Community Matters

With channel 6 ABC news cameras rolling and with a standing room crowd, Tredyffrin-Eastttown School Board held its monthly school board meeting last night. Passion, commitment, support, devotion … adjectives that describe the steady stream of District students who spoke on behalf of their teachers at last night’s school board meeting.  Waiting for hours for [...]

Filed under: Tredyffrin Township | 61 Comments »

Opening a door that most school districts would prefer to keep closed. Teacher contract negotiations have traditionally been cloaked in secrecy. In my perfect world of transparency, school districts would open the teacher contract talks to the public. Letting the sunlight shine on the negotiations, parents, taxpayers and employees would benefit by seeing the open [...]

Filed under: Tredyffrin Township | 36 Comments »

Monday night was the Board of Supervisors Meeting and TESD Budget meeting.  I attended the BOS meeting and will offer a few thoughts in a later post.  Ray Clarke attended the school district meeting and offered his opinion on the evening which I provide below. In reviewing Ray’s notes, I was pleased that it appears [...]

Filed under: Tredyffrin Township | 96 Comments »

Over the next few years, Tredyffrin Easttown School District will be faced with a $16 million budget shortfall; but the pension crisis is not the only contributing factor. For many years, a growing economy propelled increases in stock prices, enhancing the coverage of many pension plans, public and private. In the old days, the nature [...]

Filed under: Tredyffrin Township | 16 Comments »

The contract negotiations between the T/E School District and the T/E Teachers Union (TEEA) started in early January.  What is the saying about the ‘calm before the storm’ – I had been thinking that the teacher contract negotiations must have been going well as everything was quiet. In a Community Matters post, Expert Negotiators Named [...]

Filed under: Tredyffrin Township | 50 Comments »

Based on attending the TESD Finance Committee meeting, it looks like the custodial outsourcing in the school district is ‘off the table of consideration’ for another year.  If you recall, the most significant cost-saving measure to the District remaining from last year’s budget was ‘outsourcing of custodial services’ with a savings listed as $950K.  After [...]

Filed under: Tredyffrin Township | 19 Comments »

I attended the T/E Finance Committee meeting last night as did Ray and Carol Clarke.  However, other than one other resident, the 8-10 T/E school district teachers in the audience outnumbered us.  Presumably, as the District begins the teacher contract negotiation process, there will be a continued presence at school district meetings from the teachers [...]

Filed under: Tredyffrin Township | 8 Comments »

There was a T/E Finance Committee meeting last night and although the entire school board was present, the Finance Committee is Betsy Fadem (Chair), Kevin Buraks, Jim Bruce and Rich Brake. There were several interesting discussion items for me – Ray Clarke’s notes follow mine.  There was much discussion about the school district’s decreasing real [...]

Filed under: Tredyffrin Township | 24 Comments »

Today’s post includes notes from the Board of Supervisors and T/E School Board meetings held last night. Although a prior commitment prevented me from attending last night’s BOS and school board meeting, Ray and Carol Clarke attended the meetings and graciously forwarded their notes.  I attended a TMACC (Transportation Management Association of Chester County) meeting [...]

Filed under: Tredyffrin Township | 1 Comment »

Monday night is a case where I would like to be in two places at once . . . Tredyffrin’s township finances and the proposed 2012 budget is on the Board of Supervisors agenda at 7:30 PM while the T/E school directors will hold a Finance Committee meeting at 6:30 PM followed by a special [...]

Filed under: Earned Income Tax, Easttown Township, Tredyffrin Easttown School District, Tredyffrin Township | 36 Comments »