At Graham, whole classes of North Shelby School students had their IEPs changed so they could be transferred to Graham. IEP stands for “Individual Education Plan.” “Individual” is the key word here. Changing a whole class full of individual plans to the same thing is like me winning the Powerball Lottery twelve times in a row. Possible, but statistically pretty close to impossible. The hope was by moving these North Shelby students to Graham, the Graham School could be reclassified in such a way that the failing grade category would not apply, thereby keeping the State Board of Education off CCS’s back for awhile.
But what about James Love? Doing the same thing they did at Graham would have been too obvious. So they regrouped and came up with a new idea. Build a new North Shelby School at James Love and hook the whole thing together. Superintendent Fisher says that is why he pushed the CCS Board to approving the new North Shelby School project to be built at James Love. To add an exceptional “educational opportunity” for North Shelby School students. Fisher never explains how moving North Shelby School to a failing school provides anything “exceptional” about such an educational opportunity. When the school board looked at the building plans they were told the connecting corridor doors between the new North Shelby School and the James Love School would be locked. Common sense tell us all that Fisher is blowing a smokescreen to hide the many failures within CCS.
Back to Graham School. Fisher and the CCS Board are blowing another smokescreen there. This smokescreen is called “Year Round School.” With CCS Board Chairman Phillip “Bully” Glover leading the charge of smoke blowers, the school board approved the new “Year Round Schedule” for Graham School. Scroll on back for the articles I wrote about that. Basic curiosity caused me to look at both the old schedule and the new Year Round Schedule to find out why the new schedule was supposed to be so much better than the old schedule? My question was if this new schedule was so great, why didn’t CCS go for the new schedule at all schools???
I quickly found out why. I counted the instructional days on the old Graham (and everywhere else) schedule and counted 180 days. Then I counted the instructional days on the new Year Round Schedule and counted 180 days. What?, the number of instructional days are the same??? I recounted and again got the same 180 days for both schedules. The days in school were just moved around a little. The whole batch of hoopla put out by Bully Glover and his cronies was hokum. A whole passel of made up lies with the express intent of trying to hide failing grades within the school system to fool the State Board of Education (who are easily fooled in the first place) and especially to fool the general public and voters in Cleveland County.
Listen up folks, This is a school board election year. When you hear Bully Glover bragging about the new Year Round Schedule at Graham, remind yourself to vote for someone else.
Now that the great idea to build a new North Shelby School was sneakily and very poorly rolled out by Bully Glover and his cronies, the word was that “money was no object.”
