Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

[bigblue_dl]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

les, question. For your school, you mention that you are last in funding, does this mean that your school has the smallest budget per student in your state/area/etc? If this is yes, which I think it probably is, it seems obvious that the funding needs to be increased to really see improvement. If your school is getting adequate funding right now, in comparison to similar surrounding districts (which is sounds like it is definitely not), and you are still seeing these problems, it sure seems to me like there needs to be some restructuring and gutting of the school administration. And actually, thinking about it, it is probably a combination of both. A good gutting of everyone in the district's administration, and funding up to the level of comparable districts needs to happen.

I always try to look at these things logically. Some times my decision of which side is correct falls on one side of the argument and others it is on the other side (contrary to popular belief).

 

[leswp1]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

les, question. For your school, you mention that you are last in funding, does this mean that your school has the smallest budget per student in your state/area/etc? If this is yes, which I think it probably is, it seems obvious that the funding needs to be increased to really see improvement. If your school is getting adequate funding right now, in comparison to similar surrounding districts (which is sounds like it is definitely not), and you are still seeing these problems, it sure seems to me like there needs to be some restructuring and gutting of the school administration. And actually, thinking about it, it is probably a combination of both. A good gutting of everyone in the district's administration, and funding up to the level of comparable districts needs to happen.

I always try to look at these things logically. Some times my decision of which side is correct falls on one side of the argument and others it is on the other side (contrary to popular belief).

Dead last when you look at what we contribute and 8th from last if you look including grants.

Lil came home today and all his friends who had signs to support the initiative had them stolen off their lawns- total >140 signs now pilfered. . He keeps asking me aren't they going to get in trouble somehow? He can't get over the paper not covering this or the fact there is no consequence for these people.

Paper's editorial saying we didn't fire teachers. Forgot to say we are now running at >200K deficit.

Less than 2 hours to go. if it doesn't work out I will be calling the realtor. Mr doesn't believe me

 

[leswp1]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

It is official. I live in a town of mental midgets. We are now 300K in the hole. I had the number wrong. We have no plan to fix the deficit. We have no plan to fix the schools. They also failed the override for fire and police. I want to either throw up or find a legal mind altering substance that is legal and doesn't give me a migraine.

 

[MissThundercat]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

It is official. I live in a town of mental midgets. We are now 300K in the hole. I had the number wrong. We have no plan to fix the deficit. We have no plan to fix the schools. They also failed the override for fire and police. I want to either throw up or find a legal mind altering substance that is legal and doesn't give me a migraine.

here... you can have my Prozac.

 

[MinnesotaNorthStar]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

It is official. I live in a town of mental midgets. We are now 300K in the hole. I had the number wrong. We have no plan to fix the deficit. We have no plan to fix the schools. They also failed the override for fire and police. I want to either throw up or find a legal mind altering substance that is legal and doesn't give me a migraine.

Sounds like you need a chocolate milk....with Khalua.

 

[leswp1]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

here... you can have my Prozac.

Sounds like you need a chocolate milk....with Khalua.

I need grain alcohol!! and I wouldn't mind a bit of Prozac either. Phew. I needed to vent. People Suck!

 

[FadeToBlack&Gold]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

...or find a legal mind altering substance that is legal...

Redundancy is a sign of drunkeness.

Serious joking aside, in another thread, it sounded like you had a running effort to turnover the local government and elect more favorable constituents?

 

[bottomdweller]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

It is official. I live in a town of mental midgets. We are now 300K in the hole. I had the number wrong. We have no plan to fix the deficit. We have no plan to fix the schools. They also failed the override for fire and police. I want to either throw up or find a legal mind altering substance that is legal and doesn't give me a migraine.

I was doing scorekeeping for a men's league last night when I got this text from my wife, "So much for moving back to D-Town." I would have loved to have seen the override pass, but once that money was received, I still wasn't confident it'd be used properly by the people in charge.

Patronick had a very good rant regarding this on Facebook last night that I think mirrored your above rant.

 

[leswp1]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

Redundancy is a sign of drunkeness.

Serious joking aside, in another thread, it sounded like you had a running effort to turnover the local government and elect more favorable constituents?

We were trying to pass an initiative to level fund the schools to a few yrs ago (when we were still sucky but at least workable). We had a corrupt town manager who was touted as fiscally responsible but really was excellent at smoke and mirrors. He moved a ton of money out of the schools and charged the schools account for things like plowing their parking lots. The Selectmen/woman all have a lot to gain financially by not having to pay the extra money. They refused to work with the School Committee all last yr so the School committee rebelled and proposed the override. In the election last yr 2 different candidates implied they would vote favorably and then after being elected came out in the local paper saying no. (Showing you don't need to be honest but just have people stupid enough to vote for you.)

Unfortunately between the people too stupid to see what was in front of their nose and the people who know they are so corrupt and don't want to give them the money we are now in a 300K deficit have subpar schools, one on warning another threatened with being unaccredited and people still saying we should wait and figure something out. Makes me want to puke.

bottomdweller- we have people who are convinced this won't stop people from moving here. Can you be exhibit A?

 

[bigblue_dl]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

We were trying to pass an initiative to level fund the schools to a few yrs ago (when we were still sucky but at least workable). We had a corrupt town manager who was touted as fiscally responsible but really was excellent at smoke and mirrors. He moved a ton of money out of the schools and charged the schools account for things like plowing their parking lots. The Selectmen/woman all have a lot to gain financially by not having to pay the extra money. They refused to work with the School Committee all last yr so the School committee rebelled and proposed the override. In the election last yr 2 different candidates implied they would vote favorably and then after being elected came out in the local paper saying no. (Showing you don't need to be honest but just have people stupid enough to vote for you.)

Unfortunately between the people too stupid to see what was in front of their nose and the people who know they are so corrupt and don't want to give them the money we are now in a 300K deficit have subpar schools, one on warning another threatened with being unaccredited and people still saying we should wait and figure something out. Makes me want to puke.

bottomdweller- we have people who are convinced this won't stop people from moving here. Can you be exhibit A?

Sorry to hear this.

You mentioned earlier that the newspaper doesn't cover anything, have you tried to write a bigger newspaper? Maybe one out of Boston? It may be a situation where a major investigative newspaper may want to take interest in it.

 

[leswp1]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

Sorry to hear this.

You mentioned earlier that the newspaper doesn't cover anything, have you tried to write a bigger newspaper? Maybe one out of Boston? It may be a situation where a major investigative newspaper may want to take interest in it.

So far no dice. There are now efforts underway to front a class action law suit. The town is good at this. They refuse to rectify something that needs addressing, people sue, the court says the town is a collective idiot, of course they have to do something and we lose even more money in settlements. We are in the hole for the town hall not being in compliance, the special ed dept not providing services, the condos not getting services, some kind of issue regarding a town employee. It would not take a rocket scientist to work out we would lose but we are like a little kid that keeps opening their eyes big and saying we didn't know we should do that....

 

[FreshFish]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

Every year, on this day, I notice a knot of residual anger in my gut. I’m becoming resigned to the realization that it will probably be with me for the rest of my life.

It isn’t assuaged when I boarded the commuter train in Connecticut, walking past several men standing on the platform with “Department of Homeland Security” emblazoned across the back. Nor when I disembarked at Grand Central Terminal, with the soldiers and bomb-sniffing dogs in the lobby, nor when I strolled past the tactical squad in Rockefeller Center, wearing helmets and body armor and carrying semi-automatic weapons.

From time to time during the day, tears will well up in my eyes unbidden, for no apparent reason.

Yes, I am thoroughly and royally pizzed at the memories, now twelve years old, yet also as fresh and new as the original experience of that fateful day. I recall the anguish of my daughter, then only 12, wondering if she will ever see her father again, and my heart goes out to all those other sons and daughters who did lose a parent that day.

Now, if you really want to see steam come out my ears, dare to suggest that somehow those innocent office workers and international tourists somehow “deserved” that shameful slaughter of the innocents that occurred on that tragic, sunny morning.

“Grinding my gears,” on this one day at least, is far too mild a term for the pain in my heart.

 

[St. Clown]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

The business analyst who's been annointed the quasi-PM of the business analysts for this new project to which I've been assigned through the end of October is really grinding my gears. You might even go so far as to say she's on The List. I so very sincerely dislike working with micro-managers. Also, I've been doing this job for almost seven years, she's almost completed her first year as an analyst - her first year anywhere doing this sort of work.

The ho has gotta go.

 

[FreshFish]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

The business analyst who's been annointed the quasi-PM of the business analysts for this new project to which I've been assigned through the end of October is really grinding my gears. You might even go so far as to say she's on The List. I so very sincerely dislike working with micro-managers. Also, I've been doing this job for almost seven years, she's almost completed her first year as an analyst - her first year anywhere doing this sort of work.

I had a new manager come in a few years ago who started second-guessing and micro-managing everything. I discovered that the best way to deal with her was to ask her to review all my work before I presented it to others, and to review every single one of my emails before I sent them out, so that I could "make sure I was getting it right."

You might call it a passive aggressive response, and you'd be exactly right! Rather than resist the micro-managing, I over-loaded her with so much to micro-manage that she soon tired of it; while meanwhile I did it so nicely that she figured that after enough "guidance" from her on how to do it "right" that I could be trusted to have some more freedom than she'd have granted had I chafed at her "guidance" instead.

In her case, it was more a case of being anxious and nervous from being placed in a new, unfamiliar position supervising someone smarter than she was. As soon as she realized I was no threat to her authority, she began to figure out how to use me as an ally instead.

Was it devious and manipulative? Of course it was! and it worked really well, too. I'm now about the only person here who is no longer annoyed by her.

Think of it as channelling your inner Sith, perhaps.

 

[leswp1]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

More school stories. One of the elementary schools (600 students) is going for long periods with no water (3 h at a time because the sewer blasting keeps knocking out the water main). Toilets non-functional (you imagine) no running water to wash hands, no parent notification, BOH not notified, just pretend it isn't happening. When the parents went nuts on FB. The response? Oh yes it happened. It might happen again. No plan for what to do was articulated.

This is what you get when you don't attract qualified individuals to run the schools or be princpals.

We are the school Dr. I imagine we will be seeing all sorts of stuff from this.

 

[joecct]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

More school stories. One of the elementary schools (600 students) is going for long periods with no water (3 h at a time because the sewer blasting keeps knocking out the water main). Toilets non-functional (you imagine) no running water to wash hands, no parent notification, BOH not notified, just pretend it isn't happening. When the parents went nuts on FB. The response? Oh yes it happened. It might happen again. No plan for what to do was articulated.

This is what you get when you don't attract qualified individuals to run the schools or be principals.

We are the school Dr. I imagine we will be seeing all sorts of stuff from this.

Cholera?

 

[Tiggsy]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

Just got a pretty big project up and running recently. It's the first time it has run for an extended period of time and was working pretty well initially but we quickly realized it worked about 80-90% of the time. Not a bad start IMHO and I acknowledged there is stil some work to do. But why is the first question now "why didn't you do it this way?" instead of realizing this wasn't easy and even getting it to 80-90% off the start is pretty good? No one had any issues with my plan when I presented it and the weeks I spent building it. We put in too much time and are too close to getting it working to go back to the drawing board. I don't care if you don't like it, just give me the time to fine tune it and shut up! The thing really driving me crazy is the rest of the pieces of this project got 8 tries and plenty of development time to get it right. This was my second try and I'm doing better then they were, so back off!!!

 

[pirate]

My school district has added a "Student Advocate" position to each school. Until seeing that sign, I thought that the entire school system was supposed to be made up of student advocates, but that's apparently not the case anymore.

And with the proliferation of charter schools, there is a growing need for more administrators.

It's like the regional managers at McDonald's voting to create a bunch of new regions. so not only is there growth at their level but somebody needs to now be the regional director to manage the managers. And of course we can't have schools without administrators. They can share nurses and PE teachers but we have to have administrators with state owned cars, offices, high salaries and pensions.

It is a great trick, if the number of schools stayed static, there would be no career growth...so we make more schools...can't justify that via population so they become charter schools to get around the fact there is no need for the incremental buildings, staff and other costs.

 

[jen]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

This lady talking to her boss in an office near my cube has a voice like a foghorn and a crazy hyena laugh and I think my head is going to explode.

edit: there are 14 guests reading this thread?!

 

[bigblue_dl]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

edit: there are 14 guests reading this thread?!

Including the lady and her boss.