music's benefits itself. Music can stand on its own as reason enough to be part of the basics of education, although most people may not realize those reasons. But when tied to other subjects it seems to enable people to say, "Hey, well, maybe it is justifiable to include in the discourse of what should be included in the experience of our children's lives."

All the years I taught in Portsmouth Schools, I had no children going to the Portsmouth Public Schools because I had no children. That changed late in my teaching career because a young boy entered Hathaway Elementary School in the second grade who was in foster care. That boy has been my son since his fourth grade year and now is an exceptional engineering student at Northeastern University. I have no students in the Portsmouth Schools at this time. So, I speak now as a taxpayer who pays for others' children to have what they need. I care about the community. I care about the children in our community and the education that we as a community provide for the children.

I speak about music here. But, the Portsmouth Town Council members who voted to cut the Portsmouth Public School budget over a million dollars will necessitate cutting more than music from the schools. I say "You are wrong to do this". I am well aware how these things go. And I know that those who feel brave enough to cut the Portsmouth School budget have their supporters.

Even some of those who feel emboldened to cut, can step back, reconsider and make a braver decision and fund our schools. There will never be a day that this problem goes away. We just need to get smarter about how we are going to get through this immediate year's budget problem, but then get really smart and figure out ways to get ourselves a long range solution in action to thwart future years' similar dilemma. If we care.

There is no better investment that we can give ourselves as a community, than the education that we provide for our community's children. They are our future leaders. They are their future.

Sincerely,

Sandra Hammel

Learn more about auditory discrimination and reading abilities: http://www.healthofchildren.com/A/Auditory-Discrimination-Test.html

Sandra Hammel
Teaching an evening music workshop for parents and their children
Melville Elemenary School

Save Our Schools

or Portsmouth will be the Pits regarding Education
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Uploaded by PortsmouthSchools
June 2, 2010 Portsmouth RI School Department Budget Meeting
Part 1

First video of last week's town council/school committee budget workshop. There are 13 separate videos. The 1st one starts out discussing the open space/recreation bonds, but ends with Dr. Lusi presenting the FY 2011 budget.

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Uploaded by PortsmouthSchools
June 2, 2010 Portsmouth RI School Department Budget Meeting
Part 2
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Arguing
Part 11
Motion to "Level Fund"
Uploaded by PortsmouthSchools

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Tribute to influential teachers
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The North Central College Choir that I sang in
Uploaded by ilovemylifesblog

In honor of Paul Warren Allen, who was the head of the North Central College Music Department and Conductor of the North Central College Choir recorded here in 1968. Three years later the college eliminated the music department.

Other songs from this album uploaded
It's May
The Eyes of All Wait Upon Thee

A tribute blog post with the choir roster and more:
its-may-robert-schumanns-art-song-

A blot post - IN HONOR OF PAUL WARREN ALLEN
in-honor-of-paul-warren-allen

I talked to Professor Paul Warren Allen's daughter in January 2010.
He is 96 years old.

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Uploaded by rockstarwrangler
Susan Werner sings May I Suggest?