Get on the Bus

By DPS Parent

October 6, 2006 10:29 PM | Link to this

I’ve been to the Ludlow and I’ve been to the new Kiser. Kiser is WONDERFUL!! Much nicer than Ludlow… let’s focus on the new schools that are going up. THANKS Dr. Mack, Teachers & all DPS staff.

By dayton teacher

October 6, 2006 10:44 AM | Link to this

I am one of the few teachers that think that administrators earn their money, I wouldn’t want to do it and I am happy teaching and making the money I do, but for Dr. Mack to complain to the chief union negotiator that he wasn’t getting a nickel raise was a slap in the face to the teachers. His cost of living doesn’t go up, he has his gas paid for by the board, along with a car. There is mismanagement in the Board, have you been to the new offices downtown on Ludlow, Old Prof? I know that’s water under the bridge but the only consequences for bad mismanagement are against the teachers, not the administration.

By Joe Lacey

October 5, 2006 11:35 PM | Link to this

If old prof is concerned about preventing property tax cuts to any jabrony who requests one he needs to talk to my colleagues on the Dayton City School Board who voted just this past Tuesday to abate $450,000 in property taxes for a doctor moving his two offices from Dayton to Trotwood.

By Oldprof

October 5, 2006 9:07 PM | Link to this

Shucks, Rick, if the Charters worked half as well as advertised, I’d be starting two or three myself. But they’re failures, as are the voucher programs. I like stuff that works. As for racist and sexist—well, how many of our local minority-owned businesses can go to, say, Moraine city officials and expect a warm reception and big tax privileges, e.g. corporate welfare? Uh huh…as Moraine’s mayor would say, they’re fortunate not to meet a lynch mob.

By Rick

October 5, 2006 6:17 PM | Link to this

Dayton Teacher: As to the salaries of the top administrators? My response? Thou shalt not envy. We all should get down on our knees and thank God for Superintendent Mack; he is worth more than his salary. I can assure you that Ms Littlejohn is not looking to her pocketbook; her salary is paltry. Oldprof, I agree with some of your last post, but, geez, “racist and sexist”? What a meaningless cliche on this point! And, yes, I recognize that you have a visceral hatred of competition in education, preferring going back to the failed monopolies.

By Oldprof

October 5, 2006 5:09 PM | Link to this

I think lumping Mack, McLin, and Littlejohn in the same class ignores their individual uniquenesses and weaknesses, and it aims at figureheads when factotums are sometimes more culpable. Shucks, Littlejohn earns maybe a couple thousand a year in her position, McLin’s salary is, finally, not tied to the schools, and Percy Mack gets paid less than his (inferior) peers. If you want to fix school funding, all you need to do is figure out a way to prevent municipalities from extending 75% property tax cuts to any jabrony who requests one. That practice is inept, hideously unfair (and often racist and sexist), it doesn’t attract businesses (if it did, Dayton would have a 100% occupancy rate), and it robs the public of services essential to the common good. Get everybody to pull their fair share of the weight and the schools will be solvent, as will the cities—the only losers then would be the big-bucks corporations who would prefer to finance politicians and charter-school advocates with the taxes they don’t pay.

By blah

October 5, 2006 1:55 PM | Link to this

Dr. Mack doesn’t need a pay increase. His salary is huge, plus he receives excellent benefits. I agree that DPS is extremely top-heavy. Why do the administrators get all the money and all the credit for the increase in scores? Teachers cannot afford to lose money—which is what is going to happen with a 0% salary increase and the increased cost of insurance premiums. I love how Dr. Mack came out with cost saving measures one day after the teachers voted for a 10-day strike notice. That is quite a coincidence.

By dayton teacher

October 5, 2006 9:46 AM | Link to this

Sorry if I came across as negative, but it’s hard to be positive, especially when the school district and the city have something to do with the other and I see very little positive about the situation in the city. The city administration’s policies and lack of creativity have allowed the city to deteriorate, driving out businesses and therefore tax dollars. As a result there is less property tax revenue and the schools suffer. The city’s big vision is “Tech Town” but it is still an empty lot. Ever wonder why it is so difficult to keep and attract city administrators? Lack of vision, and who’d want to work with Rhine McLIn? At the DEA meeting last night, we learned that the top 12 downtown administrators average salary is $95,000, which is a bit misleading because Dr. Mack gets over $137,000 per year in base salary and his benefits package gives him more than $145,000 on top of that. I won’t even talk about the other examples of mismanagement because it’s all in the past and we can’t go there now. But we can look at the past to plan for tomorrow and Rhine McLin, Dr. Mack, and the Ms. Littlejohn have tunnel vision and only see a tiny part of the picture, their own legacies and pocketbooks, and if you aren’t in the picture, get out of the way.

By Oldprof

October 5, 2006 9:42 AM | Link to this

Here’s a productive idea: keep blathering about yesteryear’s issues. Gosh, the school board consolidated central offices rather than repairing several crumbling, disjointed locations—we need to invest all our cash in a time machine because if we can just go back three years we can fix this stuff. Look, rather than gunnysacking issues past so we can squabble among ourselves, can we at least focus our attention on the utterly inept and illegal leadership at the state level? The Ohio Board of Education and the Charter School fools in the legislature are the ones who flout the law by refusing to fix school funding, who take millions back from Dayton on the basis of a guess, and who MANDATE a top-heavy administration via convoluted funding formulae and ridiculous “accountability” measures. We’re never going to have consistent public education in this nation unless we reform our system from the top down—and that means Governor and Legislature. As an educator and a former school bus driver, I’d urge all you good union members to defeat the legislators who are so utterly misled about education issues, like John Husted, and make it your point to discount the biased misrepresentations of organizations like the Fordham Foundation. THAT’S the issue to discuss—not whether Percy Mack has an expense account.

By daytondriver

October 4, 2006 9:28 PM | Link to this

Percy Mack and Stan Lucas can easily afford the show business methodologies they are employing while facing down dual contract talks with the teacher’s union and the bus driver’s union, whose current contract ends in January. The transportation department in Dayton Public Schools began the year by changing wholesale the routes that Local #627’s drivers had chosen at their yearly route pick the year before. This caused innumerable problems and headaches (not to mention the consistency of driver’s for students, to whom the having the same faces and role models everyday is a lot more important that bureacrats realize). The wholesale route changes, coupled with a computerized routing system that is completely inadequate - spitting out overlaps on a regular basis (an overlap is an innaccuracy on a route that says you arrive at point at at 9 a.m., and leave point A en route to point B at 8:45 a.m.), caused untold headaches for the drivers of DPS this fall, and continue to. The routes being driven are often completely impossible to drive on time, coupled with the fact that very few DPS schools actually get their kids onto to the buses on time at the end of the day, and you have a recipe for disaster - stressed out school bus drivers with a bus full of rowdy kids who do not face consitent discipline for poor behavior on the bus, and and a completely irrationally designed route. Accidents increased substantially during the fall quarter. At the same time, discipline of drivers has been being dished out at a nearly breakneck pace, bypassing all of the procedures outlined in the district’s manuals for the discipline of classified employees and causing a rash of union filed grievances. The administration knows it will lose these battles with the union as the rule of law is clearly on the union’s side, but nevertheless, DPS administration is using the bureacratic process itself as a tool of punishment (also setting itself up for an expensive, and completely unnecessary Unfair Labor Practices Suit against the DPS administration. It takes nearly two-months for a suspension without pay to reach the grievance abritration process. And although union members will get their days suspended paid because the district administration did not follow established procedure for the discipline of its union employees, good people are often being punished for small accidents (i.e. cracking a mirror on a tree branch). Additionally, the transporation department’s administration is wasting oodles of money in fighting battles it knows it will lose, only to be a sore player who doesn’t like to follow a contract. And the DPS drivers, the least respected of all DPS employees and the brunt of administrative bullying and a misunderstanding public who always blame the driver for their child getting home late, have just about had enough. Perhaps we should invite Percy Mack and Stan Lucas aboard a bus packed with 50 or more kids from Parkside Homes whose lone understanding of life seems to be cursing and fist fighting. Then lets see how they deal with this situation with an administration who is nearly non-responsive (due to the short staffing of safety officers) to situations of violence on the bus and against drivers by parents or others (drivers have been assaulted, as well as verbally threatened on numerous occasions). Then we’ll have them get up at 4 am every morning to do the same thing for a continually diminishing paycheck caused by always increasing health-care costs, and the rate of inflation. My money is that they’d be on the first plane to Los Angeles wondering why they ever spent came to Dayton to begin with.

By Joe Lacey

October 4, 2006 9:25 PM | Link to this

In 2002 the board handed over its budgeting responsibilities to the administration as part of its reform plan. The board felt that it’s involvement in budgeting would encourage “micromanaging” and that the administration would be best held accountable if the board let them do the budgeting. Since then the administration has eaten away at a sizeable reserve, a reserve that was mainly built up prior to the current administration and in the wake of the Williams superintendency. This year, dps is budgeted to use up over 20 million of that reserve. In a two hundred million dollar general fund budget, we’re spending 10 percent more than we are taking in. Forecasts had predicted that we were using our reserve long ago but the administration has not has not come up with a plan to reverse that trend. I agree with the Dayton Teacher that we are probably top heavy, but unfortunately dps’ budget has reached the point where cuts at the top will not be enough to fix the problem.

By Bryan

October 4, 2006 9:07 PM | Link to this

Your headline is misleading — the commission pay raise is just a recommendation from a compensation board. It hasn’t happened yet and may not happen.

By Rick

October 4, 2006 5:39 PM | Link to this

Boy, Dayton Teacher you are really negative. The raise for the city commission has nothing to do with the BOE. I am sure that there is a lot of fat in the headquarters and I hope the union addresses that in the bargaining. The upper staff is not getting a raising so it appears to me they are walking the walk.

By Keith

October 4, 2006 5:21 PM | Link to this

This conflict between the work of the schools and the inept, political city administration giving itself raises is typical of what’s been wrong with the city of Dayton. Pass more ordinances (scrap license, e.g.) to make it look like they’re doing something to clean up the “bad” people they nurture for votes; put up more redlight cameras instead of more policeman randomly wandering around and giving out tickets at all lights where many are being run all the time; pretend we know how to improve a city. I don’t drive downtown if I can avoid it. I emphasize with the plight of the city schools, but the City of Dayton gave the schools their legacy in the 70s. Schools represent the community in which they lie.

By dayton teacher

October 4, 2006 1:29 PM | Link to this

How can the city commission even consider giving itself and the mayor raises when it is primarily the reason that the city is in such poor economic condition. There is no vision, especially from the mayor and her cronies. The downtown is a mess, nobody wants to go there. Most businesses are moving out, like the Dayton Daily News. And yet teachers and the school district suffer because of this lack of foresight. Lack of taxes and growth has crippled the district. Mack can live with out a raise; he already has use of the district vehicle, which is nice, and a sizable expense account on a district credit account. I am sure the BOE pays for his insurance and whatever fringe benefits they can hide in his contract. They probably pick up his portion of the state teachers’ retirement system. .DPS teachers do not want to strike, we understand the fiscal crisis the district faces, but it is a slap in the face when we see the school administration so top heavy on Ludlow, sitting in their spanking new offices, and hearing about double digit raises for pathetic city officials. Most teachers would be happy with a cost of living increase to compensate for the higher insurance rates, but they don’t even want to give us that. I’d like to know what the average salary of downtown administrators’ salaries are, I am sure that it is unusually high. There is lots of waste in DPS and most of it is downtown, right down the street from city hall. Every contract, teachers give up a lot to get very little, some day maybe we will stand up to stop these losses and maybe that day has come.

By Janice Muth

October 4, 2006 1:23 PM | Link to this

I think it is a shame that when the school system shows improvement and the city does NOT-the city gets the raise and not the people who should-how typical of them…

By Eve

October 4, 2006 1:11 PM | Link to this

I wish we could clone Mack and his staff and let them take a shot at overseeing the city. They’d certainly be a step up from who’s running the show now.