Today, Jeffco staff will present their 2020-2021 Restart Plan to the Board of Education.

It is an unmitigated disaster.

It looks like it was developed with about one hour’s worth of thought.

The ‘Plan’ only addresses student learning from an extremely high level, principally the reduction of class sizes by splitting classes into smaller cohorts who will attend in-person classes one day a week.

With only 1 remaining Board of Education meeting prior to school restarting in the fall, this broad outline does not provide nearly enough detail for the Board of Education to perform their primary function of governance.

The plan does not address how facilities will be sanitized. It does not address how buses will be sanitized. It does not address meals. It does not address school entrance procedures. It does not address what scenarios would require the closing of a school. It does not address costs. It does not address how schools would function and interactions kept to a minimum. It does not address the continuation of Grab and Go meals. There are so many things to consider. And, while I’m not suggesting that the District have answers to all of the questions right now, they should be talking with the Board about what the issues are, what they are considering, potential costs and when they will have those answers. No detail whatsoever.

But the most egregious part of the restart plan is the complete lack of any mention of education. Absolutely none!

Students will still be participating in Remote Learning for 80% of the time. I would think that very few people think that the same quality of instruction is happening now as happened when students were in physical classrooms. Yet, we now see that Remote Learning will be happening for an extended period of time. Therefore, Remote Learning MUST be just as good as in-classroom learning. But there is no discussion of best practices, standards for teachers or standards for students. How will the District know if ALL teachers are doing their jobs and doing them effectively? How will the District identify, motivate and train poorly performing teachers, before kids are negatively impacted? How/when will the District know if students are learning at the same rate as they did in the pure classroom model? How will low performance/growth be changed to correct this? What are the projected impacts on achievement? When will assessments be administered?

So many questions regarding the most important consideration of all and it is not even addressed.

Now is the time to put the necessary changes in motion, not in August.

Glass and his band of merry subordinates just don’t get it.

What a disaster.

Yesterday, the Superintendent of Jeffco Schools, Jason Glass, released a blog post titled: ‘Road to Recovery – How Lawmakers Can Ease the Crisis for Schools’.

As with most things related to Glass:

1. The post is political in nature. There is literally nothing in the post about educating Jeffco’s kids. Specifically, Glass does not talk about what Jeffco Schools are or will be doing to mitigate the effects of the, in most cases, lower quality of remote learning education.

2. Glass makes a big effort to shift responsibility and accountability to the state and away from himself and change the way in which he is measured and evaluated.

I particularly find his plea to ‘Stabilize enrollment counts and projections’ to be interesting, especially in light of the fact that Jeffco’s CFO was already publicly stating that the District was projecting a loss of 350 students and $3M in revenue.

Because of this, it is to Jeffco’s advantage to ‘hold-harmless’ school Districts for student losses as Jeffco’s losses are likely to be proportionally more than other Districts. What Glass doesn’t take into consideration is the possibility that one District could gain students from a neighboring District, but still have an overall loss. Will funding still be the same as last year? Here’s an example: In both Denver and Jeffco 10% of students who attended in 2019-2020 do not return to physical government schools in August for Covid-19 related reasons. Yet, an additional 100 students from Jeffco transfer into Denver schools. Is Glass saying that Jeffco should be held harmless and receive the same state money for those 100 students? And what about Denver, will they receive no money for those proportionally more students? Or, will the state, already in a budget crisis, be paying twice for some students?

Additionally, if the state does ‘hold-harmless’ student count, will Glass do the same with individual schools within Jeffco? Will principals receive the same SBB as last year if their enrollments decline? Will Glass be willing to pay twice for students who choice change schools?

Does Glass really think that there will be ANY Districts in Colorado that see an overall enrollment increase? How many District’s will permanently lose students to homeschooling when parents realize that their kids might get a better education at home than they have gotten in the government schools? It’s nice to say that Districts with growing enrollment will gain additional funding, but it’s not quite as simplistic, or equitable, as Glass makes it seem.

It is nice to see Glass admit that state funding for student losses is mitigated by the state funding formula.

School enrollment rises and falls each year across the state and money sent to districts adjusts accordingly (with provisions to soften the loss of funding for districts with declining enrollment).

His CFO, Kathleen Askelson doesn’t seem to get that concept as she has repeatedly told the Board of Education that a loss of 350 students will result in a $3M loss ($8,571/per student) of revenue to the District (there are other problems with her loss claim too, as outlined here). Shouldn’t the BoE be able to trust the District’s CFO? Does Jeffco need a new one? That’s a big swing of money, when Districts are checking sofa cushions, to make misrepresentations like that.

Testing – to put it bluntly – Glass doesn’t like it. He has stated it several times in the past. And, there’s no reason why he should. Since he has been Superintendent in Jeffco schools’ academic growth and achievement scores are down. He just doesn’t want to be measured and made accountable for the pathetic Jeffco Generations Academic Performance Indicator goals he is nowhere close to achieving.

What better opportunity than a pandemic crisis to change the conversation and implement measurement systems that aren’t comparative and have the distinct possibility of not measuring anything:

While … the challenges presented by COVID-19 are disruptive, they also present opportunities for meaningful change and innovation. On assessments and accountability, the legislature should direct school districts to develop locally-designed accountability systems …

When you’re failing at your primary job of educating kids, why not just change the measurement system so that people can’t really see how badly you’re doing.

I’m sorry, but I’m not buying that and neither should Polis, the legislature or parents. We can’t let the fox guard the hen house.

There’s no doubt that Covid-19 is going to have a big impact on K-12 education for an extended period of time and Glass has made some valid points. It will not be an easy time. Systems, processes and people will need to change and adapt. Leaders will need to emerge. However, I would have preferred that Glass talk about how he intends to stop and reverse the Covid-19 slide with curriculum, standardized/best practice teaching methodologies and evaluation of teachers’ instruction practices than just one more politically slanted, shifting responsibility and avoiding accountability blog post.

With falling academic achievement and atrocious growth rates substantially below state averages, it was interesting, and troubling, to read the Board’s recent yearly evaluation of Jason Glass.

Most troubling was the Board’s evaluation on what I consider to be the most important metric of the evaluation: Standard 5 Instruction. The narrative of this standard states: ‘Your rating on this standard reflects the disappointing drop in the district’s growth data on CMAS.’ Glass was given an Overall Rating on this standard as ‘Professional’.

For the Board to state that the drop is ‘disappointing’ is nothing but an understatement. When overall District growth rates for both ELA and Math are 3% points below state averages and barely above the growth rates for Adams 14, a District essentially taken over by the state, I would think words such as unacceptable, atrocious, horrific, pathetic and kid damaging would be more appropriate. Is the Board serious about the most important responsibility of the Superintendent? Let’s call a spade a spade here – Jason Glass is failing in his primary responsibility – ensuring kids get an excellent education in Jeffco schools. Yet, the Board gave Glass an overall rating of ‘Professional’. What does that mean? At first glance, ‘Professional’ means to me that someone is doing their job in an acceptable manner. – not great, but not bad. How, when achievement and growth are so bad, can someone be evaluated as ‘Professional’? If I was evaluating someone and they delivered results this bad, you can bet that the BEST rating they would have earned would have been ‘Needs Improvement’, but unfortunately, that’s not the case in Jeffco, with this Board, led by Ron Mitchell.

The Ethics Standard review is also questionable, particularly the rating of ‘Exceptional’ – ‘Your commitment to high ethical standards continues to be a strength of your performance … This trust is built upon your honesty, integrity, and values.’ Was there integrity and honesty in the way that Charters were cheated out of 5B (and probably 5A) monies? Absolutely not! What about the fact that over $10M in 5B funding projects was not accounted for in the highly touted FlipBook? Were projects, like Trailblazer stadium renovation, being intentionally hidden? And what about Kris Schuh’s we ‘anticipated an implementation dip’ excuse he gave to the Board in an attempt to explain falling achievement and growth scores in September? Glass didn’t challenge or attempt to correct this obviously false statement. Or, Tom McDermott, telling the Board that 2019 PARCC data is ‘similar’ to 2018 data when that data actually shows a decline or the misleading statement that Jeffco’s results are higher than the state averages when they should be higher based on different FRL populations. Or even Matt Flores telling the Board that SAT scores have been stable, when they’ve actually been falling. Deception and deceit are rampant in Jeffco and Glass gets an evaluation rating of ‘Exceptional’? The Board has been duped. They really need to open their eyes and understand what is really going on with Glass and District staff.

It’s also interesting to look at the Recommendations the Board gave to Glass. You would think that Recommendation Number 1, the top recommendation, would be related to raising achievement and growth. No, not in Jeffco. Recommendation Number 1 is: ‘Continue to improve the negotiation process with JCEA’. Are you kidding me? That’s the Number 1 recommendation, not something related to educating kids? Is this because JCEA was able to out negotiate Glass and get an additional 1% raise that the Board hadn’t budgeted for? Or is this because of all of the letters the Board got, from teachers, about the negotiations? In the end, this only shows where the current Board’s priorities are – Adults over Kids, Teachers over Students. Shameful.

Recommendations 2 and 3 had nothing to do with education either – essentially more collaboration and dealing with the impending budget crisis.

Recommendation number 4 was also interesting: ‘Identify additional ways to measure student success.’ This is essentially telling Glass that if you can’t meet the state defined measures of academic success – which he can’t – then go out and make up your own criteria. Change the narrative from something you and the District are failing at to something new that you can say you’re succeeding at. How about one of Glass’s famous surveys with leading questions administered unscientifically using Survey Monkey? Yep, that should do it – something that only the Kool-Aid drinking true believers have access to and will complete, excluding those people in the District who may not have access to computers or for those people for whom English is a Second Language and who are currently being hurt the most by District’s failures.

It’s a shame. The Board’s review of Glass seems like a pat on the back when it really should have been a kick in the ass as kids continue to be failed by Jeffco schools.