News-Record.com

Sonya Conway, chief district relations officer for Guilford County Schools, will start work with American Express's Greensboro service center on March 17. Conway became head of the district's communications department in 2004 after working with the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce. Her last day is Friday, March 14, coincidentally the same official last day as Superintendent Terry Grier.

Conway will work for American Express as a director of public affairs and communication. Conway said she wasn't looking to leave the district, but said the new job will benefit her long term growth and development.

"It's a tremendous opportunity," she said.

Conway, in tears, told me last night her work with GCS was the most awarding rewarding work she has ever done. School board members congratulated her at last night's meeting.

I wasn't able to interview at-large candidate Sandra Alexander in time for the Saturday compilation we had on filings for the Guilford County Board of Education, Board of Commissioners and other public offices. However, Alexander faxed me some information about her this week and I wanted to share it.

Alexander, a former English professor at N.C. A&T State University is the owner/CEO of Greensboro Scenic Tours, a local sightseeing tour and transportation business. Her platform includes: fiscal responsibility, parental involvement, innovative educational programming and performance accountability/teacher support. Sound familiar?

Alexander formerly served on the board of directors for the Greensboro YWCA and North Carolina Writer's Network. She is a current participant in Impact Greensboro and member of the board of trustees for Triad Stage.

The Guilford County Board of Education spent a little time at its meeting last night talking about the costs of following through on some of the proposals made last week by the school climate task force.

I was able to get a copy of the presentation made last week by Yamille Walker, one of the members of the task force. Everything here.

Following are some of CFO Sharon Ozment's cost estimates for the proposals:
* Assign one social worker per school: GCS has 43.70 social worker positions now so it would cost $5.3 million for 81.30 more positions. Average social worker salary and benefits is $65,571.
* Reduce class size to 17 or below in traditional schools: $41.4 million to add 897 teachers to accomplish this (going from 3,433 positions to 4,330 positions).
* Fund and implement Positive Behavior Support district-wide: $3.3 million with $201,008 needed for coordinators. PBS is currently at 21 schools.
* Add two non-law enforcement security positions to each high school to increase safety: ranged from $579,179 to $1.9 million depending on salaries and number of positions.

It's still a mystery why Kevin Miller resigned as assistant principal from Grimsley High School but one has to wonder if GCS administrators are sighing with relief that he is gone. Getting details on Miller has been difficult because of all the confidentiality laws and when I asked Grimsley students to identify him yesterday, none could give a reason for his leaving other than it being "personal."

Be sure to check out a story coming out on Friday about the new roles of Sharon Ozment and Eric Becoats.

Find here the interim superintendency contracts for Ozment and Becoats, courtesy of school board attorney Jill Wilson.

Also, resumes for the two.
.

A local grassroots group has launched its Bonds for Schools Campaign to build support for the two school board referenda totaling $457.3 million on the ballot May 6. The group has been meeting since early January to write and refine its campaign message and recruit volunteers.

Read the entire press release here.

Campaign co-chairs are Melvin Swann, a former school administrator and community volunteer, Craven Williams, president of Greensboro College, and Chris Greene of High Point, a community leader and education advocate.

Anita Bachmann is the campaign coordinator.

(Sorry it took me so long to post this; I was out sick last week. Unfortunately, I also missed the first meeting of the educational specifications process. That is why you did not see a story Wednesday.)

Centro de Accion Latino invites members of the Greensboro community to attend a fundraiser at Northeast Middle School on Thursday.

The “Rams Coming Together” cultural awareness event takes place from 6-8:30 p.m. at the school, 6720 McLeansville Road in McLeansville. For $5, participants can enjoy salsa lessons, performances, art and games. The money will be used to help pay for the Project H.E.R.E. tutoring and mentoring program for Hispanic students at the school.

Read here a letter providing more details about the program and a flyer for the event.

Guilford County Schools announced today that Page High School has attained International Baccalaureate status. The program is similar to Advanced Placement in that it allows high schools students to take high level courses that could qualify them for college credit. However, IB students must also write an essay and be involved in extracurricular activities. An IB diploma is the end result.

GCS has been offering the IB curriculum since 1996. Grimsley, High Point Central and Smith high schools also have the program. IB prep programs are offered at Falkener Elementary and tentatively at Northwood Elementary, Ferndale Middle and Hairston Middle.

I am working on a fuller story about the IB program, but wanted to give you this nugget: May 2007 performance at the three high schools.

Grimsley had 34 IB diploma-eligible seniors at that time and by the end of the year, 27 had earned one. Also, 424 IB exams were taken and 327 earned a score of 4 or higher, which is needed to qualify the student for college credit.

At High Point Central, 9 opf 34 eligible students earned IB diplomas; 143 of 221 exams earned scores of 4 or higher.

At Smith (the most recent school to get IB other than Page), 0 of 12 eligible students earned an IB diploma; 19 of 79 exams earned scores of 4 or higher.

The Community Dialogue on Education and the Guilford County Council of PTAs will co-sponsor a Town Meeting on a Community Agenda on Sunday, March 30, from 3-5 p.m. at Gillespie Park Elementary School, 1900 Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, Greensboro. All Guilford County groups and individuals, who are concerned with local education, are invited to attend.

Following is the text from the invite:

"With the transition that will occur following the exit of the School Superintendent, there is an opportunity now to engage the Guilford County community in a discussion of our goals for education in this county. Any search for a new superintendent needs to be informed by the highest hopes, dreams and aspirations of our friends, relatives and neighbors from the community and the young people who will be responsible for moving us into the future. Much of the current discussion of education policy includes the dire warnings about American competitiveness, but we must also include a sense of purpose and direction that is linked to the full realization of the humanity of our youth. Many of the current policies and procedures, while having the expressed intention of improving education for all young people, have had very different results. We, as a community, need to develop bold, creative and effective ways to resist the damage to our young people by any policies that we see which do not meet our standards for the full development of our youth. Any such dialogue would be incomplete if it did not include the voices of young people themselves in expressing their needs and desires.

"We encourage all who will participate to engage with their organizations and friends prior to the meeting to think through the most important things that should be included in setting forth the agenda for our schools' future. We would ask them to think through what they consider to be the main problems, what might be solutions to those problems, and what ought to be the goal of education here in general. This discussion will be the basis of future discussions and an ongoing involvement of the community in guiding the work of any new superintendent. We look forward to seeing you on March 30."

Occasionally I get a call from a reader who still cannot wrap his or her mind around the Guilford County Schools insurance policy and how paltry the final insurance settlement of $17.6 million seems when the new Eastern Guilford High School is estimated to cost $61 million.

I received such a call about a week ago and I'm not sure if my various explanations were able to ease the caller's mind. So I decided check in with Wanda Frazier, the district's risk manager, to see if I had missed anything, and post the outcome of our conversation on The Chalkboard for public benefit. I also spoke today with Everette Arnold, executive director of the Insurance Advisory Committee, a group that helps local municipalities and other government agencies purchase insurance.

In cased you missed it, I posted a short explanation on this back in early 2007 along with copies of the district's insurance policy at the time. Other insurance coverage.

Now, the question I keep getting is, if the district had replacement coverage, why isn't it getting enough money to rebuild Eastern? (In some readers' minds, the $17.6 million couldn't be enough to rebuild the school at present time.)

There is such a thing in the insurance world as guaranteed cost replacement insurance, which will pay to rebuild your property even if the cost exceeds your policy limit. I understand this type of insurance to be very expensive and uncommon, especially for school systems. GCS had replacement value insurance, a type provided by the state Department of Public Instruction to most school systems in the state.

"The statewide plan is very good," Arnold said. "Let's call it reasonably priced."

In fact, both Frazier and Arnold said that the DPI insurance premiums are so low that private companies have a hard time matching them. Arnold estimates the district is saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on premiums, which could total in the area of $3 million if you multiplied those savings by 15 years, the amout of time the district has bought state insurance (since merger in 1993). GCS is currently paying $534,758 a year to insure its $1.4 billion in assets, but is seeking insurance bids for 2008-09.

"My recommendation would be to set that (the savings) aside," Arnold said. "But I don't think the Board of Education will set that money aside to build a new school. They'd say we need it now."

Would taxpayers even support either paying more in insurance premiums or setting the savings aside, given that a total loss is so unlikely and that money could be used to pay for staff and other resources?

Also keep in mind that the argument about replacement cost insurance is somewhat moot when the district decided to build a bigger school. The construction costs of the 1968 blueprint, even when modernized to meet current codes, are theoretical as that project did not go out for bid. All we have are Eastern's appraisals, totaling $20.3 million back in 2006.

Following is the text of an e-mail sent from Frazier to the same reader who called me:

"Each school system administrative unit is responsible for insuring the schools in their district. GCS carries property insurance with the Insurance Section of the Department of Public Instruction in Raleigh. This group insures over 90% of all the schools in NC. The coverage we carry is replacement coverage. Replacement coverage is for the building/s that are lost. We lost a building that was constructed in 1974/75. Our coverage pays for replacement of like kind and quality of what was lost. We would not build back a school constructed to the codes of 1974/75. Also the building that burned was a total of 126,500 sq. ft. The portion that was lost was 104,578 sq. ft. Insurance does not pay for the portion not lost.

The old Eastern High was built to accommodate 920 students. On November 1, 2006 when Eastern was lost, we had 1068 students. The new Eastern High’s core capacity will accommodate 1600 students with a total of 270,000 sq. ft.

GCS is requesting bids for higher levels of property coverage for the school year 2008-2009. These will be evaluated and a recommendation will be given to the BOE. Additional coverage always costs more money, so the available budget will also be a consideration."

Does that help?

Check out today's story on teacher personal days, if you have not already. The N.C. Association of Education is petitioning state legislators to remove the $50 fee that teachers and media specialists must pay when they use a personal day. The state levies the fee to help offset the costs of hiring substitute teachers, which in 2006-07 cost between $65 and $130 per day.

Sharon Ozment, chief finance officer, told the Guilford County Board of Education last week, that if the fee is removed, the district would see a local impact of about $200,000, based on 2006-07 personal days taken. Statewide, it could cost $11 million to $12 million.

Details from Ozment this week: In 2006-07, GCS paid a total of $3.6 million from state, local and federal funds for teacher substitutes ($3.6 million includes fringe benefit costs) and a total of $1.4 million from state, local and federal funds for teacher assistants working as teacher substitutes ($1.4 million includes fringe benefit costs).

In 2006-07, GCS "recouped" $204,130 of the $5 million ($3.6 million + $1.4 million) in total substitute costs from the $50/day + fringe benefits costs assessed from teachers for personal leave days used during the school year.

Do you think the state and local districts should bear the full costs of hiring substitutes? Or should teachers themselves have to chip in?

You may recall reading stories last year about a report estimating how much money high school dropouts were costing the state of North Carolina over their lifetimes. One of the groups behind that report was Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina.

I met with Chad Lowry of the group yesterday and he shared with me some of the projects the group is working on. While Parents for Educational Freedom is not pushing specifically for school vouchers, the group would like to see tax credits for families that send their children to non-public schools.

"We just want to see greater options for our students because some schools here are subpar," Lowry said.

For example, the group supports House Bill 388 that was filed last year. It would provide tax credits for parents of children with special needs who enroll them in a private school. Parents for Educational Freedom is also sponsoring a fact-finding trip for state legislators to Florida to research that state's McKay Scholarship Program. That scholarship helps pay for children with special needs to attend non-public schools.

Parents for Educational Freedom would also like North Carolina to replicate a Pennsylvania education tax credit for businesses. More information here and here.

Which of the two tax credits would get your vote?

The district's school nutrition program, along with Director Cynthia Sevier, was recently profiled by the School Nutrition Association in its Well Done! publication for efforts to improve student health & nutrition through its local wellness policy.

Well Done! provides examples of how local wellness policies can have dramatic, positive effects on the entire school system, according to the association. The federal government required all school districts participating in the National School Lunch Program approve wellness policies by July 2006. Policy goals had to include nutrition guidelines for all foods available at schools as well as consistent messaging about nutrition and health.