School Board Meeting Highlights
12-16-14
Agenda:
For a complete agenda, please visit us at:http://www.boarddocs.com/pa/parkland/Board.nsf/Public
All motions were approved.
Workshop Meeting
Circuit Rider for the Campaign for Fair Funding
Here are a few key points from an article that he distributed which outlines the issues:
The amount of public resources spent per student in PA varies from $9,000 to $27,000
The local tax burden can vary from the equivalent of 8 to 36 equalized mills of tax effort for homes with the same value.
And in the ultimate insult, the districts bearing the highest tax burdens frequently have less dollars to spend on their students than districts with tax burdens half the amount.
The reasons for these multiple failures are:
1. Too few state dollars result in too high reliance on local dollars; 2. The current system does not take into account how much it costs to educate children. 3. State dollars are distributed on a basis which does not reflect the tax effort of the district.
Business Meeting
Taylor and Ella Deal led the group in the Pledge of Allegiance. They are twin students from Kratzer Elementary.
Brenda DeRenzo was appointed Director of Student Services. You can read about this here.
The PHS Commencement date was approved to occur on June 9, 2015 at PPL Center at 7 PM.
Roundtable
Congratulations and best wishes were extended to Brenda DeRenzo in recognition of her appointment to Director of Student Services.
Lisa Adams mentioned that the next CAC meeting would include a tour of the PHS TV studio and then the group would be invited to enjoy the Holiday concert on December 18th.
Mrs. Marcus congratulated the students and staff on the School Performance Profile Results. The full chart of scores can be seen here, but she also noted the following
Parkland state rank for academic growth:
Grade 4-8 Math 47 out of 631 Top 7%
Grade 4-8 Reading 3 out of 631 Top 1%
Algebra I 87 out of 580 Top 15%
Biology 245 out of 556 Top 44%
Literature 12 out of 525 Top 2%
The full profile can be viewed here.
Bob Bold gave a Foundation report including:
Harlem Wizards events a huge success raising $12K for Foundation and $4K for PTO's.
Holiday tribute cards are once again for sale at this link.
The Foundation set up an Amazon partnership that allows shoppers to shop through a portal and a portion of proceeds benefit the Foundation.
This year's PHS CD features more than 40 PHS students and proceeds benefit the Foundation.
Several Board members noted that the senior citizens were grateful for the holiday dinner concerts that the District organizes. They also noted that many wonderful concerts, breakfasts and activities occur around the District in December and that they have enjoyed attending many events.
Everyone wished each other Happy Holidays.