Community pitches in on Ridgewood schools planning
SEPTEMBER 23, 2014 LAST UPDATED: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2014, 9:29 AM BY JODI WEINBERGER STAFF WRITER THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
Like excited learners, adults invited to the Board of Education’s (BOE) community planning session readily shared their hopes and dreams for the Ridgewood school district, collaborating with officials and administrators in a way that’s rarely possible at 49 Cottage Place.
The first task as part of the four-hour strategy session on Sept. 13 split the group of 50 or so individuals into smaller clusters to draw a representation of their goals for the schools.
Under the direction of former state school board members Cathie Sousa and Nancy Stern, of Sousa and Stern Educational Consultants LLC, the groups got to work literally coloring their vision of the future.
In the casual atmosphere, enhanced from the standard public BOE meetings by a cheese plate and other snacks, everyone had equal input alongside the school board members, principals and administrators, public safety officials, clergy persons, parents, and other community leaders.
“Some strategic planning processes can take months,” said Superintendent Daniel Fishbein. “This really works.”
Ridgewood Board of Education honors record-setting swimmer Charlotte Samuels
SEPTEMBER 22, 2014, 9:49 PM LAST UPDATED: MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2014, 9:50 PM BY CHRIS HARRIS STAFF WRITER THE RECORD
RIDGEWOOD — Open water swimming sensation Charlotte Samuels smiled widely Monday evening as the Board of Education recognized the 16-year-old athlete’s record-setting feat.
Charlotte — who recently returned from Britain, where she swam the English Channel to become the youngest person to complete open water swimming’s Triple Crown — thanked all the members of Ridgewood’s school board for the honor.
“This is the first time in my career I get to honor someone for breaking a world record,” said Superintendent of Schools Daniel Fishbein, before reading a resolution noting Charlotte’s swimming prowess.
The resolution expressed the board’s congratulations while extending to Charlotte “their best wishes for success in all future endeavors.”
Charlotte received a standing ovation from the 15-member audience, which also included her parents, Steven and Suzanne Samuels.
Sheila Brogan, the school board president, said she was both proud of the Ridgewood High School student, and “in awe” of her.
September 12, 2014 Last updated: Friday, September 12, 2014, 9:28 AM
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Why are we moving to Common Core?
Marlene Burton
Marlene Burton
Marlene Burton
To the Editor:
I have spent some time looking at the Common Core ELA standards, as well as the math. A couple in particular caught my eye:
The first, and I quote: “With guidance and support from adults, explore a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing, including in collaboration with peers.”
For what age child is this intended? You might think a 6th grader, but perhaps too ambitious and too grandiose for an 11-year-old – certainly a diversion from more fundamental activities.
But no, it is a kindergarten standard. The proponents of the Common Core want 5-year-olds on computers exploring digital tools to publish their own writings and the writing they have done in collaboration with their peers.
Here is another one: “Participate in shared research and writing projects (e.g., explore a number of books by a favorite author and express opinions about them).” Also a kindergarten standard.
Concerns on Common Core presented to Ridgewood school board
SEPTEMBER 2, 2014 LAST UPDATED: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2014, 11:09 AM BY BY JODI WEINBERGER STAFF WRITER
An apple core that has become the sign for the opposition to new state standards for school curriculum was featured prominently on buttons of many of the two dozen parents who came to speak at the Ridgewood Board of Education (BOE) meeting Aug. 25.
The public outcry against the Common Core and standardized testing is growing in Ridgewood with the help of a group named Ridgewood Cares About Schools, which has formed online on Facebook and drawn many to in-person meetings this summer.
The parents (and many grandparents) raised issues of concern during the public comment portion of the meeting, including that the testing is done on computers, the lack of transparency of where and what test data is shared, and that there are too many instructional hours devoted to testing. They also said that the Common Core standards for math and other subjects are confusing and urged the BOE to reject them in fear that the standards and focus on test preparation will create bad curricula.
Anne Burton Walsh, one of the founders of Ridgewood Cares About Schools, said the increase in the use of technology in the younger grades is “unnecessarily expensive and potentially harmful.” Ridgewood is currently implementing its one-to-one initiative with Google Chromebooks at the high school and plans to give one to every student in Grades K-8 in the coming years, with one reason being that the students must take the new standardized tests on computers.
Ridgweood school board names new business administrators
AUGUST 29, 2014 LAST UPDATED: FRIDAY, AUGUST 29, 2014, 12:31 AM BY JODI WEINBERGER STAFF WRITER
A former school district employee will return to the Ridgewood Board of Education (BOE) as its business administrator in the coming months.
On Aug. 25, the BOE approved the hire of Alfredo Aguilar as the district’s business administrator, with a contract lasting through June 30, 2015. Aguilar will be paid an annual salary of $168,000.
Although Aguilar was unanimously approved to hire, he will remain in his current position, as the business administrator for the Pascack Valley Regional High School District, for 90 days or until a replacement is found.
In the interim, assistant business administrator Gertrude Engle has been named acting business administrator and will receive a stipend of $250 per day.
Aguilar previously served as the business administrator for the Oradell Board of Education and from 2009 to 2012 was the assistant business administrator in Ridgewood.
From 2004 to 2009, Aguilar was a middle school math teacher in Paterson Public Schools and from 2001 to 2004 was a financial services officer in the U.S. Air Force.
4 Charts Every Mom With Kids Going Back to School Should See
Kelsey Harris / @KelsRenHar / August 25, 2014
Many kids are heading back to public school this week, and so begins fall and spring semesters. You have entrusted the government to give your child a good curriculum and a teaching staff you can count on. But what happens when the school staff is equipped with a big list of employees, but not necessarily a big crop of teachers focused on your child?
Tax dollars in places you don’t know about.
Even though the Obama Administration proposes spending $25 billion specifically to “provide support for hundreds of thousands of education jobs” in order to “keep teachers in the classroom,” research by both Heritage and The Fordham Institute reveal alarming numbers: only half of education jobs belong to teachers.
Heritage’s education policy expert Lindsey Burke says “school districts should trim bureaucracy and work on long-term reform options for better targeting taxpayer resources,” instead of putting taxpayers on the hook for more federal spending.
Check out the numbers in the four charts below.
1. The charts proving only half of education jobs are teachers:
The next Regular Public Meeting of the Ridgewood Board of Education will be held on Monday, August 25, 2014 at 5 p.m. The public is invited to attend the meeting at the Ed Center, 49 Cottage Place, Floor 3. The meeting will be aired live on FiOS channel 33 and Optimum channel 77. Or it may be viewed live via the district website at www.ridgewood.k12.nj.us using the “Link in Live” tab.
Click here to view the agenda for the August 25, 2014 Regular Public Meeting.
8.19.14: REVISED Back-To-School Night Schedule: The Willard School Back-To-School Night for Grades K-2 has been changed from September 18 to September 23.
Please click here for the newly revised schedule. Please note that this change is an update from that which is printed in the Newsline newsletter coming to Ridgewood homes this week.
BOE MEETS MONDAY, AUGUST 25, 2014
The next Regular Public Meeting of the Ridgewood Board of Education will be held on Monday, August 25, 2014 at 5 p.m.
The public is invited to attend the meeting at the Ed Center, 49 Cottage Place, Floor 3. The meeting will be aired live on FiOS channel 33 and Optimum channel 77. Or it may be viewed live via the district website at www.ridgewood.k12.nj.us using the “Link in Live” tab.
Click here to view the agenda and addendum for the July 21, 2014 Regular Public Meeting.
Click here to view the webcast of the July 21, 2014 Regular Public Meeting.
BOARD BIDS AMERICA A HAPPY BIRTHDAY: (from left): Board members Jim Morgan, Sheila Brogan, Christina Krauss and Vince Loncto join Superintendent Dan Fishbein (center) for the Ridgewood Fourth of July Parade.
Reader asks Was there any publication that the BOE elections were coming up and any potential candidate packets were available ?
Any Notification ? Any Publication ? Candidate Packets ?
Well two BOED trustees are running unopposed. So its the same old song. Was there even any publication that the elections were coming up and any potential candidate can pick their packets up at the BOED. Snuck that one through.
BOE MEETS MONDAY, AUGUST 25, 2014
The next Regular Public Meeting of the Ridgewood Board of Education will be held on Monday, August 25, 2014 at 5 p.m. The public is invited to attend the meeting at the Ed Center, 49 Cottage Place, Floor 3. The meeting will be aired live on FiOS channel 33 and Optimum channel 77. Or it may be viewed live via the district website atwww.ridgewood.k12.nj.us using the “Link in Live” tab.
Click here to view the agenda and addendum for the July 21, 2014 Regular Public Meeting.
Click here to view the webcast of the July 21, 2014 Regular Public Meeting.
Another $119,865 to repair 2 turfed fields + $48,000 for turf on Maple Field (no longer Park, so let’s admit it and change the name). Plus who-knows-what in change orders.
Deductible is $25,000! That must have been somebody’s great idea to save money on the insurance.
We are going to go broke over this fiasco. It even failed a referendum but it happened anyway. Sickening waste. Meanwhile people are literally starving all over the world.
The turf MUST GO. It’s either now or later. Now is better. But nobody can admit to making a mistake. Well, this was a huge one.
Ridgewood incurs costly damage from recent flash flooding
August 7, 2014
BY JODI WEINBERGER
STAFF WRITER
Bubbles pop up on the Ridgewood High School field after a quick but powerful rainstorm led to flash flooding throughout the village last Friday.
Last Friday’s flash flood is costing the school district and municipality hundreds of thousands of dollars in cleanup costs.
The Board of Education (BOE) received authorization from the Bergen County Department of Education this week to award a bid to LandTek for $119,865 for “emergency repair” of two district-owned artificial turf fields.
Business Administrator Michael Falkowski said there was “extensive” damage at Ridgewood High School and Stevens fields following the Aug. 1 storm and that the playing grounds are “not useable” in their current state.
The money will come out of the 2015 district budget and possibly an emergency reserve fund, he said.
“This is just for the fields,” Falkowski said. “There’s other work that needs to be done,” including general cleanup of the area.
BACK-TO-SCHOOL INFO: Parents and guardians will be receiving a detailed letter on or about August 11 about updating emergency contact information, reviewing various district policies and granting certain permissions. This Mandatory Annual Online Re-registration process takes place through Skyward Family Access between August 11 and September 12
August 5, 2014 –In preparation for the start of the 2014-2015 school year, all parents and guardians of students in the Ridgewood Public Schools must complete the Mandatory Annual Online Re-registration process through Skyward Family Access between August 11 and September 12.
New this year is a section on the 1:1 Chromebook initiative, in which parents and guardians of high school students will be required to review the new Chromebook policy and procedures, complete the agreement form and fund the annual insurance fees.
Re-registration also involves updating emergency contact information; completing the All-Media Permission Form; reviewing district policies and codes; authorizing food service accounts and administration of over-the-counter medications; and applying for the optional NJ FamilyCare insurance program.
Detailed instructions on Mandatory Annual Online Re-registration will be mailed to homes on or about August 11. To re-register, parents and guardians should go to the district website at www.ridgewood.k12.nj.us, choose Skyward Family Access under the Parents tab, log in with their username and password and select Mandatory Annual Online Re-
Registration under Home. Anyone who has forgotten their login and/or password information may request a password reset by selecting the Forgot Login/Password link on the log-on page. Further assistance may be requested by sending an email to skywardhelp@ridgewood.k12.nj.us.
Stimulus ‘boondoggle’: School board member details disastrous school computer giveaway
August 6, 2014
HOBOKEN, N.J. – When the Hoboken school leaders decided in 2010 to use a windfall of federal stimulus money to purchase laptops for all students in the city’s junior-senior high school, former board member Maureen Sullivan was the only one to vote against the measure.
Four years later, the district’s superintendent Mark Toback has deemed the initiative “unsustainable” and canceled the program, leaving school officials to explore options for recycling dozens of machines that are now collecting dust in a school storage closet.
“It was clear it was going to be a boondoggle and a disaster and that’s what it turned out to be,” Sullivan told EAGnews.
“The stimulus money came and it had to be soaked up … It was like, ‘It’s free money, let’s just spend it,’” she said of the board’s rush to dole out computers, which her colleagues on the board viewed as an opportunity to help the district’s mostly poor students keep up with their wealthier peers.
“There was just no planning or thinking things through logically,” she said. “In general, that’s how the school board operates.”
Before the plan was approved, Sullivan repeatedly highlighted the district’s already struggling tech staff, the costs to repair and maintain hundreds of computers, licensing fees for software, and the lack of a strategic plan for training teachers, but “it was just shluffed off like ‘Don’t worry about it, these things take care of themselves,’” Sullivan said.
“I asked what happens when the stimulus money goes away and they were just like ‘Our taxpayers will see the value … and pay,’” said Sullivan, a mother of two high school students.
“You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out it was going nowhere fast. They never wanted to hash out the negatives, they only wanted to talk about the positives,” she said. “Anyone with common sense knows you can’t just give a 12-year-old a laptop.
“Kids have all the time in the world to figure out how to mess them up,” Sullivan said.
And that’s exactly what happened.
According to the Hechinger Report:
By the time Jerry Crocamo, a computer network engineer, arrived in Hoboken’s school system in 2011, every seventh, eighth and ninth grader had a laptop. Each year a new crop of seventh graders were outfitted. Crocamo’s small tech staff was quickly overwhelmed with repairs.
We had “half a dozen kids in a day, on a regular basis, bringing laptops down, going ‘my books fell on top of it, somebody sat on it, I dropped it,’ ” said Crocamo.
Screens cracked. Batteries died. Keys popped off. Viruses attacked. Crocamo found that teenagers with laptops are still… teenagers.
“We bought laptops that had reinforced hard-shell cases so that we could try to offset some of the damage these kids were going to do,” said Crocamo. “I was pretty impressed with some of the damage they did anyway. Some of the laptops would come back to us completely destroyed.”
Crocamo’s time was also eaten up with theft. Despite the anti-theft tracking software he installed, some laptops were never found. Crocamo had to file police reports and even testify in court.
That was only the beginning.
Students also learned how to circumvent software installed on the machines intended to prevent them from visiting pornography, social media, and other inappropriate websites. Crocamo disabled the computers’ webcams, but students learned to undo those controls, as well.
The added software also dragged down the computers’ processors, which prevented them from effectively running educational software.
“We didn’t really do much on the computer,” Michael Ranieri, a junior at Hoboken high school, told the Hechinger Report. “So we kind of just did games to mess around when we had free time. I remember really big was Crazy Taxis that we used play. If we found solitaire online, we used to play it.”
Many folks in the community also learned the district’s username and password and eventually overwhelmed the high school’s wifi network.
Are Public Schools Collecting Too Much Data on Your Kids?
Mary Tillotson / @Watchdogorg / August 05, 2014
Parents are increasingly voicing concern that public schools are collecting massive amounts of personal data on students, storing it and distributing it to third parties without their consent.
Dawn Sweeney, a Pennsylvania mother, has two children in public schools and home-schools her younger three. She had planned to enroll them in public schools when they reached seventh grade, as she did with her two oldest. But because of the data collection, she’s now reconsidering.
“Nobody can say exactly what is being collected, but it’s a lot, and it concerns me that every time my kids are on the computer, their person is connected to data,” Sweeney said. “You don’t need parent permission for that. However, you do need parent permission to hang artwork in the hallway.”
That data collection makes plenty of parents nervous and is one reason more parents home-school their children, said Will Estrada, staff attorney and director of federal relations for Home School Legal Defense Association.
Other concerns include identity theft, data security, a child’s physical safety if a sex offender gains access to the data, and the government or big businesses’ having access to the data.
Emmett McGroarty, executive director of the Preserve Innocence Project at the American Principles Project, said if government is able to collect information in an unfettered manner on individuals, it will change their relationship.
“If you’re walking around knowing this guy is collecting this information and is keeping it on you and your children, it’s going to bother you, and it’s going to intimidate you,” he said. “If you and I ever enter into a dispute down the road, you’re really going to be at a disadvantage.”
In late July, parents who had worked to take down inBloom, a pilot project involving massive student data collection, formed Student Privacy Matters, a coalition to push for better privacy protections at the state and federal level.
The next Regular Public Meeting of the Ridgewood Board of Education will be held on Monday, July 21, 2014 at 5 p.m. The public is invited to attend the meeting at the Ed Center, 49 Cottage Place, Floor 3. The meeting will be aired live on FiOS channel 33 and Optimum channel 77. Or it may be viewed live via the district website atwww.ridgewood.k12.nj.us using the “Link in Live” tab.
Click here to view the agenda and addendum for the June 23, 2014 Regular Public Meeting.
Click here to view the webcast of the June 23, 2014 Regular Public Meeting..
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