FCPS School board mtg at 10:00 Thurs...live stream

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Can’t believe FCPS admin is throwing teachers under the bus like this. Y’all don’t deserve that. And it’s a failure of leadership to accept full responsibility when things like this happen.

+1

The fact that no one at the top owned this cluster is telling. Leadership is about taking responsibility. I hope we get some qualified folks running for school board next election!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can’t believe FCPS admin is throwing teachers under the bus like this. Y’all don’t deserve that. And it’s a failure of leadership to accept full responsibility when things like this happen.

+1

The fact that no one at the top owned this cluster is telling. Leadership is about taking responsibility. I hope we get some qualified folks running for school board next election!

I don’t begrudge superintendents their salary. The reality is though when YOUR name is on the top of the letterhead, when YOU are the final say so on all decisions and when YOU make $300k, the onus of a systemwide failure is NOT on the classroom teachers who only have so much agency. Ridiculous to even suggest they are to blame for the logins or whatever.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Grovel, BB guy, grovel more.

Yes.

It's a Fairfax based company so it's unlikely that they're going to lose FCPS as a client but they might get a pretty unfavorable contract when it's renewed.

Contract isn't being renewed. It costs a fortune, very few schools use it, and there are better programs. As of earlier this year, FCPS was moving to Schoolology in 2022 (?) but that has to be approved by the board who were hesitant. They won't be now.

They have 75% of the school market.

In the business world, it's GoToMeeting, Zoom, and lately Teams. No one who could actually get fired would use BB. It's a disaster.

This hasn't been true for at least 5 years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For a county that has so many well-educated people, overall a good tax base, and the expertise of a large school system..... FCPS has not done very well.

I understand that this was very abrupt to switch education from in-person to on-line. I give them a break for the rest of this year (to some degree).

But, this whole school board meeting and the big FAIL gives me no confidence at all that FCPS is going to handle next school year well.

I watch Cuomo's press conf. everyday. He gives the impression of being seriously on the task and giving us the facts. I would feel comfortable following him into battle. Watching the FCPS administrators, I do not have confidence and would not want to follow them into battle. It would be like the Keystone Cops.... bumbling into each other and getting captured by the enemy. a mess.

If you have followed our schoolboard for the past couple of years, you would see that as they have gotten more and more dominated by one side, their focus has been very far from the basics of educating the students.

+1

Their emphasis has been on Ryan McEleven inspired pet projects that have zero to do with education.

Add that to a bloated Gatehouse full of overpaid "leaders" and now we have what we have.

I would bet most Fairfax residents have never set foot into fcps main office building. If they did, they would be stunned by how top heavy this district is.

The school board has been very poor stewards of our resources and students for many years, and have gotten a pass due to so many quality teachers.

I have heard the same thing from many school board members. They find Gatehouse frustrating and wasteful, but said that large portions of the board deferred to the Supervisor so completely that they really had abdicated any kind of real oversight. This does not seem to be either a democratic or republican tendency - there have been members of both parties and total independents who were guilty of the same. I would suggest that one thing that might help is to elect people with actual educational credentials to the school board, so they would know a little more about how the system runs than the business people, stay at home moms, lawyers and whatnot who have traditionally run it. How about we put some teachers and former principals up there??

The current school board is lying.

In the past few years they have micromanged the schools at the site level to the point that they banned all homecoming queens, powderpuff games, and anything else that the possibly could that was based off gender. For example, the school board micromanaged to a level that the 2020 class could not have a boy/girl superlative. They had to have 3 genderless spots per superlative.

They have abdicated the important stuff that is the main part of their job duties, such as fiscal management and ensuring kids are functionally educated, and devoted all their energies into who gets to wear a crown or not at the prom.

This school board and the recent school board especially, have put politics, social engineering and pandering above all else, and have put education and responsible financial planning on the back burner. They have wasted millions, perhaps billions of dollars on under the table contracts like Cenergistic, hired cronies and consultants, and micromanged the schools, teachers and principals over frivolous stuff to the point of tying their hands with educating our kids.

The school board's feigned outrage over the whole thing is about as convincing as the main law enforcement guy from Casablanca. They are rounding up "the usual suspects" by blaming all of those below them, but the responsibility and accountability is on them and the gatehouse leadership.


Hopefully this is a big enough cluster that fcps are finally paying attention, and will quit voting in single party activists from the extreme fringe (democratic in this case, but really it could be either fringe), and vote these people out for moderates with sense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:seems like the principals need to tell their teachers to go ahead with non synchronous learning in whatever way they choose. Stop relying on the higher ups.

[phone]

That’s what my elementary grade level did from the beginning and we didn’t miss a beat today. Students watched recorded lessons, they completed the work, teachers commented and returned it, and answered questions from students. When I mentioned recorded lessons last week many in other threads were amazed and upset that the kids might not have “live” lessons. Well, it’s working well for us and we’ve had positive feedback from families.

Us too. So it’s been fine for my kids. They have a live morning meeting where the teacher went over the plan of the day. There is a live afternoon session of “ask the teacher” where they could get help with any other problems they ran into. Other then that it is videos and assignments. Also the teacher, spec Ed teacher and grade level ia are monitoring the classroom stream and helping as questions pop up there.

Yes. Yesterday was one of our best days yet. The students are starting to “get it” (they’re 8 and 9 years old) and it’s starting to fall into a routine.

[Anonymous]

It is laughable that some folks use salary as a reason to fire an FCPS employee. I would argue that a CEO responsible for over 200,000 individuals is underpaid at 290K. That said, this is an monumental failure and some heads should roll. Luftglass (assistant superintendent of the Department of Information Technology) not recommending blackboard be updated over the last 3 year and expecting it to work? She blames Blackboard for this? Then she blames the training teachers received (and by extention the trainers) for the failures? Sad when a higher up's failure leads them to blame the line worker.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It is laughable that some folks use salary as a reason to fire an FCPS employee. I would argue that a CEO responsible for over 200,000 individuals is underpaid at 290K. That said, this is an monumental failure and some heads should roll. Luftglass (assistant superintendent of the Department of Information Technology) not recommending blackboard be updated over the last 3 year and expecting it to work? She blames Blackboard for this? Then she blames the training teachers received (and by extention the trainers) for the failures? Sad when a higher up's failure leads them to blame the line worker.

Agree. Actually, a lot of it does sound like Blackboard's fault, since they host all of FCPS. Blame them, not the FCPS IT or teachers.

[Anonymous]

The tool to better secure Collaborate virtual sessions wasn't enabled until after this mess happened. Why wasn't it enabled before rollout? Did Luftglass and her IT department not realize an unsecure link can be shared and opened by anyone? Any 5th grader knows this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is laughable that some folks use salary as a reason to fire an FCPS employee. I would argue that a CEO responsible for over 200,000 individuals is underpaid at 290K. That said, this is an monumental failure and some heads should roll. Luftglass (assistant superintendent of the Department of Information Technology) not recommending blackboard be updated over the last 3 year and expecting it to work? She blames Blackboard for this? Then she blames the training teachers received (and by extention the trainers) for the failures? Sad when a higher up's failure leads them to blame the line worker.

Agree. Actually, a lot of it does sound like Blackboard's fault, since they host all of FCPS. Blame them, not the FCPS IT or teachers.

I 'd say you could blame Blackboard IF FCPS had an up-to-date platform but FCPS IT didn't authorize this. Blackboard may not have had the access issues if the system was updated. Who konws for sure. You update your iPhone. To fix issues. Skip too many updates and your iphone doesn't work. That's not Apple's fault. Turns out Blackboard has a tool to avoid the virtual classroom issues as well. Why wasn't that enabled prior to rollout? Is that Blackboard's fault or FCPS fault? I would love to know.

[Anonymous]

Our teachers keep adapting with new plans as all of this changes, and I can tell they are working so hard to make the best plans they can. It really frustrates me that they keep getting foiled by forces outside of their control.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The tool to better secure Collaborate virtual sessions wasn't enabled until after this mess happened. Why wasn't it enabled before rollout? Did Luftglass and her IT department not realize an unsecure link can be shared and opened by anyone? Any 5th grader knows this.

+1

I’m assuming the county had to pay more to get the more secure version (which is linked through regular Blackboard) so that’s why they didn’t do it in the first place.

[Anonymous]

it's fcps IT/luftglas who dropped the ball. They didn't specify the capacity or needs to Blackboard (lufthlass admitted). They didn't tell teachers not to use guest id's. They didn't do updates. They wanted BB to take the blame, but when questioned on the details, it was mainly Luftglas and IT dept that didn't manage the plan properly.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is laughable that some folks use salary as a reason to fire an FCPS employee. I would argue that a CEO responsible for over 200,000 individuals is underpaid at 290K. That said, this is an monumental failure and some heads should roll. Luftglass (assistant superintendent of the Department of Information Technology) not recommending blackboard be updated over the last 3 year and expecting it to work? She blames Blackboard for this? Then she blames the training teachers received (and by extention the trainers) for the failures? Sad when a higher up's failure leads them to blame the line worker.

Agree. Actually, a lot of it does sound like Blackboard's fault, since they host all of FCPS. Blame them, not the FCPS IT or teachers.

This part is unclear- we hear one person say that it's a BB-hosted (aka cloud) installation, then we hear someone else say that it's hosted internally (by FCPS), so until we have a clear picture of that, it's hard to say who is more at fault. If it's hosted by BB, typically they would perform the maintenance and roll out updates on their own schedule; additional features purchased by FCPS would be installed by BB (but perhaps activated/turned on by FCPS). Any performance issues would be on BB in this scenario. If it's hosted by FCPS, then it would be up to them to install updates and upgrades and FCPS would be responsible for performance issues. It's also possible that it's a hybrid that first touches FCPS before going to BB, in which case there are multiple potential points of failure.

Regardless, though, of who specifially dropped the ball(s), the response by Braband, Luftglass & Co has been inappropriate and embarrassing. I don't know how the SBTSs and Teachers can report to work today and feel like they're supported in any way by the district.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The tool to better secure Collaborate virtual sessions wasn't enabled until after this mess happened. Why wasn't it enabled before rollout? Did Luftglass and her IT department not realize an unsecure link can be shared and opened by anyone? Any 5th grader knows this.

+1

I’m assuming the county had to pay more to get the more secure version (which is linked through regular Blackboard) so that’s why they didn’t do it in the first place.

This is what our principal said -- that the county did not want to pay the extra money (probably in the millions of dollars) to get the additional features that allow for more secure BB Collaborate sessions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:it's fcps IT/luftglas who dropped the ball. They didn't specify the capacity or needs to Blackboard (lufthlass admitted). They didn't tell teachers not to use guest id's. They didn't do updates. They wanted BB to take the blame, but when questioned on the details, it was mainly Luftglas and IT dept that didn't manage the plan properly.

Any software company knows that clients aren't tech savvy. And usually are cheap and put off doing updates. So what else is new? They're supposed to figure this stuff out. Blackboard said they modeled the load, just that apparently they did it badly.

Blackboard's product may or may not be good but their service is bad.