Dayton School Board race to look like Republican Presidential Primary
Just pulling petitions doesn’t mean you’ll get on the ballot- unless you are a party-endorsed candidate in Montgomery County (they get their petitions checked for free by BOE employees on their “lunch break”).
According to the BOE site- here is who has pulled petitions, that are due on Wed. Aug 5th. You’d need 300 good signatures of registered Dayton voters to get on the ballot.
Incumbents in bold.
- Jerome (Jerry) Brunswick, 426 E. Sixth St., Dayton 45402
Louis D. Butler, 2374 Rustic Rd., Dayton 45406Ann Marie Gallin (Mario), 40 Gebhart St., Dayton 45410 Petition Fail 12 Aug 2015
Hashim Ali Jabar, 40 S. Decker Ave., Apt. 7, Dayton 45417- John A. Lumpkin, Jr., 1258 Hook Estate Dr., Dayton
- John S. McManus, 35 S. St. Clair St., Apt 502, Dayton
- Nancy A. Nerny, 482 Shiloh Dr., Dayton 45415
Anthony Dion Roebuck, 1406 Steiner Ave., Dayton- Sheila Taylor, 2818 Kenview Ave., Dayton
- Robert Charles Walker, 4516 College View Dr., Dayton 45417
UPDATE
5 Aug 2015 Butler, Jabar, Roebuck didn’t file, now we wait to find out who had enough valid signatures
Unlike the Dayton City Commission, there is no primary to thin the herd. One ballot, pick three, and the top three win. Obviously, with more candidates, the incumbents, get a better shot at being known quantities and have a better shot.
Only one person has turned in petitions so far- John McManus. (full disclosure- my firm printed his signs and stickers) and he has been out walking longer than anyone else.
Thursday night I was presented with a dual candidate petition- for Jerry Brunswick and John Lumpkin. I’m not sure how these work- since you are allowed to sign up to 3 petitions, and I’d signed 2. Guess it’s first in and first name on the petition that gets the credit in these cases. The circulator told me the petition format of more than one candidate was OK on Russ Joseph’s advice- which means these are the chosen party candidates. Word on the street was that Mayor Nan was trying to round up candidates for School Board because she wasn’t happy with the board as it sits- for once, we agree. Brunswick served on her “City of Learners committee” which issued yet another report with all the obvious issues stated and no real revelations.
Mario Gallin is a wild card, she’s been on the board before and is well liked. Brunswick is a former bank president who is also the part-time head of the milked-out port authority. Lumpkin is a Joey Williams contemporary who played football at Ohio State, worked as a bank branch manager at Chase for a long time before becoming a stockbroker/private wealth manager with Morgan Stanley. Both are good guys and very civic minded.
Last time Nearny was on the ballot, it was only because the BOE was nice enough to reverse itself on the 3 or 4 signatures she was short. That doesn’t happen very often, if at all.
I don’t know Butler or Roebuck off the top of my head. Of the other newcomers, there is only one that I’m not a fan of- and that’s Ali Jabar who likes to scream at people and try to incite racial issues as the cause of all ills. He’s married to the woman formerly known as Maria Holt now Zakiya Sankara-Jabar, and is tied in with Vernalia Randall, a former UD Law Professor , with “Racial Justice Now,” who rightly campaigns against the “school-to-prison pipeline” but does so in a manner I find insulting most of the time.
Of the existing school board members, all are caring and good people, who’ve been totally ineffective and visionless for the district. Not an original idea for transformation from any of them, and never a serious questioning of the Teflon-coated superintendent, Lori Ward.
While being the highest paid elected official in the county, Ward has muddled through one crisis after another, without making any real progress for years. Talented teachers, principals and administrators have jumped ship, tired of waiting for her to plug the many holes on the sinking ship. Some of her hires have been incredibly questionable, including former “Chief Operating Officer” James Harris who barely unpacked by DPS standards before they parted ways.
With the state just itching to throw the district under the bus, and a state “takeover” on the near horizon, anyone wanting to run for this board should get bonus points. This upcoming term, plus having to work with Hazel Rountree (she’s proof that degrees and positions don’t prove that you have any idea of what you are doing) should be enough to scare anyone off. The last election we only had four candidates on the ballot for four seats if that’s any kind of indication.
Looking online for candidates’ websites (so you can actually learn something about them and their positions) is like finding needles in a haystack. Of course it doesn’t matter, because the voters who are going to pick them are notoriously underinformed and make lousy choices (the current Dayton City Commission is a prime example).
A quick search-
- Brunswick- no
- Butler- could be a veteran who works in insurance or a DPS teacher with only 1 connection according to LinkedIn.
- Gallin has lots of hits for School Board since she used to serve. No hint of a website- but huge personal tragedy since.
- Ali Jabar- no site
- Lumpkin- no site
- John S. McManus– oh look, a professional who is even social media savvy. A Nation Builder site, he’s on twitter, Facebook, someone who actually attempts to communicate with people using modern technology.
- Nancy A. Nerny- who despite being on the board, comes up with an interview from 2007 by my very missed, deceased friend, Gary Staiger.
- Anthony Dion Roebuck – tied in with Racial Justice Now- and part of a lawsuit against The Dayton Urban Ministry Center which ostensibly got government money and didn’t pay people it was supposed to.
- Sheila Taylor- no site. You have a better chance of finding info on her on this blog according to Google.
- Dr. Walker- no site. Ditto above.
If any of the candidates (and I know most of you will find out about this post) have a site they want to direct voters to, let me know via comments below.
Frankly, other than McManus, y’all look mighty unprepared (the drawl is because if you’ve met McManus, you know he sounds straight out of Tennessee, probably because that’s where he’s from). One pro, a bunch of amateurs- sounds just like the Republican Presidential Primary field, and I’ll leave it to you to guess who I think the pro is.
It will be a week from Tuesday to see how the BOE thins the herd.
Roundtree would be getting a “round house” from me every meeting. Most of these incumbents are slugs who not only have no ideas but they’re milquetoast who are bullied by those (like Roundtree) who’s real objective is not to serve the school system but have their eyes on other political positions.
I could think of no greater torture than serving on this dysfunctional group. It’s much better being controlled by the state. DPS needs completly dismantled and Nanny Whale’s grubby hand slapped for trying to insert her own lackies.
Seems likely the State of Ohio will take over DPS in a couple of years.
Sounds like a step in the right direction.
It’s going to be a great summer. The people of Dayton School District will have plenty of choices.
I have a special phone line that I invite anyone to contact me on day or night. The number is 937-260-1740.
I also have an Instagram for the campaign @votemcmanus
Best wishes to everyone in the race,
John
And as you can see- one candidate has his act together- the rest- posers.
There is unfair criticism of the school board and DPS in general. 1) Would anyone care to explain how are these major factors, which are impacting DPS severely, the fault of DPS or its board: a) 926 students officially classified as homeless (out of 14,000 students): http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/local-education/homeless-student-population-increasing/nmGrS/ That’s more than any other school district in the greater region. b) 20% of all students have some kind of disability – the highest of any school district in Ohio. c) 99% (!) are on free or reduced lunch – an official measure of poverty in schools. That makes Dayton the poorest school district in Ohio. d) general crime in Dayton, including near some school buildings, which scares parents and even teachers. I heard you acknowledge this problem before, although you said you were not as afraid and even approached anyone. Well, many parents and teachers are afraid, and refuse to come close. What can possibly DPS do about this? It has all the proper lighting, and has security, and cameras – but that protects the perimeter around the school. What about two blocks away? e) proliferation of low-quality charter schools – there are more charter schools in Dayton than there are public schools. Yet, as we know from several authoritative studies, charters in Ohio are, on average, worse academically, than public schools. This is certainly true in Dayton. And this is before we adjust their performance for the massive violations found by the State Auditor (there are too many news stories to link, but all know about it and can easily find). So while not all charters are bad, and there are some that are very strong academically, but in Dayton there are quite a few weak and outright bad one’s, and they’ve been in the news a lot in the recent year or so. f) variety of unfunded mandates being placed on public schools – not to mention the fact that public schools have 150 more Ohio laws to comply with than charter schools do. I hope everyone understands what does it mean to have to comply with 150 additional laws,… Read more »
Welcome Dr. Baguirov, or Adil for those not making the connection to the one solid choice currently on the BOE. I’ve written my plan already: http://esrati.com/a-plan-for-the-dayton-public-schools/11771 And, I know better than to get into an argument with a PhD who is going to look for the numbers to support his arguments. I agree with you completely that the Charter schools are a major disruption- and should be held to the exact same standards. No argument. As to the poverty- where is your residential school for kids who are stuck in unfit homes? Should have happened years ago. The USMC reserve training center would have been an excellent location – before the city and the feds let it get scrapped. I sat on your technology review committee- and frankly- you don’t have anyone there who is even remotely up to speed. Your entire organization has avoided open source solutions to almost every issue- even buying a proprietary CMS for the districts site which is a mess (still). As to your top school- Stivers, let’s be real. It’s by audition, probably 35% or more of the students are not residents, and it’s the only school with a long term principal that hasn’t been screwed with. It runs unto itself. The loss of David White over $20K a year was a critical mistake. How much is a building worth that is performing- vs not performing. Someone doesn’t understand priorities- maybe the Superintendent should have cut her salary from $200K to $180K a year to keep him- she’d still be making more than any other non-collegiate public employee in the county. Don’t get me started on the PR and marketing skills of the district- other than to say, you get a solid F- and have for decades. You want to attract new teachers- you want to get people feeling good about the district- learn to tell the good side of things a LOT better. I’ve got a lot more to say- but, comparing DPS to Charter schools is like comparing abacuses while everyone else is using super computers. For years we heard that the… Read more »
David, when I mentioned Top 5 schools in Dayton, that doesn’t just include Stivers. There are also Charity Adams Earley Girls Academy, Horace Mann PreK-8, and Valerie PreK-8, as well as DECA. And if we expand the list to Top 10, we can include Ponitz. So please don’t forget about all the great schools we have in Dayton and at DPS. Meanwhile, if we go outside of Dayton, and compare to other schools in Miami Valley, DPS is still holding on – according to the U.S. News and World report’s 2015 ranking, Stivers, for example, is better than Brookville High School, Bethel High School (Tipp City), Centerville High School, Tippecanoe High School (Tipp City), and Springboro High School. This is despite worst poverty level in the state, highest number of students with disability in the state, just recently stabilized population size that was continuously declining for 40 years, ageing population with less young families, onslaught of weak charter schools who spend a lot on ads to lure students/parents, 150 more state laws to comply with, and many other factors that you for some reason unfairly dismiss as “excuses”. This all would have been “excuses” had it not been proven by peer-reviewed academic studies – or had DPS not had several good schools, had not been ranked by U.S. News and World Report, had not won robotics competitions, had not won TV/media competitions, etc. I’ve already showed that a Board and Administration cannot, by definition, be ineffective or visionless, when they have multiple good schools in the district. It shows that the problem is not with a District per se, but far more nuanced – and that the very external factors that you try to dismiss as “excuses” have an outsize effect over which DPS has no control whatsoever. I agree 100% that new buildings didn’t make anything better. Whose fault is that? The massive debt that was placed upon DPS over a decade ago is hardly the responsibility or fault of the current Board, or the current Superintendent, Treasurer, or other senior administrators. So why point fingers and accuse those… Read more »
Dr. Baguirov, The problems you talk about with WordPress and Drupal are easily dealt with by professionals- which you don’t have on staff. The reality is- if a CMS isn’t easy to use, update, and manage- it doesn’t get updated as often. A proprietary CMS also requires a learning curve- considering WP is now powering about 25% of the web- I’d say it’s good to go for DPS. Where do we get the money for programs? And how do we pay staff to work year round? Well, if you don’t want to be fired or taken over- for failures caused by problems outside your control- you try to take control of as much as you can. Teachers start to work a schedule like the rest of us- who are pretty happy making $50K a year- working a 40 hour work week- most of us working 50+ weeks a year. The teaching load gets stretched out over a longer year- you don’t have summer slide- and you can share your interests and other lifeskills in the additional time- which is largely structured by the staff of the school. Want to save money- well every school had to be built on 5 acres- farm some of it- integrating biology, chemistry, geology, and food sciences as well as learning about marketing, sales, profit margins. Look at the MetroParks CityBeets program- expand that to every Pre-K-8 school. We can have a long discussion here- but, to tell me Horace Mann is a top performing school- I’m going to tell you no, it’s not. When I had kids there, that had been at Southdale in Kettering- I watched them fall from 90+ percentile to 50% in 2 years. Any school that can’t send books home, isn’t really a school. Honestly, the reason I don’t sit on the tech committee anymore- is because after sitting through badly structured meetings, with absolutely worthless data, presented by someone who wouldn’t have a job in the private sector for more than a hot second, I sort of got dis-invited. As to PR- my firm did some award winning work… Read more »
Local control of DPS hasn’t worked, and shows no signs of starting to work any time soon.
Let the State Board of Ed take over.
Think of it as cntrl+alt+del for an entire school system.
How much worse could things get?
and the State Board of Education, of course, has some impressive track record of “turning around” school districts – or even just one school? They, I presume, have a bunch of “proven” education “leaders” who have top-notch degrees from prestigious institutions of higher learning (it is not too much to expect that in the field of education, I hope), and who have proven their theories in practice, or perhaps at least in some simulation. But in reality, of course, there is none of that. No record of “turning around” a single district or school, no top-notch acclaimed experts, no proven track record, just some theories. And if one reads what their commission report’s findings present, there is no new action plan, no innovative solutions, no out of the box thinking, nothing that can be taken and implemented. In many ways, it is no different than the report presented by the Council of Great City Schools in 2008 that I’ve cited above. And they (great experts from Columbus, that is) definitely looked, very hard, hoping to find some obvious and glaring problems at DPS that could be pointed out.
After all, when state government is changing education laws (not just student testing, but so many other aspects) every year (!), which suggests that they probably don’t seem to know what they are doing (sure, very surprising). You can’t have an unpredictable environment, where fundamentals change every year, and yet expect great results (even the federal tax code is not changed as drastically every year). All while reducing state funding and increasing state mandates – among many other things.
If only state officials (or at least ODE and SBE bureaucrats) were rated and ranked the same way that students, principals, and teachers are rated and ranked! Now that would have been fair, not to mention fun and eye-opening.
Dr. Baguirov,
I read the Youngstown and Elyria “plans” and thought- oh, yeah, sure- we’ll go to aisle 9 of “Teachers Mart” and buy 25 more “reading intervention specialists” and solve our problem right now. The idea of the State taking things over is a joke- their answer will be to privatize the district- because, well, you know, charter schools work so well. (That’s what a gerrymandered/selected Republican government does.).
I fully agree with you that there needs to be a system to rate and rank politicians- as well as test them before they even run (I’m in the process of writing a book about that).
The state can barely properly track students from district to district now- nevermind when you throw in the charters. The “graduation rates” are about as worthless as a guide written by Lance Armstrong on cycling conditioning without steroids.
And here is a Harvard Study on Public Boarding Schools- which seem to be very controversial: http://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/potential-urban-boarding-schools-poor-evidence-seed
Cincinnati tried to start one in 2012- but got derailed.
Also note that Cincinnati has 5 people in their PR department.
And, Adil- btw- the site still has serious shortcomings- not due to CMS- but due to lack of understanding how sites are used, why they are used- and how to build a proper navigation system.
Thank you for the Harvard plan – will read. And noted about Cincinnati – I applaud them for doing it, even though academic purists probably detest the fact that spending rose for initiatives that are outside classrooms. They also had an independent Internal Auditor before Dayton did. But they were second to Dayton in joining the Ohio Online Checkbook Initiative. :)
and not to preach to the choir, but here’s a letter signed yesterday by several members of the Ohio State Board of Education (SBE) about the conflict of interest and other problems with the SBE. http://files.ctctcdn.com/26d1b400301/c2c2eb4d-aa9a-422d-ba88-2a00a49efd26.pdf
And, maybe DPS wants to join this group:
http://wvxu.org/post/school-districts-join-demand-more-local-control-fewer-mandates
@Adil- and, try to have this conversation on the DPS site?
Not happening. There is a community to engage- that wants to see change, that wants to help- but the tools aren’t there.
DPS has been a disaster for decades. Time for drastic measures.
State control. The sooner, the better.
Enough of the ongoing C.F.
Maybe, after a few years, return control to a local board.
When one hand does not know what the other hand is doing you have chaos when implementing rules, following protocols, procedures, making confusion to all involved. Who suffers the most? you guessed it the students. Who gets the blame the teachers who dedicate themselves with their time on and off their jobs and get full blame for someone else in charge of an administration with supervisors and higher ups and middle man.
Teachers need to be allowed to do their job in the first place without threats. This works in any organization or the government, however there is the teacher that can get blamed easily covering up the neglect of administration in these settings. It all boils down to societal breakdown that is happening across the country because if things are bad at home it will not get better elsewhere having one be a babysitter.
This is why there can be no accountability because basic understanding with an emphasis on good old fashion-back to basics and a commonsense approach has been thrown under the bus.
Fat cats getting big paychecks and bonuses for doing very little or nothing at all except a title to the position they sit.
How about we let teachers sit and be in charge of these positions; we would save a lot of time, money, effort, and total dedication would ensue with great schools, problems would be solved immediately, budgets would be totally balanced and in the black and fairness would be the order of the day as teachers could then do the dedicated service to their districts and community!
Mario didn’t make the cut. 6 candidates, 3 seats.