Reply to What can parents do to improve ACPS?

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "What can parents do to improve ACPS?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]In so many respects, the ACPS schools are actually quite good (yes, I know that this sentence alone will yield a firestorm; I don't offer the comment lightly -- we have private and other-public experience and the opinion is a considered one).   I think the individual school PTAs and the city-wide PTAC are the best, most useful vehicles to help improve and support ACPS.  An individual school PTA unit has astounding flexibility as to what it can do with its budget.  And speaking with a PTA officer is typically easy to do.

The one big problem is that the school board doesn't agree as to the value of PTAs -- in fact, multiple school board members aren't even on speaking terms with any of the PTA officers.  One school board member made the notorious white-women “PTA demographic” comment; another delivered incredibly insulting remarks in public directed to named PTA officers and then lied about it; another basically refused to meet under any terms with PTA leadership and instead told the PTAs that they had no rights beyond applying (at the school board’s total discretion) to become members of ACPS advisory groups.  One school board member -- following 2013’s best-ever TC Williams college admissions record -- made public statements to the effect that TC doesn’t have 14 students who could pass the TJ entrance exam, which is a malicious and dumb comment.  One school board member even privately arranged for an internal transfer of the board member’s kids to a different school for which they otherwise would have been ineligible.

The current school board is completely tone-deaf to parent interests.  This is also reflected in ACPS’s public announcements -- ACPS used to publicly announce everything (yes, it got loud); the current school board announces nothing that isn’t legally required, and sometimes not even that.

The advantages to PTA participation include (1) you get direct input, usually in the context of a pretty small group, into school-level asks and offers; and (2) the ACPS school board sees that parents are indeed organized through active, visible PTAs, giving school board members an opportunity for an attitude-adjustment.  
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics