Buist Principal Sally Ballard has retired. Now the housecleaning begins, especially in regard to its much bally-hooed waiting lists. CCSD Board of Trustees Chairman Chris Fraser has put forth the idea that perhaps methods of maintaining waiting lists for the districts' county-wide magnets should be standardized. Buist's bloated list stands out like a sore thumb.
Funny, isn't it? While Ballard remained principal no questions were raised, at least by McGinley supporters. Fraser does what McGinley asks him to do; therefore, Superintendent McGinley now wants to straighten out what has been a disgrace ever since Ballard took over the magnet school.
Makes you wonder what favors Ballard had granted McGinley.
At any rate, Buist's 2000+ waiting list is a mirage. Ballard's idea of how to fill vacancies is a joke: the old "delay, linger, and wait" routine. If waiting lists were not purged and parents did not need to apply again after kindergarten, don't you wonder what Ballard did with students who moved into the district afterwards? Added them to the end of the list? Not likely. The whole process was inept, tainted with cronyism, and corrupt.
Let's hope that while changing its method of keeping waiting lists Buist also sheds some light into the dark corners of how it fills spaces and why some spaces remain vacant.
Monday, June 04, 2012
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5 comments:
Yes. Hear! Hear!
Does anyone know why the district allows each magnet school to determine how its waiting lists are managed? It seems like maintaining inconsistent waiting list policies invites problems and is a law suit waiting to happen.
I used to manage a home for families of ill children, we stayed full all the time with a waiting list daily. Each day when someone checked out, I called the next person on the list and offered a room, if they didn't want it, I removed them from the list and kept going down the list. The list was updated daily in an excel spreadsheet. Pretty simple stuff! My big question thought, if this school is so great and desirable, why hasn't it been replicated?
Good question. Why not replicate it?
Watch carefully. The superintendent is in the process of pushing out (or making an example of) some upper level magnet school administrators at Buist, SOA and AMHS. Why? They aren't offering an answer to that one either.
I'm not sure it makes sense for each magnet school to have exactly the same policies - they're different schools. However, the school board should have to approve the policies - they shouldn't be left up to the schools.
Just one obvious example: It would be senseless to have a waiting list for senior year at AMHS. It is not senseless to have a waiting list for 8th grade at Buist. The two situations are different. I think the likelihood that a family would want to transfer a student into 8th grade at Buist is fairly small, but I don't see anything educationally inappropriate about it. At AMHS, a student simply cannot transfer in at the senior level and do the work that's expected. I don't know about SOA.
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