{"id":21750,"date":"2014-04-25T09:55:20","date_gmt":"2014-04-25T13:55:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/?p=21750"},"modified":"2014-04-25T10:37:45","modified_gmt":"2014-04-25T14:37:45","slug":"a-painful-week-for-the-ucf-school-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/?p=21750","title":{"rendered":"A painful week for the UCF school community"},"content":{"rendered":"

Principal’s departure was handled about as well as possible, thoughts on participation fees<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

By Mike McGann<\/strong>, Editor, The Times<\/em><\/span><\/span>
\n\"UTMikeColLogo\"<\/a>To say it was a busy week for the Unionville-Chadds Ford School District doesn\u2019t begin to start to describe it.<\/p>\n

From the departure of a school principal, to the resignation of a school board member and lively debate about raising activity fees, there certainly was no shortage of topics to discuss.<\/p>\n

First, let\u2019s address the situation at Chadds Ford Elementary School. The facts are these: Principal Mark Ransford was placed on administrative leave and took retirement after it is alleged he allowed students to finish portions of the PSSA tests after the designated testing period.<\/p>\n

By all accounts, and certainly from my interactions with him, Ransford was an excellent educator and administrator. But it also appears that he broke protocol for the tests and had a lapse of judgment, based on the account offered by the administration, one that is supported by discussions I had with folks close to the situation. The lapse was reported to the district administration by a CFE staffer \u2014 as is protocol \u2014 and an investigation ensued.<\/p>\n

The district reported the incident to the state Department of Education and placed Ransford on leave, pending the investigation. Ransford then chose to take retirement and the administration and Board of Education approved that decision.<\/p>\n

All around, it was a lousy situation (made worse by a Philadelphia daily newspaper erroneously reporting that students had somehow \u201ccheated\u201d when the kids were completely innocent \u2014 an egregious error), but it looks from here like the administration handled it as well as possible, concluding by making what details it could public, quickly.<\/p>\n

The district rapidly moved to name an interim replacement, Dr. Tom Tobin, who takes over Monday morning \u2014 and promised that the process to hire Ransford\u2019s permanent replacement would have input from the school community.<\/p>\n

Again, it was a lousy situation \u2014 district insiders described it as \u201cpainful.\u201d But beyond the initial lapse in judgment, it seems like everyone handled things exactly as they should, working to minimize the impact on students, while being open about what happened.<\/p>\n

The situation probably begs for a wider discussion about the pressures for students, teachers and administrators to get high scores on standardized tests \u2014 and the inherent dangers of losing perspective about how we place the weight of these evaluations. But that is a topic for another day.<\/p>\n

Lost amongst the other school-district headlines of the week was the Board of Education\u2019s narrow 5-4 vote to raise participation fees from roughly 10% of the cost of activities in the district middle and high school to about 15%.<\/p>\n

This is one of the rare issues on which, were I on the board, I\u2019m not sure how I would have voted.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, I hate that school districts have to charge for school activities because of financial needs. And I really hate placing any barriers to getting kids involved with activities. On the other hand, I know the numbers on the checks we write to URA, Unionville Rugby, Girl Scouts and so on \u2014 so that $100 check I\u2019ll have to write for middle school football next fall doesn\u2019t seem out of line with what we pay for other activities.<\/p>\n

While I know the district \u2014 just like all of the other organizations I mentioned\u00a0 \u2014 offers \u201cscholarships\u201d for those kids whose families can\u2019t afford to pay, I know there are families that don\u2019t want to admit their dire financial straits (and were there such fees when I went to school, I\u2019m pretty sure I would have missed out on a number of activities \u2014 there were years that the $15 fee for Little League wasn’t in the budget, but my mother would have been ashamed to ask for help) and just quietly keep their kids from participating.<\/p>\n

And it is a slippery slope. What\u2019s next? Do we end up five years from now charging for math tutoring? It\u2019s a real worry and one our pals in the state legislature seem happy to blindly ignore as the public school funding system isn\u2019t just failing, it has failed.<\/p>\n

Still, the district and the Board of Education have to balance the books and weigh the burden on taxpayers versus parents and students, which these days is a bit like choosing which of your kids goes hungry on a given night. I don\u2019t envy them that task \u2014 or the likely more difficult ones coming in the next few years.<\/p>\n

One other word \u2014 especially as Gov. Tom Corbett makes an appearance in our area this week at the Southern Chester County Chamber of Commerce luncheon Thursday \u2014 it doesn\u2019t help that the state, and Corbett, are deadbeats when it comes to PlanCon, with the state owing the Unionville-Chadds Ford School District more than $300,000 it promised to refund the district from the renovation of Unionville High School. Despite the failure to pay, the state still requires the district to file paperwork as if \u00a0the \u201ccheck were in the mail.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is it fair to make a direct connection between the governor’s stiffing the district and parents’ being forced to pay more for activities? That\u2019s for you to decide \u2014 especially if Corbett\u2019s pledge not to raise taxes drives your voting decisions.<\/p>\n

Finally, a couple of words on the resignation of board of education member Eileen Bushelow.<\/p>\n

In a strange \u201csix-degrees of Kevin Bacon\u201d kind of way, Eileen and I had a strange number of connections, even though I had never met her until interviewing her when she was appointed to the school board in 2010.<\/p>\n

First, we both live in Pocopson. Second, we\u2019re both North Jersey natives who attended William Paterson College (now University) in Wayne, N.J. (albeit a couple years apart). I also served as Editor-in-Chief of her hometown newspaper, The South Bergenite in the late 1980s\/early 1990s.<\/p>\n

Lastly, that interview in which I first met her, was the first story I wrote in my return to community journalism after more than a decade as a tech magazine editor and writer (and an ill-considered detour into politics), which led directly to the creation of The Unionville Times<\/em> and all of the subsequent Times<\/em> editions, which now generate more than a million page views a month.<\/p>\n

And maybe as a coda \u2014 I\u2019m working feverishly to replace myself on the Unionville news beat, as running our growing media company is taking up more and more time and hurting our coverage \u2014 I was hoping to be off the school board beat by the end of the this school year (if you, or someone you know is interested in covering local news part time, contact me<\/a>) \u2014 which could end up being one last thing Eileen and I have in common.<\/p>\n

During her time on the board, even while serving as president, I appreciated her ability to take a contrary view, politely, on some topics, which led to a more full discussion. I think she will be missed by many, both among her colleagues and the greater school community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Principal’s departure was handled about as well as possible, thoughts on participation fees By Mike McGann, Editor, The Times To say it was a busy week for the Unionville-Chadds Ford School District doesn\u2019t begin to start to describe it. From the departure of a school principal, to the resignation of a school board member and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21751,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120,7],"tags":[485,4596,5407,119,1286],"class_list":["post-21750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-featured","tag-board-of-education","tag-chadds-ford-elementary-school","tag-eileen-bushelow","tag-participation-fees","tag-unionville-chadds-ford-school-district"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21750\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}