School Zone

Buffalo News articles | Candidates/profiles | Map of subdistricts

Date of election: Tuesday, May 7
The election: 13 candidates for 6 available openings
Term: 3 years
Note: This year's elections are solely by subdistrict; the three at-large spots on the nine-member board (5-year terms) come up for election in 2014

Candidates for the Buffalo School Board had to file their first financial disclosure statements by April 8.

They'll have to file the next disclosure by May 2 -- five days before the election. Historically, the big money flows in late in the game. But you can get some sense of how things are unfolding by looking at the money that has already been spent.

The candidates filed paper disclosure reports in City Hall, and the News then input the information from those reports into the list you see below. The spellings of the names of donors and other information included here is provided to you just as it was filed in City Hall by the candidates.

Any candidate who spent less than $500 so far was not required to provide a breakdown of their donations. This time around, that included Wendy Mistretta in the North District; Bryon McIntyre and Joseph Mascia in the Central District; and Adrian Harris in the Park District.

Here are the donations that the other candidates have reported so far:

Join me for a live blog of today's committee meetings. Topics on the agenda include an update on teacher evalutions, redistricting and school building closings.

- Mary Pasciak  

Join me tonight for a live blog of the board meeting.

You can access the packet of contracts, personnel changes and other information here, or you can scroll down below the chat window for the full packet.

- Mary Pasciak  

Join me online for the School Board meeting tonight.

About half an hour into the meeting, around 5:30 p.m., the board is scheduled to hold its state-mandated public hearing about Chameleon's proposal to close East High and Waterfront Elementary and reopen them as charter schools.

- Mary Pasciak  

Join me tonight for a live blog -- we will get things rolling at 4:15 p.m., when the School Board will hold a public hearing on charter renewals for Aloma D. Johnson Fruit Belt Community Charter School and the Community Charter School.

That will be followed by the regular board meeting at 5:30 p.m. Among the likely topics of conversation: the future of International Prep, da Vinci and Middle College.

You can download the packet of contracts, personnel changes and other information here, or you can scroll down below the live chat window for the full packet.

And here's the full packet for the meeting:

School Board Packet 10-24-12

- Mary Pasciak  

Join me for tonight's meeting of the finance and operations committee and executive affairs committee.

- Mary Pasciak  

Two years ago, then-Superintendent James Williams asked Erie 1 BOCES Superintendent Don Ogilvie to lead a review of what were then the seven persistently lowest-achieving schools in the district.

At the time, Ogilvie said that those seven schools weren't isolated examples of failure -- they were symptoms of a districtwide dysfunction.

To put it simply, the adults in the Buffalo Public Schools had a bad case of the nasties -- and the students were suffering as a result.

Here's what I wrote back in August 2010:

A six-page letter released this week harshly criticizes the Buffalo Public Schools administration and urges district personnel to move beyond their differences to develop mutual trust and respect.

"This existence of deep divisions within the district among the adults, along with the countless examples of their cancerous effect, must be set aside and replaced with a culture that continually nurtures and supports all of them in fulfilling their professional responsibilities to the children," wrote Donald A. Ogilvie, superintendent of Erie 1 Board of Cooperative Educational Services.

Buffalo Superintendent James A. Williams had asked Ogilvie to oversee the recent reports on the district's seven persistently failing schools. In his letter, Ogilvie cites a host of systemic problems that, unless they are resolved, will continue to produce more failing schools.

"There has been the inclination of central office and school buildings to blame each other for the failure of individual schools, when in truth they must both share responsibility," Ogilvie wrote.

Well, fast-forward a little more than two years.

This time, it's distinguished educator writing the report, at the request of state Education Commissioner John King.

And this time, we're talking about 28 schools that are failing. That's four times as many as two years ago, and nearly half of all the schools in the district.

In her report, as today's story notes, Elliott took things a step farther than Ogilvie did.

While Ogilvie called out the schools and City Hall for not playing nice, Elliott specifically puts the onus on City Hall, painting central office staff as clueless, out of touch, unresponsive and generally incompetent.

Distinguished educator Judy Elliott’s plan for improving the Buffalo Public Schools reads something like an indictment of top school administrators for the consistent failure of the system.

Central office administrators are out of touch with what happens in the classrooms, she wrote, and they rarely leave City Hall to visit schools. They either ignore requests for help from the schools or fail to respond adequately.

And decision-making for everything from staffing to budgeting has been happening in City Hall – not in the schools, as it should be, Elliott wrote in her report, which the state Education Department released to The Buffalo News on Wednesday.

“Buffalo City School District is a centralized system that provides little school autonomy,” she wrote. “The structure of governance has historically yielded poor student outcomes. Priority school principals uniformly voice that they are disconnected, unguided and unsupported due to a lack of service and support from the central office.”

As things stand, central office calls the shots -- and they're not exactly hitting the bull's-eye, to put it mildly.

Here's one of the most telling lines from her report: Practices that have not demonstrated effectiveness (e.g., instructional, opreations, budgeting for student achievement) continue to be implemented.

In other words, for years, nobody has really bothered to look too closely at whether what they're doing works.

They just keep doing it anyway.

It's time to end the insanity, Elliott says in her report, and restore the power back to the principals -- the people who see firsthand every day exactly what's happening in the schools.

Here's a copy of the outline of her action plan:

BPS Distinguished Educator Plan Oct 2012

That was accompanied by more than three dozen specific recommended actions.

Here are some of the highlights:

- Create school-based budgets based on per student spending for Title I and III.
- Hold monthly principal meetings for the 28 priority schools.
- Decentralize professional development.
- Find ways to give students more GED opportunities.
- Expand career and technical program offerings.
- Give principals a voice in who is hired for their schools.

Check out the full set of recommendations for yourself:

BPS Recommended Actions Oct 2012

- Mary Pasciak  

Join me tonight for a live blog of the School Board meeting.

Scroll down below the live chat window to access a copy of the agenda, contracts and personnel changes for the meeting.

School Board Packet 10-12-12

- Mary Pasciak