Supt. Patti Jaffe reported that she had “a great meeting” last week with parents from throughout the School District who had on their minds replications of El Marino Language School’s heatedly debated adjunct program.
During the 90-minute assembly, Ms. Jaffe and Asst. Supt. Eileen Carroll listed and took notes from the 20 parents, their observations, objections and suggestions.
“I heard their concerns, and we talked about what needed to be done next. But there was nothing new. Their concerns are to make sure the dollars that the schools donate go to that school.
“Some of the subjects we talked about, Leslie Lockhart (newly promoted to Assistant Superintendent) will have to sit down and talk with (ACE, the Assn. of Classified Employees) about.”
Ms. Jaffe said she told the moms and dads that “I can’t negotiate with you.”
However, “we did clarify the fact that any person they hire cannot work more than 3.9 hours because that throws them into benefits.”
Making a Pledge
The soon-to-retire Super told the newspaper that the main takeaway was “that they understand we will be coming up with a resolution. We have not decided exactly what. But we are going to come up with a clear outline.”
Ms. Jaffe assured the parents that the sticky details related to mounting adjunct-type programs at their schools – a topic publicly smoldering almost three months – “has to be sorted out with ACE. I don’t know what form it is going to take. In all honesty, Mrs. Lockhart will be working with ACE. She knows what the areas are. They will come up with some kind of memorandum of understanding or ,,,
“I don’t know if it is going to be a Board policy.
“We still are in the discussion stage. We have an understanding, and the Lin Howe (School) model seems to be working.”
(Last autumn, Lin Howe sought to emulate El Marino’s smashingly successful, quarter-century adjunct problem. The program that was put into place amounted to a modified version of El Marino’s, sharply scaled down from what Lin Howe leaders had sought.)
As for last Tuesday night’s School Board meeting:
Ms. Jaffe noted that the rules change the Board considered regarding, “School-Connected Organizations,” colorfully known as Board Policy 1230, “had nothing to do with the adjuncts.”
There were two reasons for publicly airing out a substantively rewritten, unrelated policy at a meeting when adjuncts were on the minds of at least the audience, Ms. Jaffe said.
“First,” she said, “it had not been updated, and because a couple of schools want to form booster clubs, but they have not gone through the process.
“We have been trying to go through the Board’s policies, trying to update a couple at each meeting. Some are from 1997. There was some misunderstanding about what is a booster club, what is Board policy and what is the administrative regulation on it.”
The item that has set off months of steamy community chatter is another tantalizingly titled notation, Board Policy 1240, which covers “volunteers,” such as the El Marino adjuncts.
Ms. Jaffe said a reworked, re-examined version of 1240 “will be looked at in late May. That was the timeline the Board gave us.”
