Month: July 2020

With Denver Public Schools just announcing a start to the school year in full Remote Learning, we can believe that Glass will follow and announce the same within the next few days for Jeffco. This will be mere days after Glass’s disastorous FB Live event in which no actual questions regarding the District’s restart plan were answered.

In fact, in the 40 minutes of the FB Live event, Remote Learning and academics were not mentioned once. The restart plan itself merely contains several pages of vague eduspeak and is actually tellingly shorter than the Communications plan.

It’s just a plain dereliction of responsibility and an avoidance of accountability that the Plan is so vague and includes no specifics.

Remote Learning, in some form, was always going to happen this Fall. A failure to provide specifics in the Plan is a truly appalling lack of leadership.

Going forward, Glass should be required to immediately and definitively answer the following questions:

1. By what date will EVERY Jeffco student have at-residence access to their own electronic device? The only acceptable answer would be within the first week of class.
2. By what date will EVERY Jeffco student have at-residence internet connectivity. The only acceptable answer would be within the first week of class. Did the IT Department work on alternatives during the summer such as bus or school building roof hot spots as many other districts have done?
3. Will teachers be required to deliver Remote Learning from their classrooms for accountability purposes? If not, why not?
4. Given that school will start a week late, should we continue to expect 5 days of instruction weekly? If not, why not and what impact on students will reduced class time have on students?
5. When will beginning of year assessments be administered to ascertain how much learning was lost during the spring’s failed experiment in Remote Learning?
6. Will student attendance be measured in a different manner than in the spring? If not, why not?
7. How will teachers be held accountable for their instruction?
8. How, specifically, will best practices be shared? Will best practice sharing be limited to tool usage or will sharing/instruction on proven Remote Learning techniques be mandatory?
9. What guidelines will teachers be given relating to Remote Learning? Will there be Synchronous teaching requirements? If not, why not?
10. How will students be held accountable for Remote Learning?
11. What are the specific plans to make up for the spring learning loss?
12. Will anything be done to improve the Grab-and-Go meal distribution to ensure more students and families receive meals?
13. How long will non-working Classified staff be paid full wages if Remote Learning extends beyond just a few weeks?
14. If the school year starts with Remote Learning for all, why didn’t the District fall back on the K-5 in school option previously presented?

It’s well past time for the eduspeak and vague ‘plans’ for how things will work this fall. Remote Learning was always going to be given. At this point, Glass and staff should be able to provide details and extremely specific plans. If he can’t do that the Board should execute their responsibility of ensuring quality education and get rid of him immediately. They should put someone in charge who will actually get something done while there is still time to make an impact.

Unfortunately, we know that isn’t going to happen because the Board is extraordinarily weak and unwilling to ask the hard questions. In the end, thousands and thousands of students will be permanently harmed because of the incompetence of Jason Glass and the Board’s failures.

Glass can call it what he wants, an “opportunity to come home”, but mere days into the start of a 5 year contract extension, I call it something else – a complete lack of integrity and a total betrayal of Jeffco and the Board members who gave him that contract extension.

As much as I think that Glass is an extraordinarily weak leader, this move goes far beyond weak leadership – this move is downright disgusting.

Think about it. Glass left Jeffco at a crucial time in implementing his Covid Restart plan and at a time in the year when it is extremely difficult to ensure that high quality candidates to fill the position would be willing or even available for interviews.

What type of person, if they really cared about an organization, its employees and most importantly its students would just pick up and leave at this critical time after the Board had done everything within its power to provide continuity for the next 5 years?

Obviously, someone who is self-centered. Someone who doesn’t really care about the damage that their move might cause. Maybe someone who doesn’t think they can really succeed in the position. In any case, its someone I’m glad I’m not. I’ve been in positions before where I hadn’t finished projects I was leading, or hadn’t finished the transformation of an organization to my standards and turned down more lucrative and exciting opportunities. Not only did I want to get the sense of accomplishment for what I set out to do, but I felt an obligation to the organization and my people. I guess that’s the difference between Glass and me. I’m glad I don’t have the same set of values and integrity he has.

And, where does that leave Jeffco’s 84,000+ students and 5,000+ employees? Essentially leaderless for a year. Another year with no academic gains and then a transition year with a new Superintendent, who most likely isn’t going to buy into the Transform the Task, Deeper Learning mumbo-jumbo that so far has only brought about confusion and declining results in the District. So, another change in direction as 1,000s of kids continue to be harmed each year by the poor curriculum and teaching methods propagated by Glass.

The Board needs to get it right with the next choice for Superintendent. We need someone who has a track record of focusing on students, not teachers, and a record of improving education, backed by results. Glass was a great talker and blogger, but his 6 year record of failing to improve education results in both Eagle and Jeffco is a total disaster for the kids.