The long predicted Fall campaign by the Urbana School District 116 to sell the decision they made, to merge all Dual Language classes in one school (codeword: “whole school model”) started. The crew of administrators responsible for the program (Directors Ricconi and Wiemelt) are working the parents, as usual, by triangulation. There are several intrinsic […]
DL: means and goals Read More »
Last Tuesday, the Urbana School District 116 held public hearings on the budget proposal for the next fiscal year. If you live in Urbana, you certainly should’ve heard about it, because it is a big deal. At $109 million of proposed expenditures, it is a third bigger than what the whole town of Urbana spends
the budget, the public and the hearing Read More »
I wrote that we don’t really know how our district’s Dual Language program serves the immigrant families. Well, now we do, kind of. Recall that the district’s Dual Language web page asks (themselves), How are students currently doing in the Dual Language program? and immediately replies: “Current assessment data suggest the following: Dual language students
“like we have never seen before” Read More »
The business meeting of the USD116 Board addressed many issues, but its focal point was, unmistakably, the report of the Spanish Dual Language (DL) program committee, which recommended to consolidate into one building the program, now spread over Leal and Dr. Williams schools, where it is colocated with the traditional, monolingual classes. A shrewd administrator
board meeting: dual language duplicity Read More »
A talk on Faculty Freedom Today (today was 5.10.22) by Matthew Finkin was revolving around conventional topics: when faculty speech is protected; what are the latest vectors of attack on it etc. It had that quintessentially American flavor of pragmatic legality: establish some semblance of law (statements by AAUP, insofar they are cited by the
academic freedom, department head edition Read More »
As we expected, the administration got what it wanted: the Board approved the contract with Dr. Dubiel’s SEE LLC to conduct the coveted Equity Audit. There was, quite obviously, some behind the scene maneuvering: Anne Hall, the Board member who requested more time to analyze the issue, explained that she talked to the administration and
I am being sent lately pointers to a twitter thread. It’s a lot of puerile outrage, but this claim by… – let’s call the author Dr. X, – caught my eye: I will fight this person, their grandma, their descendents, and their ghost. Then I will build a time machine and fight them in the
enemy of the people Read More »
This is a small personal grievance. The district, USD116, obviously wants to keep appearances of being in compliance with the Open Meetings Act. To this end they need to upload the recordings of the meetings, if they were advertised. But this is not good, – the vile disruptors might listen to and mock them. What
trusting your lying eyes Read More »
The fog around early March meetings dealing with the Equity Audit lifted a bit: the district released the recording of the Board meeting on March 8. The recording is still incomplete, but it has sound (so generous)! There exists also, somewhere in the ether, a recording of the preceding Equity Task Force meeting on March
disruptors’ dilemma Read More »
The whole Equity Audit saga is descending deeper into Veep territory. We last wrote about it a month ago, when a group of Urbana School District employees cast as the Equity Task Force (assisted by a parent or two) announced that they needed to carefully rethink the inscrutable problem of the Equity Audit provider. The