Is anyone else watchung the school committee meeting on TV right now?? Pure bullshi+. Trying to make themselves look good, competent. HA. What a joke. What a disgrace.
Yes.....a lot of people watch those meetings on MMTV - however, before watching school committee meetings - I usually need to take medication to prevent me from vomiting- if you get my meaning!
I'm more concerned with our own local felons. (MFD, stick to school stuff. Your red-scare rant doesn't help anyone. You make a lot of sense when you talk about the local corruption, but you are an instant turn-off when you start your trump-izing.)
Watched some of the budget barf show yesterday. Had a public meeting but couldn't manage to make sure the doors to City Hall were open. Can anyone spell OML? Blaming it on the "fobs" naturally (instead of our incompetent IT manager, who also hadn't been backing up city servers often enough, obviously, and subjected the police dept to several days with no access to any IT and then paid a ransom out of our taxdollars to hackers!).
Who's brilliant idea on the school committee was it to have an 8-4 Saturday circus, arraying the whole ship of fools for the further embarrassment of the community? Just for good measure they paraded out their most fanatical Ed foundation parent, as if that makes them look even vaguely credible (nope, not a chance of that). They (SC, mayor, MEF) have all become lockstep Dolanites with their misplaced rage and whining over their catastrophically failed override. Notice how they managed to avoid mentioning the $3.5 million surplus from this past year's budget, and instead are propagandizing a "million-dollar deficit" in Paymore's proposed "level service budget." How many ways can you spell S-C-A-M? No PR firm is going to be able to wash over the shameful ignorance and arrogance of those putting forth all this garbage.
Listen "education expert" Mr. 26% Dolan & your lobbying PAC, MEF: You lost. Get over yourselves. You have made a total mess of things with your "exemplary" figurehead. It is now beyond fixing without a total sea change of new and actually qualified leaders. All of you need to go get a life and figure out how to redeem yourselves. You are hurting children with your support of really bad people who are still collecting way more than they deserve from all of us, and damaging what might be left of the city's reputation. You want your hands to be back in our pockets for more, and want to grind in the misery with your relentless, poorly expressed rage and whining. The answer was and is NO.
School Comm Mar 5 PT1
https://vimeo.com/157856904
and if that doesn't turn your stomach, there's a Part 2.
Starting with Melrose's own uncute Grover. Oh so so gross.
Apparently she thinks the city needs a "full-time communications person"! Laughable really.
These people can't get out of their own way.
Just a rant where she admits "still being pretty angry" over the override.
It was all just a reaction to CKK's right-on remarks during super's recent evaluation, and to losing the override (by a huge margin, which these types just don't have the simple humility or common sense to think about).
Her "two cents". So pathetic. She was the only one to "participate."
Margaret Adams: "Next year the district might be cited by the Dept of Ed for not providing the required amount of ESL (Engl as Second Language) services."
And we citizens are supposed to believe that this is all due to money instead of that resources were negligently parsed by administrators knowing that they were in violation of the laws and regulations. But somehow they always have enough for their "pot of money" for administrative raises that they sneak through every summer when they think we're not looking.
Adams: "doing science" Funny that. She wouldn't even know what science is if something scientific bit her.
After long, simpering rant where Driscoll listens to herself talk and drop as many buzz words as she can fit into her up-talk (those "angels" in her head), gets called out by CC who reminds committee to confine their remarks to the budget, to which Dolan jumps in with his equally obvious rant, continuously bemoaning the override loss. "Listen, the public made their choice. We have to live with that...."
Dugan, "at what point do we get cited for not teaching Science" ... or "at a sub-par level because we don't have the materials"....leading questions, again, all geared towards positioning that pi$$ moan, the public didn't vote for the override, now it's the voters fault for the fact that the district is going to cited for multiple violations (beyond the federal civil rights and state law violations Melrose has already been found guilty of), not meeting ESL laws, not teaching the new science curriculum, you name it.
Dugan, "as a liaison, I KNOW how much work is being done...." "No new instructional materials for grades 6 through 12"
Adams: "We don't have that rigorous line item for instructional materials"
Oh really.
This is all just a pre-fab disgusting crybaby session about all the things they plan to cheat the students out of in order to punish the community for failing the override. Huge bonds for textbooks, high school renovations, huge amount from city budget for next five years for technology, that the community has generously paid for, on and on. But the students are going to be denied what they need so that the administration can rub everyone's noses in the failed override. Classy. These people truly have no shame. Don't know if the rest of this shameful display can be watched.
How many times are they going to repeat "Best Practices" to which Taymore retorts "I will tell you...." or "I get very concerned" (oh, I'll just bet she's "concerned"! NOT) rant about ListServs "We've done so much"
These people need their own evangelical tent for their circus. Wow. Just so obvious and drab and horrifically "Sub-Par" (to quote Dugan).
Eddie "intends to spend the morning 'listening and learning'" Bad joke. Has zero to contribute, especially if it places him in any political disfavor with his next-seat buddy and patron, Rob.
At least DeSelm was no longer "Nascent"!
God, this woman is a poster child for nastiness. She's angry that the override failed. Who cares? She's the "Mayor's mouthpiece, all right - they have they same arrogant rotten attitude, that being that anyone who disagrees with them must therefore be an idiot. I was especially disgusted by her "ghostwriter" spew, and by her comment that she must not have worked hard enough to inform the ignorant electorate about why the override was needed, the implication being that the electorate is too stupid to understand the issue and needs someone to lead it around by the nose. Hence, the rant about a "communications director". What she really means by that is "propaganda minister".
What she apparently is too dense to understand is that the electorate understood the issue perfectly, and said with it's vote that "You people are full of crap, and we don't believe you anymore.".
"And we citizens are supposed to believe that this is all due to money instead of that resources were negligently parsed by administrators knowing that they were in violation of the laws and regulations. But somehow they always have enough for their "pot of money" for administrative raises that they sneak through every summer when they think we're not looking."
That "pot of money" for administrative raises was a real quote taken right from Thorp and Driscoll's cynical "Rolling Agenda" last spring. They really have no shame!
They drone and rant on and on about their "deficit" now, all as further bullying of the community that denied them their fraudulent override requests at last November's election. They are shameless in misportraying anything and everything to fit a narrow and really quite silly narrative--that voters said no to their ill-conceived tax override, and since the voters defeated the measure resoundingly, 62% to 38% roughly, the voters--and kids!--should now be punished by these vile, self-serving hacks, who are determined to construct a budget that will leave the district open to charges of violations and negligence by the Dept of Ed. They persist in portraying it all as a grim crisis (even while "Kidneys Dolan" contradicts himself routinely that "it isn't really dire") with only "tough choices." Meanwhile, the fluff PR pieces about the "Learning Commons" still being "on budget" continue so that the PR firm can claim it has fulfilled its mission and bill extra for any real news stories that it is commanded to deal with. Given the dark underbelly of all that's going on during the district's spin cycle, there is inevitable bad news that will surface and need mega-spin.
Gee, wasn't just a few short years ago that Brodeur (then upwardly mobile prez of BOA) "gave" the schools (oh, who cares about separation of powers anyway!) some "leftover" tax money to buy those nifty Science kits that Conway and Herrera (remember her?) and Straznik (remember his fun times at HM?) claimed were indeed a science curriculum (they're not) and they were the great Answer to this district's pathetic history in the teaching of science? And then, oopsie, they discovered they needed another $100,000 just a year later, because, oopsie again, they didn't realize they had only purchased one subject for one grade of each science kit (because they hadn't bothered to do any scientific reasoning, or even read the catalog!)? And then, lo and behold, they discovered that the kits required annually replaceable materials ("manipulatives"), which they stopped buying when they then realized that no one was really using those "inquiry-based" science kits that they had all just a short time earlier sworn up and down were The Answer. And then, oopsie, have to allocate another $5,000 because somehow the kits from the Winthrop disappeared the same time its less-than-a-year principal vanished for greener pastures, maybe someplace that also needed a Science Answer.
Oh sure, Melrose Schools are now all about SCIENCE, and don't you forget it, especially with its own School Committee NASCENT SCIENTIST now who's going to make sure we never forget that!
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Watch at about 1:32 (part 1). Just crazy. Driscoll putting forward the idea of kindergarten parents paying for "consummables" again because she had to pay for high school workbooks etc. Shot down by Taymore because of regs.
"social emotional" & position of Social Worker discussed in such low bar, uneducated and yes, racist way. CT: "Many of our newcomers are refugees who have been traumatized...." Oh so here we go again, blaming the high cost of their budget on "that" population of "others" (ESL, etc.).
Not for anything but we are headed for our next crisis because CT is paying for the PR spin masters from unauthorized funding sources. E-rate grant funds can ONLY be spent on communication infrastructure and even then the eligible items is very narrow. This will undoubtedly result in, at a minimum, an audit finding but potentially an investigation by the FCC or US Dept of Education's Investigator General. CT's public comments that "the business manager called the E-Rate people and they said this is okay" is simply ridiculous. These administrators better smarten up as this kind of blatant disregard for the regs can and will jeopardize future E-Rate grant funding. More importantly, the school committee members better start doing their own research because as history has demonstrated, they simply cannot rely on CT to be above board.