Thank you for your taking the time to care and for your kind words. The years that I was privileged to work with you at Frick were special. Be well!!

The notion that there are other districts who are not meeting their children’s needs is equally true. Oakland is not the only district who comes up short.

My frustation is that what is mandated in a child’s IEP is a legally binding contract that the district must carry out. Oakland’s announcement that parents are to pay out of their pockets for something that has been written into the IEP is illegal.

Every bit as much of an issue is that if the child has been determined to need a particular service, and the district does not provide that service, the child’s needs are not being met. If we are not meeting the needs of our children we are not doing our job.

There are no excuses. Instead of the district stonewalling matters, there needs to be an open forum between the Board of Education, the special education administration, the parents of children in special education and teaching staff. My feeling is that the special education administration has, typically not been the most astute at problem solving. Such a forum might lead to a set of proposals, through developing consensus, that would be an improvement over the top down administrative style that is presently in place. No one person is so all knowing that they are above dialoging with staff or those who are invested in the special education program. The bottom line is that we are about meeting the needs of our students. The special education department doesn’t seem to know how to do that. A public forum on this whole subject seems like the next logical step in fixing something that is truly broken.

Jim Farwell

Thank you for the information. I am only 18 and most of you seem to be adults. If we were consertive and said OUSD has only 400 million dollors for 37,000 students, that would come to over $10,800 per student.

Why do you guys think more money is the answer to our education problems? My mom was not able to get an education growing up in Mexico. She came to the United States and worked as a maid to support us.

My mom taught all of us that you “can not” spend above your income. What is the problem with the people who run the schools?

Why should we give them more money and they can’t manage what they have now to run the schools?

http://www.ibabuzz.com/education/2008/06/23/your-school-board-this-week-school-enrollment-changes-and-next-years-budget/

I have herd that OUSD gets over 400 hundred million dollars a year to serve about 37,000 students.

Ms. Murphy, do you or anyone else know the correct numbers? With this information, we will have a better picture of what is goin on in the district.

– Teacher turnover and new teachers lacking adequete preparation, mentoring and support.

– Overworked teachers given too much time with students, too many students and increasingly onerous paperwork, professional development and parent outreach mandates.

– A built-in conflict between what it takes to teach students with special needs and the scarcity of a resource-starved system which must serve anybody who asks.

I salute Mr. Farwell for serving for 17 years. I myself can’t imagine putting in more than ten into a system as stressful as this one.

Sue: You’re absolutely right that the Gates Foundation can just as easily foot the bill to have the software developed outside of Microsoft. I sure don’t endorse them as the soloution to all software needs. Quicken is better than Microsoft Money.

Sorry, I work in the industry, and if we want the schools to have systems and applications that actually *work* off the shelf, we shouldn’t waste our limited education dollars to M$. Maybe after they get to the 5.x or 6.x release when 80-90% of the bugs have been fixed.

Now, Adobe makes good products that actually work reliably. If we wanted to use their products in education, I could support that decision.

Hey, there’s the answer – get the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to pay Adobe to develop what our school systems need. And for educational software for the kids to do computer-based learning, Humongous Entertainment would be my first choice.