A school board without a community

So for my second assignment I needed to view some PTA or PTO or school board meetings. I searched high and low and this is the assignment...

Please consider this a warning, I didn’t go into this assignment with my eyes wide open. I went in with a bad attitude, and I have to say that I come out of the assignment the same way. After doing the research for assignment #1 I wasn’t expecting to be surprised. I’m sad to report that I wasn’t surprised, and I come out of assignment #2 even more dejected than I was after assignment #1.

I spent a good portion of time trying to find the YouTube video of the high school district that I graduated from and Hatboro-Horsham School District in Montgomery County Pennsylvania. Sadly I could not find any kind of video of the meeting or any meetings for that matter. Instead what I could find 4 minutes from the school board and PTA and PTO meetings.

The most current set of minutes is from June 15th of 2015 so almost a year out of date. The reading had no one that was not a member of the school board. And actually two members of the school board including the president were actually absent for the meeting. As it was the end of the year it wasn't surprising to see that the vast majority of the minutes or giving out Awards and recognizing the retirements of several important members of the school District. On a good note the recognition did not just include teachers but Administration as well as staff in the cafeteria and bus drivers. I appreciate that all members of the district or included in the recognition. I was sad to see that there was very little information on the actual year that has just passed as well as future information regarding the coming school year and plans for that.

I would love to see more activity from the community at Large but sadly I don't think that's going to happen. The community doesn't step out when everything seems to be working well. The Hatboro-Horsham School District is one of the best in the state of Pennsylvania and was ranked in the top 20 of the United States at one point in time. In fact one of the only issues that I can recall from my tenure going to the school (graduated in 1997) was the lack of diversity due to cost of living in the community.

Sadly too many people ignore something until it's broken. Because of this the activity from the community is very limited. Actually I struggle to call it a community as there is very little interaction between people or even neighbors.

There's one other thing that I noticed and I've noticed it a lot and University levels as well and that is the explosion of the Administration staff over the last several years maybe decades. It makes me truly question whether or not the school funding issue is actually just being allocated to administration rather than the students.  Perhaps we don't need so many administrators and instead we could focus more on teachers and students but that's an aside and a topic for another day.

**I feel like I need to make it clear that I do actually love teaching. It is truly the highlight of my day getting to work with my students and teach them all about science and sharing stories with them and reading stories to them. However this last week of research has left me angry and bitter and questioning the whys.