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Pink slips given to top higher education officials
By Jacqueline Rabe
Thomas CTMirror.org on January 9, 2012
Backers of the higher education
merger promised it would save the
state millions, and last week numerous highly paid top officials at the Connecticut State University
and the community college systems received pink slips to ensure it would.
"We're talking about
saving almost $5 million a year," said Michael Meotti,
executive vice president of the new Board of Regents for Higher Education that
is responsible for the 100,000-student merged system. "We are not keeping
any associate chancellors."
In total, 24 positions, with an
average salary of $141,000 each, are being eliminated. But most
of those laid off will remain on the job for the next 12 months because system policy requires that long a
notice. Three of the eliminated positions were already vacant and will not be
filled
The U.S.
Department of Education reports that the average
salary of a professor at Connecticut
State University
is $95,000.
"We all know that we are
not going to need two chancellors or two, you name the position, when this
merger happens," Louise Feroe,
who was acting chancellor of the state college system before the merger, said
after the new regents' first meeting last year.
Feroe managed to keep her job. The titles of those receiving notices were made
available to the Mirror, but their names were not, out of respect for their
"privacy." Here is a list of the positions eliminated
and here are the titles of central office employees at the community colleges and colleges.
In discussing the savings that
will occur as a result of the layoffs, Meotti said,
"Students have significant challenges to find the courses they need to
graduate on time," in part because of insufficient numbers of
professors.
A recent report by the Regents says
that while 74 percent of the state's high school graduates go to college, only
41 percent complete post-secondary programs.
Meotti also said that the state's colleges are relying too heavily on less
experienced, but cheaper, adjunct faculty to teach. The U.S. Department
of Education reports that non-faculty pay at CSUS is $60,000 a year, $35,000 a
year less than the salary of a professor. The share of full-time faculty at
CSUS, the community colleges and the state's online college has dropped nearly 10 percent
over the past eight years, reports the Board of Regents.
Meotti said he hopes this $5 million will make a dent in reversing that trend.
While 24 of the 200 central
office positions have been shed, four new positions were created along with the
Board of Regents. Those slots include President Robert Kennedy's
$340,000-a-year job; director of human resources Steven Weinberger's
$175,000-a-year job, and the $130,000 position of spokeswoman, held by Colleen
Flanagan. The position of chief financial officer remains open.
Read more at http://www.ctmirror.org/story/15001/pink-slips-given-top-higher-education-officials
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When it came time for Tyrone Almonte to decide where he wanted to go to high school, he
had plenty of magnet schools to select from in the Hartford region.
He chose Greater Hartford
Academy of Math and Science -- a school not only with significantly higher
achievement rates than nearby schools but also one of a
handful of schools in the state with a longer school day than the required
state minimum.
"It's stressful because
you have to wake up early, but in the end it's the better choice so it more
than makes up for it," the freshman said while passing between classes of
what will be a one hour longer school day than if he went to another school.
By the end of the year, Almonte and his classmates will have spent 20 percent more
time in the classroom than students in almost every other school in the state.
"Most school districts
offer the minimum or near the minimum number of school days annually and that
only a handful have average schools days longer than seven and one-half
hours," Judith Lohman, a legislative researcher,
wrote in a recent report for state lawmakers.
This reality comes against the
backdrop of public officials routinely declaring that more instructional time
is needed for improved student outcomes.
"We spend a phenomenal
amount of time talking about time on task... How can we allow more time where
it's needed?" Stratford
school board member David R. Kennedy asked
fellow members of the state task force looking at ways to close the achievement gap between low-income and minority
and Caucasian students.
"Seat time makes a big
difference," echoed Miguel Cardona, co-chairman of the Achievement Gap
Task Force and principal of an elementary school in Meriden.
But this same group's
recommendation last year to the legislature to extend time in
the classroom failed to even made it out of the Education
Committee. The State Board of Education has recommended since 2003 that districts extend
their school day and school year to no avail.
"Despite [their policy]
and available federal and state funding, the statewide average number of public
school instructional days per year has remained at 181 days for the most recent
seven years," Lohman reported.
The Connecticut Education Association, the
state's largest teachers' union, and the state's superintendent association
both have proposed increasing the school day in recent months.
Nearly half of the schools in
the state open school the bare minimum and almost all the remaining schools
build in no more than five extra days to cancel school for snow.
Five charter schools had
students attend school three extra weeks on top of the minimum 180 days required during the 2009-10 school year, the most
recent year for which the State Department of Education has data available. Six
schools statewide -- four charters and two Hartford-area magnets -- have added
an hour or more onto the traditional 7-and-a-half hour school day.
"Time is so tight. I wish
all of our schools had this extra time," said Anne McKernan,
the assistant superintendent of the Capitol Region Education Council, while touring
the Math and Science Academy, one of the six schools in the state with an
extended day.
"It would be difficult to
accomplish what they have without that extra time."
An expensive initiative
Metropolitan Learning Center
in Bloomfield
used to require their students to attend school nine hours a day. But it was costly,
as teachers had to be paid more to make up for their added time in the
classroom.
Soon after lengthening the day,
CREC officials had to scale back time as they grappled with balancing their
budget.
"We just didn't have the
funding for it anymore, so we had to cut it back," said Bruce
Douglas, the leader of the interdistrict
magnet school system. "We were running a deficit."
Jake Mendelssohn, a teacher at
Math and Science Academy: 'Going to school for this long
will not hurt, it will only help.'
Douglas's district has been
able to keep two of its schools open for longer hours,
and he hopes he is able to keep them in place even as budgets remain tight.
Millions in federal and state
dollars have been dished out over the past several years for districts
promising to increase instruction time. However, those grants are only
available to the state's very lowest-income and -achieving districts.
"The school day is not
increasing because there's only money for this for the worst-off schools" Douglas said.
Schools that did receive grants
to increase performance through extended learning time had their initiatives
outlined in their applications. Bridgeport intended to use some of the $4 million it
received to bargain with the teachers' union in exchange for longer days at
three of their schools. New Haven
promised to increase teacher salaries 10 percent for the
added 11 school days and longer school days at one of their high schools.
Repeated requests to the State
Department of Education to see how these grants have played out in increasing
instruction time went unanswered.
In Bridgeport,
Roosevelt Elementary School has made a
"slight extension" to instruction by shaving time off lunch, but the
school hours remain the same, said Principal Tania Kelley.
"I really wanted to have
the teachers come in earlier, but it's something that I couldn't do at this
time," she said, noting that she still needs to approach the teachers'
union about the idea. If teachers come in at 8 a.m., they can use that time as
their prep period and tack on another half hour of instruction during the
school day.
"That's something I'd like
to do in our second year with the grant ... The [School Improvement Grant] is
not as fully implemented as we want it to be because we're in such a
deficit," Kelley said.
Pressure to cut the calendar
Not only do many municipal
leaders oppose the expansion of the required school day and year, but they also
want officials to allow them to cut their calendar.
"We hear this consistently
across the state," said James Finley, of the Connecticut
Conference of Municipalities. "There's a certain irony to this
will to increase the school calendar, [state officials] want us to do more with
less money."
During former Gov. M. Jodi Rell's tenure, local officials on her Municipal Mandate
Board told her budget director the required calendar was an unfunded mandate
that is often too expensive for them to live up to.
Several districts
officials have warned they may have a difficult time
fulfilling the 180-day, 900-hour requirement after they had to close their
schools for days because of Tropical Storm Irene and a freak October snowstorm
that knocked out power for days. But Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor and
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy have said waivers would be hard to come by.
Changing times?
President Barack
Obama and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan have
repeatedly said they want to significantly increase the amount of time students
attend school.
"Go ahead and boo
me," Duncan told middle and high school
students in northeast Denver.
"I fundamentally think that our school day is too short, our school week
is too short and our school year is too short."
The grants Bridgeport,
New Haven and
six other high-need districts in the state received were allotted in Obama's 2009 stimulus package to help district increase
time in the classroom. But as Lohman's report for
state legislators points out, these and other grants have not even made a dent
since so few schools participate.
The school calendar is tied to
state requirements; Washington
does not get involved in school calendars. Thirty states, including Connecticut, require 180 days and the
remaining states a few days less, except Ohio,
which requires the most at 182 days. Most state require fewer than 1,000 hours
of instruction.
"Some schools, very few
though, are extending the school day... as desperate as we need another
hour," said Robert Lynn Canaday, a retired
professor from the University
of Virginia's Department
of Leadership, Foundations & Policy Studies, which helped school districts
in 44 states restructure their schedules. "I would say money is the main
reason [time has remained the same]. It means changing transportation. It means
paying teachers more."
There is mixed research as to
whether this added time would actually pay off. In Finland -- whose students
consistently test higher
in reading, writing, and math achievement by international standards --
students attend school for significantly fewer hours
per year than their American counterparts.
But national and state
officials and many experts are adamant
that the added time will have an impact.
Officials at CREC say all the
proof the state should need is the performance of the students at their schools
with added time.
"Going to school for this
long will not hurt, it will only help," said Jake Mendelssohn, a chemical
engineer teacher at the Math and Science
Academy. "It allows
us more time to do the interventions we need to do when a student doesn't pick
up a lesson right away. We aren't having to rush
through the lesson, so we can cover everything in time. http://www.ctmirror.org/story/14913/despite-push-and-spending-extended-school-day-and-year-instruction-time-remains-flat