The Education Beat

Interim Superintendent Bud Martin said Quincy School District officials are studying traffic patterns along Maine Street in light of some recent changes resulting from a Safe Routes to School project undertaken by the city of Quincy.

One change of particular concern involved going from  two lanes in each direction to having just one lane in each direction with a center turning lane. Martin said this has developed into an issue near the “circle drive” at Baldwin Intermediate School, where motorists take turns pulling in to pick up students after school.

“Historically, if the circle drive filled up, they would line up down the street in one of those extra lanes,” Martin said at Wednesday’s School Board meeting. “No extra lane exists now, so we can’t allow that to happen for the safety of the children and the safety of the drivers.”

Martin said it is illegal for cars to stop in a single traffic lane and cause other cars to back up, and it is illegal for motorists to use the center turn lane to pass other cars. Both of these situations apparently have been happening this week as the new school year got under way.

“We are studying that pattern,” he said, noting how a recommended solution may be announced soon.

One possible option being considered is to halt use of the circle drive altogether.

Click here to see a copy of the personnel addendum approved at Wednesday’s meeting.

Bud Martin, the Quincy School District’s former business manager, attended his first School Board meeting Wednesday night in his new role as interim superintendent — a position he agreed to fill for 60 working days in the wake of Lonny Lemon’s sudden resignation.

Martin didn’t have a lot to say during the meeting, but he did share a story about his experience speaking to a local group earlier this week.

“They were talking about the district and all the changes and concerns about this happening and that happening,” Martin said.

“My response to them was: We’re a school district that’s in transition. We’re not adrift. We know where we’re going. We’re going to continue business as usual. Right now we’re working very hard to have a very good opening of school in the fall, close out the past year’s financials and get the budget ready for next year. So we’re going to move ahead and do the very best we can to keep the district moving forward as it always has.”

Martin also had some high praise for school district staffers who stepped forward to take on extra duties in response to some turnover and staff being gone on medical leave.

For example, Martin pointed to the fiscal department, where a key employee was on medical leave with the district’s payroll needing to get out.

“Folks get very nervous when their checks are affected,” Martin said. “Everyone in that department — even the ladies in the office who aren’t in that department — all kicked in and worked hard and got those payrolls out on time. And the staff members got the bills out on time.”

A copy of the personnel addendum approved at Wednesday’s board meeting can be viewed by clicking here.

Members of the Quincy School Board on Wednesday applauded a Quincy High School foreign exchange student whose artwork was chosen as the grand prize winner in a statewide organ/tissue donor poster contest sponsored by the Illinois Secretary of State’s office.

QHS Principal Danielle Edgar presented Laia Monells Costan of Barcelona, Spain, at Wednesday’s meeting and told how her artwork was selected from thousands of entries submitted by students in grades K-12 across the state.

Copies of the poster will be reproduced and displayed for the next two years at Secretary of State driver training facilities, schools, libraries, hospitals and other locations statewide with the goal of promoting awareness about the importance of organ and tissue donation.

“This is an amazing young lady that we’ve been blessed to have in our Quincy public school system this year,” Edgar said.
Dr. Steven Krause, a School Board member and cardiologist who serves as medical director for the Cardiac Catheterization Lab in the Blessing Heart and Vascular Center, personally thanked Costan for her efforts to help promote awareness about donating organs.

Krause told how he recently sent one of his patients to Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis for a heart transplant that wouldn’t have been possible if not for the willingness of a donor’s family.

“So many patients need organs, and many of them suffer months to years hoping to get one. And many of them die, unfortunately, never having the opportunity to get a new organ,” Krause told Costan.

“So doing this is wonderful. Anything we can do to increase awareness for organ transplant donors is just a great thing to do to save a life.”

To see a copy of the personnel addendum from Wednesday’s meeting, click here.

Just when you thought Illinois schools were facing enough troubled waters because of the state’s financial mess, now comes another potential worry.

In his weekly message published on the Illinois State Board of Education’s website, State Superintendent Christopher Koch warned that a possible cut in federal funding could be in the offing next year, adding even more stress for financially strapped schools across the land.

As Koch explained, this new concern is tied to the failure of a bipartisan deficit-reduction “super committee” in late 2011 to develop a plan for lowering the federal budget deficit by $1.2 trillion over a 10-year period. The committee’s inaction triggered a plan to make automatic cuts to all discretionary funding in the federal budget — a process known as “sequestration.”

“It’s estimated that if Congress does nothing to stop sequestration, education programs may be cut by more than 9 percent or $4 billion in 2013 alone,” Koch wrote. “The actual amount of the cuts is unclear.”

The amounts to be cut for each state are to be calculated by the Congressional Budget Office and will be ordered by the president on Jan. 2, 2013.

“Unfortunately, these cuts will be automatic unless Congress decides otherwise and will not be definitively known by schools until the sequestration date in January 2013,” Koch added.

Koch said some congressional insiders indicated to him that sequestration “is a very real possibility,” but it probably won’t be addressed until after the presidential elections in November.

Until then, Koch is urging school officials statewide to reach out to their local representatives in Congress “to educate them of the impact of sequestration on your district, schools and students.”

Koch also expressed concern about the state’s budget-making process. He noted how two similar resolutions working their way through the Illinois General Assembly would establish spending caps for the 2013 fiscal year. Based on those resolutions, he said, only $6.491 billion would be allocated to the House Elementary and Secondary Education Appropriations Committee — an amount $285.5 million lower than what was allocated in fiscal 2012 and $523 million less than the education budget ISBE requested.

This constrained amount, Koch said, is contingent upon the state making $2.7 billion in Medicaid reductions. If those Medicaid reductions aren’t carried out, he warned, “then the amounts available to each appropriation committee must be reduced proportionately.”

In turn, the amount dished out to Illinois schools would be reduced as well.

Maybe it’s a good thing Quincy School District voters last month approved a $6.2 million working cash bond issue for the district. Having a little extra cash on hand might not be a bad thing if all the warnings about possible state and federal funding cuts become a harsh reality.

Quincy University plans to expand its swimming class for children with special needs ages 2-18. Click here to download a flyer from QU outlining details about the upcoming class, which starts April 2. Included in the flyer is a list of needed items that can be donated by local groups or individuals to help serve the children in the program.

Administrative pay was a brief topic at Wednesday’s Quincy School Board meeting.

Superintendent Lonny Lemon presented a state-mandated administrative compensation report for the 2010-11 school year. By law, the report must be posted on the district’s website each year.

The full report can be found at http://www.qps.org/board/fiscal/

A copy also can be downloaded by clicking here.

To no one’s surprise, the report shows the highest-paid administrative pay was given to Lemon, whose base salary was $170,656. That’s essentially the same pay he received the previous year except for the same $656 average pay bump given to all certified personnel, including administrators, as a result of last year’s negotiated teacher contract.

The report shows Lemon’s total compensation came to $177,630 when his $6,956.83 benefit for health insurance coverage is included.

Next in line on the salary list was Christie Dickens, assistant superintendent for administrative services, whose base salary was $121,900, which is up from $115,000 the previous year. Her health insurance benefit of $7,140.23 bumped her total compensation to $129,058.

Third in line was Trish Sullivan-Viniard, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction. She received a base pay of $120,656, which is up $656 from the previous year. With her health insurance benefit of $10,486.87 figured in, Viniard received total compensation of $131,160.

Five other administrators had six-figure base salaries in 2011:

• Paul Saunders, principal of Baldwin Intermediate School, $115,423.

• Charles “Bud” Martin, business manager, $109,999.

• Kristen Kendrick, former special education director who has since left the district to take another job, $105,529.

• Jody Cooper, the district’s Title1/testing/technology director, $102,278.

• Diane Glaub, principal of Quincy Junior High School, $101,238.

Some administrators earned extra pay for extra duties. For example, Kathi Dooley, the district’s director of music, received a base pay of $78,853. However, on top of that she earned an extra $5,448 as music director, $3,643 for New Faces, $2,464 for leading the Baldwin Boys Choir, $500 for her work with the marching band, $3,149 for the show choir, $1,500 for being musical director and $2,616 for after-school chorus. All of those things, combined her health insurance benefit, pushed Dooley’s total compensation to $105,150, according to the report.

The Quincy School Board has agreed to sell some unneeded property it owns at 1411 S. 34^th.

The property consists of one lot and part of a second lot in the Fox Run Court subdivision. It will go on the auction block at 12:30 p.m. Nov. 16 in room 214 at the Board of Education headquarters, 1416 Maine.

The board did not disclose a minimum bid price that must be reached before the property will be sold, but this was a topic of conversation in the closed session following the board’s regular meeting Wednesday night.

The distinct acquired three lots at that location in 2006 for the Vo-Tech Center’s home-building program, which gives students the opportunity to gain real-world experience by building houses that are later sold to the public.

In this case, one house was built in the Fox Run Court location. But school officials say the remaining lot and part of another are too small to accommodate anything but a small house. The program’s leaders prefer to build “medium” size homes, which are more marketable.

Another consideration in selling the property is that a portion of it lies within a floodplain, and floodplain rules that apply to new construction have changed since the property was purchased five years ago.

In addition, Superintendent Lonny Lemon said the Vo-Tech program is building fewer houses today than it did in the past because of the downturn in the economy. He said the district doesn’t have much available cash on hand right now to stockpile all the supplies needed to build another house.

A resolution outlining the proposed sale of the property can be viewed by clicking here.

In other action at Wednesday’s meeting, Lemon announced the district has been added to a pilot project at Governors State University in which a group of Illinois schools is formulating a template for evaluating principals. This is being done to comply with education reform legislation passed by the General Assembly.

Lemon said this is “fantastic news” for the district, because it would have been difficult for the district on its own to develop an evaluation tool that could be put into place by next September in accordance with the new law. He said getting involved in the pilot program will give Quincy some voice in how the evaluation template is developed. Lemon said he expects the template to be used statewide once it is completed.

Also Wednesday:

• Lemon recognized Quincy School District employee Max Mosley for coming to the aid of a Quincy High School student who was choking on food in the QHS cafeteria last week. Using life-saving skills he recently learning in a training exercise, Mosley managed to clear the student’s airway and may have saved the student’s life, Lemon said.

• Agreed to move forward with $140,900 worth of life-safety projects that can be completed this year by the district’s staff at Quincy High School, Quincy Junior High and Baldwin Intermediate School.

• Amended the district’s policy dealing with extracurricular activities to formalize the academic criteria used by Quincy High School to determine eligibility to participate. The guidelines, which apply to all students taking part in extracurricular activities, including sports, require students to maintain “good standing” by passing at least four courses at all times during the season in which they are participating. In accordance with Illinois High School Association rules, eligibility to participate will be checked each week.

Board members Jeff Mays and Scott Stone said they supported the measure but want to see some tougher standards worked into the policy in the future.

A copy of the policy can be downloaded by clicking here.

A copy of the “personnel addendum” approved at Wednesday’s meeting can be downloaded by clicking here.

School districts and education observers across the region will be circling Oct. 31 on their calendars — and not because it’s Halloween.

Instead, that’s the day the Illinois State Board of Education will release state assessment data and school report cards for every district in Illinois.

This hotly awaited information will include data on the number of school districts in Western Illinois making “adequate yearly progress” on testing benchmarks required by the federal No Child Left Behind legislation.

The number of districts making AYP has been going down steadily in recent years while the federal standards have been going up. This trend is likely to continue in the newest release of information.

Last year, for the first time, the number of Illinois schools failing to make AYP outnumbered the districts that actually met AYP.

Since there are potential penalty provisions tied to continued poor performance, school officials throughout the land were relieved to hear President Barack Obama announce plans last month to let states seek waivers to the ever-tougher NCLB standards, which will require 100 percent of all students to meet or exceed testing standards by 2014.

State Superintendent Christopher Koch promptly declared it’s “very likely” Illinois will seek such a waiver.

Other states will no doubt follow suit because many educators feel the federal guidelines are unrealistic.