"Race to the Top" school guidelines approved

Bedford County Board of Education, meeting Thursday night, approved a memorandum of understanding with the state to comply with the guidelines of President Obama's "Race To The Top" grant program.

The program will evaluate teachers and principals based on criteria such as student test scores, and make tenure more dependent on the results. "This was somewhat controversial a month ago," said School Superintendent Ed Gray.

Now, however, Gray said it's likely that conditions similar to those in the memorandum will be enacted into state law during a special legislative session which Gov. Phil Bredesen and Lieutenant Gov. Ron Ramsey have called for next month; board members said it was better to approve the memorandum now and have a chance at Race To The Top grants, since the school system will likely end up having to adopt those rules anyway.

Gray said the Tennessee Education Association and Bredesen disagree about the exact extent that test scores should play a part in teacher evaluations.

Gray said the state relied heavily on stimulus funding for educational programs, and when those stimulus programs expire it could mean cutbacks in state funding. Gray said the Race To The Top grants could help replace some of that money, and that Tennessee is well-positioned to benefit from the grant program because its record of value-added data on student performance goes back farther than any other state.

School board member Glenn Forsee noted that the state's rules for tracking school performance require the schools to meet guidelines for various individual subgroups. A deficiency in any individual subgroup can cause an entire school or school system to be marked as failing. Forsee said that if this same methodology is applied to individual teachers, it could result in qualified and experienced teachers being penalized if they have one or two difficult students.

Gray said that student scores would be averaged over three years when measuring teacher performance.

The "scope of work" to which the board agreed also requires that the school system equitably distribute effective teachers and principals across the district and turn around low-achieving schools.

In other discussion Thursday night:

Calendar: The board approved the 2010-2011 school calendar. Students will begin the school year with an abbreviated day on Aug. 9, 2010, and will end with an abbreviated day on May 26, 2011. Spring break will be the week of March 28-April 1, 2011.

Bids awarded: The school board awarded bids on technology and library books.

For information technology, Howard Technology Solutions was the only bidder. Gray said the bid specs had been properly advertised and publicized. The school system has worked with Mississippi-based Howard Technology Solutions for a decade, according to technology coordinator Joan Gray, and has been pleased with its products and customer service. The bid was a list of per-unit prices on various items, such as servers, desktop computers, and monitors.

There was also only one bid for laptop computers and wireless laptop mobile carts, from EarthWalk Communications Inc of Manassas, Va. The mobile carts, funded by stimulus grants, allow any classroom to be turned into a computer lab. Each cart has enough laptops for an entire classroom full of students. The school system hopes to buy 10-15 of the carts this year using the stimulus funds, said Joan Gray.

The bid for library books was awarded to Follett Library Resources Inc., which was not the low bidder but which Ed Gray said submitted the best bid. Follett offered a larger selection of books than low bidder PermaBound, and Follett's bid includes services such as shelving the books and importing the books into each library's record-keeping software. Follett also has a longer-term guarantee on the books than PermaBound, said Gray. A total of four different bids were received.

Audit: The board was given a list of audit findings from school activity funds, along with responses from school principals. These are special funds at each school, generated by fund-raisers, vending machines or other sources, separate from the school system budget. The funds were audited by Winnett Associates. Various record-keeping and classification errors were found, and principals were allowed to respond to the findings, with most simply pledging to do better in the future. One soft drink company was blamed for being unwilling to provide sufficiently-detailed vending machine sales records, and some schools have switched to the competing soft drink company as a result. School board members said none of the errors appeared to be major or evidence of wrongdoing.