In the end, the Democratic BOE members couldn’t bring themselves to look in the direction of strong experienced leadership and vote for Bruce Kimmel as BOE chairman. Wouldn’t it have been a marvel if they had done that, a shot across the bow of Captain Corda. But no, they rotated their rubber stamp and anointed Susan Hamilton as chair. Hamilton is a very nice woman, a true academic. But what the BOE needed was a change in direction, and Kimmel was the the direction they needed.
During the middle the new members were given instructions on how to access email. What on earth are they thinking? Picture this, the room is packed, people are there to see some action and they have the IT guy walking through outlook. Meanwhile teachers are still getting thousands of spam because the IT guy can’t figure out how to install a bayesian spam filter on the email server. It might be because he personally runs a mac which has a great bayesian filter as an email client, but Outlook doesn’t and a real IT guy would handle it on the server side. But I digress, I just get annoyed when simple technology is misapplied.
As it was, Hamilton presided over one of the most difficult proceedings to have. Kimmel raised a good point about pre-K education and that the proposal to have 48 slots funded by a grant was worthy enough a goal to look at more than the 48. For some reason the rest of the BOE couldn’t grasp what he was saying. They wanted to stick with the professional, that is the woman (whose name I missed) who runs the early childhood education. What is wrong with running a 3 case scenario of potential costs? WHat is wrong with asking for a separate line item so that these expenses could be tracked? The BOE couldn’t think, and so the hemming and hawing began, and the undirected questions and the confusion. It was disheartening to see the lack of action oriented thinking. No wonder our schools are failing.
The votes for Hamilton as chair were 6-3 (Kimmel, Chiaramonte and Iannacone against)
THe votes for Vice Chair Rosa Murray was unanimous
The votes for Secretary Iannacone was 6-3. Iannacone actually nominated Chiaramonte to be Secretary, an indication that perhaps he didn’t want to be an officer, but the rubber stamp set was on autopilot, they voted it down 3-6.
Field Trips were approved, and I missed the dramatic end where they ended. So we have two new BOE members, but the rest of the BOE needs a jump start.
Seriously, the reason you can’t embed has to do with the formatting “extra” stuff that the CMS adds to strip out code. There are malicious scripts that could wreck havoc on a blog, so its part of the default security. Your video is embedded now.
