Nothing shocking here for a response.  Basically, we hear yeah but don't know what the future holds.

Richard,

Basic information about the settlement with the RFT has been published on the district website.  It will also be published in the Sun newspapers, including more information about the total amounts.

Analysis has been done and the Board has seen financial projections based on varying factors.  Step and lane increases were included in previous budget projections, as you noted.  If you would like more detail about the effects of the settlement and the  budget projections you can contact Lonnie Smith, out interim business manager, or Stephanie Crosby, our HR Director.

No final decisions on future budgets have been made.  The budget process is long and complicated.  We will be discussing the budget at a short work session before the January 20 board meeting and at a number of sessions thereafter.  There are a number of unknown factors at this time, including Race To The Top funding and other funding or cuts from the state.

The school board is committed to maintaining the long-term financial stability of the district.  We share your concern.  Thank you for your thoughts on how to communicate the budget picture.

Sincerely,

Dear Board Members,

It is now public information about a tentative agreements between 281 and the RFT.  This agreement show a 0% and 1% increase on top of the already established steps/lanes (average of 1.15% per teacher).  What I am concerned about is that there doesn't appear to be anything yet published on the impact of these increases.

So some quick and dirty math gave me these numbers.  First, I understand that teacher reductions with reduced class sizes and retirements are not factored into this.  Second, the average increase of step/lanes vary every year because you cannot predict teachers education pattern.  So as I said, rough numbers.  All numbers are taken from the online budgets and only represent licensed staff (line item 112).

** Assumes 1% increase from contract + 1.15% avg lane/step

So there will be approximately a $972,000 salary increase.  Additionally, there will be a 90,300 increase in payments to health insurance (50 this year and 50 next year for each licensed teacher).  So approximately a 1 million dollar financial hit for just licensed staff.  Other groups will then follow this same process driving up the costs.

My concern is, where is the analysis of the cuts to offset this increase in salary for the following year.  The budget calls for a 3.8 million dollar fund balance, is the thought that this increase in salary comes from the fund balance as there is not an increase in state funding.

I understand the financial pressure to make sure the contract is settled before January 15th, but concerned about long term stability.  My hope is, if the teachers' contract is ratified tomorrow that prior to the board vote that the board publishes the estimated impact and the steps and processes to by which we plan to balance the budget again.

Thank you for your time and dedication to the district.

Thanks,

DJ Brynteson
Crystal, MN

Last night was a great event.  I wish we could do more of those.  Special thanks to the folks who were able to put it together.  I think I left at about 11:30 PM so lots of people to talk to with lots of great ideas.

If you are one who needs a campaign sign please let me know.  Second batch of them came in last night.  So I have a few more.  I didn't go the route to litter the streets with them so maybe I will have to rethink that one if I ever run again.

Postcards and letters go out at the end of the week.  1500 postcards to community.  Got to get at least one person to vote on that one I would think.

Wow.  I have seen some really sad attempts at making an argument about Apple costing more.  But this one might take the cake.  So the argument is owning a mac desktop and laptop is $3,367 more expensive over a 5 year period.  Now, there are plenty of things the person ignores and makes some seriously strange assumptions along the way so I was curious, how close is it. 

Some things I'm going to change.  First, I'm going to select an iMac as my home machine and not a Mac Pro - since this is a home purchase and not a business purchase.  I'm doing this before I looked up the prices so we will see.  I'm guessing Apple will be more in the end but who knows.

Here is my table:

* So there is a instant rebate right now $300 so the price is actually $1949.98.  I have also selected Windows Vista Ultimate since there is only one "ultimate" version of OSX.  Memory and processor is the same as the iMac.  Same graphics card in the HP but it has 1GB of memory vs 512MB.  23 Inch Monitor for HP / 24 for iMac.

So there we go.  Only a difference $1,198.  So why is my number so damn different?  First, I'm using an iMac which is a consumer model and not a pro machine.  Second, I'm actually including the cost of anti-virus that is needed on the PC.  Third, I'm dropping software on his list that he doesn't include on the PC list.

Other things to keep in mine.  Video card in the MacBook is better than the Dell and it also has a newer processor.  Apple's machines also include iLife which there isn't anything close to compare to on the PC side of the world included.  So that number goes down when you take into account those items.  There are tons of other intangables but at least we try to be more accurate.

So there we go a slighty more accurate "apple tax" argument. 

So I've been trying to dig into this a little bit because I'm really confused about what appears to be a budget crisis that is about to his the Robbinsdale Area Schools next year.  I know the economy is down and it's sending everything down in terms of where a school district gets it money but if you dig into one of the presentation's from a recent board there is reason to be even more concerned.

So according to the district, by the 2010-11 school year the district will again be running in the red and facing upwards of 2.1 million in cuts.  This comes after the successful referendum in November 2008 (for seven years).  Because of the recent passing of the referendum it would make sense that the board could not even think about going back to the voters for another one.

(see page 36 of the attached power point presentation for more details)

So how did we get into this mess?  Are we even in a mess?

The answer to this question is very complicated but one thing you might be able to take out of this is that the district may have financially been better off to wait another one or two years before asking for the referendum.  A little history.  2007 referendum failed by a close margin.  The board decided that it would take another stab at a second one the following year but ask for significantly less money.  Was this the best decision - only time will tell - but since it would be absolute craziness to ask for another one next year - they are now in a tough spot.  Waiting an extra one to two years could have actually allowed the school district to ask for the full money they were seeking in the first place.

According to the district at the end of the 2011 school year the district would be operating about 1.3 to 2.5 million in the red.  Both years would have seen a fund balance still in the black - but admittedly it would have been a very small amount.  What we do know is that regardless of a school closing, the district is in the hole for 2.4 to 5.9 million dollars.  (Since they decided to close schools - its a mere 2.4 million that needs to come off the books by the start of 2011.)

How will the voters react?  My guess is that with 4 open seats we are about to see a massive influx of new members.  I would have said Walsh would most likely be the only person to retain his seat after being the only person to initially vote against the PLE/SHE closing.  However, the change of vote will most likely doom his chances of being re-elected.

So what will the new board make up be?  And will they have any chance of change?  My guess is we will see some fiscal watchdogs make their way to the board this year.  Although I don't see them taking all 4 spots - they won't have a majority of the votes so it may not make a difference.  At best the watchdogs will get two of the seats.  The problem is incumbents have the advantage during a primary.  So with only two likely changes to the board I would guess we don't see any major shifts in the board.

What I will do over the next few days is write about what I think the board should be doing to help streamline costs and provide leadership that they are expected to provide.

So I've been poking around with IE 8 now for months during the beta and rc process and been noting some changes out in how IE8 on a deeper level for some of my applications.  There are a few worth noting:

• ASP.NET
  • So Microsoft has broken some items in the .NET framework and AJAX through the IE process.  The first and most notable thing that is broken is the ASP.NET menu system.  If you use IE8 with a menu you will notice that the menu will appear as a white box instead of the normal box.  This is due to some changes in CSS and the zIndex not working correctly.  You can this by checking out this post:
    
    http://blogs.msdn.com/giorgio/archive/2009/02/01/asp-net-menu-and-ie8-rendering-white-issue.aspx
• Concurrent Open Windows
  • This has been a tough cookie to crack in IE 6/7 with windows opening pop-up windows with update/panels.  The two current download/concurrent processes in IE 6/7 causes your browser to hang while the process in the background closes.  In IE8 that has changed from 2 to 6 so the problem still exists just not as badly.

More to come as I find more of the problems.

So I finally found a solution to my problem.  The basic recap of this was that a pop-up window would cause IE to crash after 3 or 4 popup windows if those items contained an UpdatePanel.  So I finally found this page:

http://sivasakki.blogspot.com/2007/07/ie-hangs-in-ajax-update-panel-pages.html

That described the problem and how to fix it.  Three easy steps:

1. Make sure the close button is not inside the update panel.

2. Do a return false with the close javascript

3. Close the ajax process.  Easiest way of doing this is to add this to your javascript code on the page:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
    //
    function stopAPOSTBACK() {
        Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager.getInstance().abortPostBack();
    }
    </script>

And then make sure that you call that before your self.close() and all of your problems should go away.  YEAH!!!!

In what was a very quiet release that no one knew was coming (from the lack of rumor sites following it - too focused on new iMac's) Safari 4 has hit the streets.  And now this release of Safari is better then before, not perfect but getting closer.  So I wanted to do a quick review and I also wanted to answer some of the critics, in particular Mr. Paul Thurrott who I've been reading his pages for years and decided it's time to start answering some of his claims.

What's New

In typical Apple fashion they are announcing some crazy number of features.  At the bottom you can see all 150 features of Safari.  First off, Apple is not claiming 150 new features, just that their browser has 150 features which is great marketigng but pretty stupid overall.  So what is new:

Tabs: Apple has moved the tabs to the top of the browser like Google has done with Chrome.  Now I have been a heavy Firefox user for years now and I have felt it was a great browser but I loved the move of the tabs to the top of the screen because I also thought it made more sense.  I found Chrome to be a little too unpolished in spots for me - it is very beta - so I've been sticking with Firefox but Apple does the tabs really well on top.  

What don't I like about them?  The tabs can be moved from one spot - makes sense - you need to be able to move windows around so you need to have somewhere to grab.  The problem is they are using the icon that has historically been the resize window icon in the Mac OSX days for years.  For a Windows only person this may not be an issue but for someone who has spent a great deal of time on OSX it might seem a little strange.  My only other complaint is something I have loved for years in Firefox (that IE7 and 8 still are missing) and that was the ability to close tabs without them be active.  Hover over a disabled tab and the close button appears.  For Safari, I'm scared I might accidently close a tab when I trying to move the window.

Thurrott and others have complained that the peak-through of Vista and 7 make this unusable on a PC.  This just doesn't make any sense or hold any water.  Maybe under extreme situations depending on what the background is but take a look at my "orange mountain" background.  Notice, the the title has an outer glow making it extremely easy to see what the tab actually is.  Even the example Thurrott gives on his webpage of this problem is easy to read.  And I would argue if this was true for Safari then it's true for every application.  How about Office 2007 Quick Launch bar?

Top Sites: Is a fancy way to display all of the recent websites.  This is an extension of what IE 7 did years ago, what Google repeated and now Apple has done the same thing.  The only difference is that they decided to put the entire thing on a curved window.  Now what is cool is you can edit these and pin them like you can documents in the office button in Office 2007, so for some users this will have a familiar feel to it.

Some have complained that this is simply eye-candy and serves no purpose.  Which I respond, sure it's eye candy, but isn't just about everything on the computer.  Can someone really tell me I need fancy 3-D cube effects when I change screens or that my Vista machine needs to have an "peak-through" title bar.  I mean, do you feel more productive now in Vista vs XP because the title bar is transparent in Vista?  I cannot think of a single time that has increased my productivity.  It gives it a cool effect but that is all.  That is the same thing for Safari.

Cover Flow and Search: Now I'll admit, I was taken back when I saw cover flow for the first time in iTunes.  I said, that is really cool, but I've never actually used it.  On my iPhone, I use it to demo to people and who them how cool the iPhone is but I've never actually used it for any meaningful purpose.  The OSX finder has it built in.  Again, wow that is fancy I can whip through a bunch of documents and useful if I'm looking for a particular document by view.  But here is Safari it actually makes more sense to me.  Now others have called it "the most recent and most egregious use of Apple's Cover Flow display."  And for them, they simply are not thinking about how to use the feature.

I like you may have hundreds or thousands of pages in your history.  And you may not for the life of you remember what the page was called but what you do remember is what the website looked like.  Typically a search through your history is a painful as you try page after page trying to find that one article you were reading before.  Cover flow search allows you to quickly find a page by look.  The search feature has also been improved to keep more information in the cache so searching through history using the old fashion "enter text" method will get you much more results that are closer to what you were looking for.

Other Features: There are a bunch of other features including address searching, phishing tools and a bunch more but the real winner is the developer tools and the web inspector.  For anyone who builds webpages for a living should take a look at this tool.  I'll go more in-depth on this a later time but know that you can enable the developer menu from the preferences and from there you can see how your web page is rendered by time, script and even turn off items from your stylesheet one element at a time for testing.  This thing might be the best kept secret of Safari 4.  More on this later

Closing Thoughts: So others might dismiss this browser because it's not Firefox or IE on Windows but I seriously suggest people take the time to check it out and see if they like it.  The tabs is what is going to turn people on/off and not because they are transparent just if they can get used to them on the top (same problem for our Chrome friends).  If you are a web developer you should have this on your computer anyways because you should be testing across all platforms but the web inspector is fantastic!  There are paid tools that don't do as much as this does.

So we have yet another failed attempt from VMware to create a windows installer and make it work.  This time it comes with VMware vCenter Update 4.  So during the installation of update 4 it attempts to upgrade the license server with absolutely no mention of this during the initial screen where you can choose which features you want to install.

During the install I continued to get a cryptic 1923 Error: Insufficient Privileges.  Now I'm the Domain Admin of the tree so I know this isn't the cause.  After playing around with it for a while I found that if you are logged into the system and attempting the install from Remote Desktop Session it would fail.  Easy enough, install from Remote Desktop with Admin switch.

I did the install of the license file from the vpx directory and upgraded license file fine.  Went back and attempted the full install again and this it started the install and again attempted to upgrade the license server and again failed and broke the service.

So last attempt went like this.  Install License Server from vpx directory and then manually upgrade vCenter, again from vpx directory and then run the full installer to upgrade Update Manager and Converter.  Update 4 requires a database schema upgrade again so make sure to have a full backup of the database.  Also the ESX vCenter agents are updated on each ESX host so don't get scared when they are all disconnected when you enter the VIC.

So I get to go to my first MDTA Meeting as the incoming president of the organization.  My first and only concern is how do we make debate more accessible to a larger number of kids in high school.  So outreach is should be our first and only concern.  So here is my list of ideas (some taken from others) on how to "save debate".  We will see.

Regional Debate Leagues

• Split the state up into 5 or 6 geographical areas and each year (or two) focus on building debate in those areas. 
• Create a regional coordinator and give that person money for that job.  Not a huge stipend but a stipend.  Has to have some sort of strings attached in regards to total size, growth of new programs, etc.
• These regional debate leagues will need to focus on the same type of debate so there will be some level of PF/Classic is best conversation will need to occur.

Coaching Incentives

•  Aimed at metro/out-state schools with speech first.  Create an incentive program to show them that PF/Classic debate is easy and great.
• Some sort of stipend for coaching.  Stay for 3 years and attend x number of tournaments you get this.
• Mentoring Programs.  Get large/established programs to buy into a one-to-one mentoring system for new programs.  Pair up the schools to share evidence resources, cases, demo debates, etc, etc.  Ideal would be for established metro school to out-state school but would definitely work metro-to-metro as well.
• More curriculum on how to teach all four types of debate.  I know people who have full LD curriculum we can get with syllabus, power points, text books and assignments.  Just need it for the other activities.
• Research options for giving new coaches CEU’s for license renewal for new coaching workshops.
• Expand and standardize the coaching materials on the MDTA web site.

Program Incentives

• Find ways to create out-state weekends.  Basically create one or two weekends where we get out-state schools to host tournaments.  No metro tournaments!  This could be a massive fundraiser for those out-state schools on these weekends.
• Encourage programs to waive fees for new programs/lower the cost of entry fees.  Can only make suggestions on this one.

Student Incentives

• Create MDTA handbooks.  Hire a few college students under the direction of some coach to write a MDTA handbook for students.  Would include evidence, case ideas/positions, etc.  Make the handbook available to any coach who is a MDTA member.  Most likely for LD and Public Forum.  Is there a need for a policy one with the advent of the open evidence stuff from camps?
• Videotaped practice rounds.  None really exist as a teaching tool.  Instead of bad TOC debate get some high-quality debates on tape/DVD for schools to use as a teaching aid.  Ideally we would produce one in LD, PF and Policy each year on the first topic as a jump-start to programs.
• Scholarships to camps

Judging Incentives

• Put together a good set of how-to-judge documents
• Contact local colleges and community colleges in regards to judging for class projects.  Many colleges have communication classes that require some sort of out-of-class participation.  Get them to judge giving the MDTA a pool a free judges on weekends to spread around.

The last two ideas don’t fit nicely into my categories so I’ll list them here.

1.       Celebrate Minnesota debate.  In an effort to keep kids local – let’s create a system that makes the kids feel good about the accomplishments.  Many people credit websites like Victory Briefs as turning kids into celebrity status and that is one of the reasons for the advent of popularity of the TOC (in particular in LD debate – maybe this is factual wrong in regards to policy).  Regardless, make use of the MDTA web site.  Start posting results to the home page about who won, etc, etc.  In the same regard, create a points system for student achievement from local tournaments resulting in some sort of either uber cool award at the end of the season or something like a MDTA round-robin invite.  I don’t want to make an alternative state tournament or anything like that but something like the Rosemount Round Robin towards the end of the season???  Throwing ideas at the wall on this one.

2.       MDTA Camp.  We want kids and coaches to get more access to information/ideas.  Why not create a camp staffed by MN coaches.  Affordable price in the metro.  Permutation of my idea of trying to keep MN kids debating in state.  Try to keep our coaches in-state for camp.  Again, this one is a bigger, grand idea that would take some serious thought.