Campbell Still riled about Financial Subcommittee Snub
By Shawn on Sep 28, 2006 in Schools, Town Videos
At the last meeting of the School Committee (Sept 11th), after discussing the poor dropout rate and other issues regarding at-rist students the committee asked the Superintendent to report back to them on what the committee could provide to help support these students.
As I discussed with Superintendent Elaine Espindle, she had asked Principal Rogers of the Junior High school and Principal Power of the High School to prepare recommendations to the School Committee to help at-risk students have every opportunity to succeed.
Espindle received reports from the Principals that recommended a number of tutors and part time professionals to work with these kids. Some grant money was available to use at the Junior High, so the amount needed there was minimal (only about $2000.00), while a greater amount was needed for the High School (about $32000.00). The request was to use money from the School Choice account for this.
(Update: The Sun covers part of this story as well here. )
Now, at the Sept 25th meeting, these recommendations had already gone before the Finance Subcommittee of the School Committee for review before coming to the full board. May Paquette, a long-time member of the subcommittee, recommended approval. Dennis “DJ” Deeb did not.
DJ definitely did not want this to pass for some reason. He tried to divert the issue to class sizes, but others quickly squashed that (class size is a separate issue from at-risk students). DJ reminded me of Deval Patrick in last weeks debate, because once Joe Campbell started, DJ just sat back and smirked through the entire discussion. He was getting his way, without having to fight for it or argue his issues (which I assume.. but am not sure.. has something to do with spending additional money on special-ed or at-risk kids.. is he just another teacher who thinks the best solution is to throw them away?).
Committee Member Joe Campbell, however, surprised everybody. As someone who had often been suppportive of programs to support the disenfranchised, he started questioning every part of the proposal. He was definitely making the point that if he was no longer on the finance subcommittee, he was going to question and dissect proposals at the full meeting of the committee.
“I’ll only make this comment once and I hope we can just drop it. The chairman chose not to appoint you and please stop saying you were removed.” May Paquette had to rebuke him at one point, “You were not appointed to the finance subcommittee for this fiscal year. End of story.”
“Was this proposal supported by Special Ed Director Stone?” he asked, “Why does this tutor cost more than this one?” He went on to question line items and funding sources, and when things didn’t seem to be going his way, he tried to table the issue (and even got into a disagreement over the result of the vote to table).
Normally a strong supporter of Superintendent Espindle, Campbell was questioning every aspect of the proposal, to the point where Committee Member Nancy Mendonca seemed frustrated with his response to the schools coming forward with the requests that the committee had asked for. “No matter what your song and dance is, your not supporting them,” she said.
In the end, the proposals passed with Paquette, Campbell and Mendonca voting to support the additional funds to support at-risk youth, Deeb voted against.
Attached is a video pod of portions of the meeting. This part of the meeting was nearly an hour long, and I have distilled about 7 minutes out of it. Please take the opportunity to watch the entire meeting on Dracut Access Channel 10. I apologize that the sound isnt exactly perfect. The broadcast still is pretty noisy. I cleaned up a lot of it, but in doing so got some electronic noise as well.
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