The Buck Stops...Where?
Article 2 on the Special Town Meeting Warrant fixes a defect in an Special Town Meeting Warrant from March 29, 2014 almost 2 YEARS ago!
So the change is from allowing the Narragansett Regional School District to borrow the money for the feasibility to The Treasurer in the town of Templeton borrowing the money.
Can this mean that the new elementary school is a TOWN project?
So IF the new elementary school is a TOWN project, why didn't the Selectman sign off on the contract with the architect as the OWNER?
From Page 1:
From the signature page:
So does this mean 2 years from now at yet another Special Town Meeting, we will have to correct who is the "Owner" of the project?
Here are links to the invoices from Templeton's Town Counsel, Deutsch Williams :
Take some time and look these invoices over.
What is missing can be hard to detect.
Think of what multi million dollar project have the good voters of Templeton recently approved in the same time period?
Why didn't Town Counsel for the Town of Templeton review that contract?
Town Counsel reviewed the contract for new windows for 160 Patriots Road.
Perhaps the School Contract review came under a different heading in the billing. Could Mr. Columbus or Mr. Markel tell us if the fifty million dollar contract has been reviewed by our town counsel?
ReplyDeleteTo add insult to injury, Mr. Hemmen is not even a resident of the Town of Templeton, as far as I know. Mr. Hem men was the happiest person in the gym after the vote for the school. Why not, he does not pay taxes.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, why should the Town vote "yes" This is such a bad start to a project. If we do not apporve what happens?
ReplyDeletePlease tell the people of templeton what the expected maintenance costs on this $50 million dollar blotch on downtown Templeton. From most thing I've read a simple number is somewhere around 1-2.5% of the building costs. Thats an additional $500,000 to $1.25 million to maintain the "structure" alone per year.
Now, how much are the new electronics going to cost yearly. Then some little items we dont count. Every child in town needs internet access to actually complete schoolwork. If the students "need" internet access to do homework it is truly a $70.00 minimum charge per month in templeton as Comcast is the only option in town.
Who is responsible for children who break the devices they are using tablets, laptops, etc?
This school is digging really deep into the pockets of Templeton residents.
How are we supposed to afford this, now we also have the water tanks issues. How much of a financial burden is this going to place on templeton residents.
Well, if you are serious, Bob M bring all your friends and vote NO on Monday.
DeleteYour moneys worth?
ReplyDelete121. Obstacles On The Road To Centralization:
The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Obstacles On The Road To Centralization
Three major obstacles stood in the way of the great goal of using American schools to realize a scientifically programmed society. The first was the fact that American schooling was locally controlled. In 1930, when the massive socializing scheme was swinging into high gear, helped substantially by an attention-absorbing depression, this nation still had 144,102 local school boards. 17 At least 1.1 million elected citizens of local stature made decisions for this country's schools out of their wisdom and experience. Out of 70 million adults between the ages of thirty and sixty- five, one in every sixty-three was on a school board (thirty years earlier, the figure had been one in twenty). Contrast either ratio with today's figure of one in five thousand.
The first task of scientifically managed schooling was to transfer management from a citizen yeomanry to a professional elite under the camouflage of consolidation for economy's sake. By 1932, the number of school districts was down to 127,300; by 1937 to 1 19,018; by 1950 to 83,719; by 1960 to 40,520; by 1970 to 18,000; by 1990 to 15,361. Citizen oversight was slowly squeezed out of the school institution, replaced by homogeneous managerial oversight, managers screened and trained, watched, loyalty- checked by Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, the Cleveland Conference, and similar organizations with private agendas for public schooling.
The second obstacle to an ideological takeover of schools was the historic influence of teachers as role models. Old-fashioned teachers had a disturbing proclivity to stress development of intellect through difficult reading, heavy writing assignments, and intense discussion. The problem of proud and independent teachers was harder to solve than the reading problem. As late as 1930 there were still 149,400 one-room/one-teacher schools in America, places not only cheap to operate but successful at developing tough-minded, independent thinkers. Most of the rest of our schools were small and administrator- free, too. The idea of principals who did not teach came very late in the school game in most places. The fantastic notion of a parasitic army of assistant principals, coordinators, and all the rest of the various familiar specialists of institutional schooling didn't exist at all until 1905, except in the speculations of teacher college dreamers.
ReplyDeleteTwo solutions were proposed around 1903 to suppress teacher influence and make instruction teacher-proof. The first was to grow a heretofore unknown administrative hierarchy of nonteaching principals, assistant principals, subject coordinators and the rest, to drop the teacher's status rank. And if degrading teacher status proved inadequate, another weapon, the standardized test, was soon to be available. By displacing the judgmental function from a visible teacher to a remote bastion of educational scientists somewhere, no mere classroom person could stray very far from approved texts without falling test scores among his or her students signaling the presence of such a deviant. 18 Both these initiatives were underway as WWI ended.
The third obstacle to effective centralization of management was the intimate neighborhood context of most American schools, one where school procedures could never escape organic oversight by parents and other local interests. Not a good venue from which to orchestrate the
undermining of traditional society. James Bryant Conant, one of the inventors of the poison gas, Lewisite, and by then chairman of a key Carnegie commission, reported in an ongoing national news story after the Sputnik moment that it was the small size of our schools causing the problem. Only large schools, said Conant, could have faculty and facilities large enough to cover the math and science we (presumably) lacked and Russia (presumably) had. The bigger the better.
ReplyDeleteIn one bold stroke the American factory school of Lancaster days was reborn. Here a de- intellectualized Prussian-style curriculum could reign undetected. From 1960 to 1990, while student population was increasing 61 percent, the number of school administrators grew 342 percent. In constant dollars, costs shot up 331 percent, and teachers, who had fallen from 95 percent of all school personnel in 1915 to 70 percent in 1950, now fell still further, down and down until recently they comprised less than 50 percent of the jobs in the school game. School had become an employment project, the largest hiring hall in the world, bigger than agriculture, bigger than armies.
One other significant set of numbers parallels the absolute growth in the power and expense of government schooling, but inversely. In 1960, when these gigantic child welfare agencies called schools were just setting out on their enhanced mission, 85 percent of African American children in New York were from intact, two-parent households. In 1990 in New York City, with the school budget drawing $9,300 a kid for its social welfare definition of education, that number dropped below 30 percent. School and the social work bureaucracies had done their work well, fashioning what looked to be a permanent underclass, one stripped of its possibility of escape, turned against itself. Scientific management had proven its value, although what that was obviously depended on one's perspective.
Flash to the future!!!!
ReplyDeleteThe year is 2021 and the new school in Templeton center is overcrowded.
The town votes to build another new school to fit in all the school choice kids.
Could this happen in Templeton?
We will not have the option to increase the size of The new school in Templeton center.
But if you look at the size of the class rooms we will be able to increase the amount of kids in the classes, it will be our only choice. Will the school be enough for the life of the loan?
If you missed the article about Narraganssett cuts school budget in the paper on March 16th. The way i read it is they brought in 160,000.00 for more school choice kids to reduce the amount needed to cut. We didn't have room or staff needed for the system now! How did this work after what we were told last year? Will the new school get overfilled before it's completed? If the siblings of the new school choice want to come here with the brother or sister our town has to allow it for them also.
ReplyDelete