Spending Way Up While Math, Reading Scores Plummet vs. State & National Average
You read that right!
Seven out of ten kids in the Methuen Public School System cannot read at grade level.
More than 73% of Methuen kids can’t do math at grade level.
Superintendent Kwong and her administration graduates 86.5% of the kids, when admittedly most of them cannot read or do math.
The absentee rate is over 40%.
And yet the amount of money being spent on the salaries of Methuen educators has steadily increased to more than 19% of above the national average.
In fact, after seven years of a woke Superintendent Brandi Kwong’s administration, absenteeism and the salaries of “educators” are the only things that have increased.
Well, that is if you don’t count a school spending budget that includes dozens of programs which literally do nothing to improve student performance and only exist to grow the programs and the grants that fund them year after year.
CHEERLEADERS AND BLINDERS
While all this failure was going on, School Committee members like Dan Shibilia, Laurie Keagan, and Mary Beth Donovan willingly turned a blind eye to the administration’s corruption and incompetence, acting more like cheerleaders for this administration instead of demanding accountability.
They are supposed to be the watchdogs of the community but instead have been nothing but lapdogs for insiders.
It doesn’t help that School Committee members like Mary Beth Donovan Grasi had her name scrubbed from the recent audit because she was actually a principal in this administration before being appointed by Neil Perry to fill a vacant seat on the school committee.
For Donovan to even try to criticize or hold anyone accountable in the schools would open the door for people to point the finger of blame at her, as she is now overseeing the very system she helped to create.
Mind you this performance audit that Mayor Beauregard concealed from the public validated every single deficiency Kristen Maxwell has been pointing out for two years.
Oddly enough those are the same deficiencies that Dan Shibilia pointed out on my podcast two years ago when he was running for school committee, but conveniently forgot about once he got elected.
REWARDING FAILURE BREEDS MORE FAILURE
Add to that the fact that this school committee gave Superintendent Kwong a glowing performance evaluation for the last two years, while academic achievement numbers (above) were taking a nosedive.
But, that’s not all.
They allowed her to lower the standards in her contract to meet the conditions of a raise.
Then gave her nearly a contract that that would pay her $680,124 over three years that actually had language in it that took away the school committee’s ability to publicly scrutinize her performance.
INSIDERS PROTECTING INSIDERS
So, it’s no wonder why the Methuen school committee can’t seem to ask relevant questions or demand accountability for poor student achievement. They are all advocating for the insiders because they ARE the insiders. It’s one big good-old-boys, insiders club where the needs of the employees matter most and the needs of the kids don’t seem to matter at all.
Is it any wonder why more and more kids are graduating every year unprepared for college or a job that requires a special skill like … reading?
SPEAK UP AND PAY THE PRICE!
For their part, there are and have been a few school board members who tried to warn the community and make a difference. But, whenever someone like Ken Willette or Kristen Maxwell started asking the right questions or tried to hold people accountable, Dan Shibilia and his woke crew of leftist brown-shirts bullied them, attacked their integrity, and did everything humanly possible to destroy their credibility so that nobody would listen to them when they finally unearthed what we now know is the incompetence and corruption of the people being paid to educate your kids.
THE ASSIGNMENT IS YOU
In fact, when School Committeewoman Kristen Maxwell told a parent on Facebook not to enroll her kids in the Methuen Schools and “go elsewhere’, Dan Shibila, and Laurie Keagan as well as members of the school administration orchestrated a letter writing campaign to the Eagle~Tribune prompting a front page story intended to ruin her reputation and credibility but moreover to shut her up.
Then school administrators ordered teachers to pass out that very same Eagle~Tribune story to the kids in their classrooms and told them to have the kids do an assignment about why Kristen Maxwell hates teachers!
I wish I was making that up!
I’m not.
What’s worse is that Maxwell’s daughter was in one of those classrooms and of course, was bullied and humiliated over it by other students as well as faculty members. And that was the point. If you step out of line in Methuen, they don’t just come after you, they come after your kids. And if you try to complain about it, they lie and claim it never happened.
THE BULLYING NEVER STOPS!
Just last month we published the story of Annie Kivlehan who complained about a reading assignment in her 13-year-old daughter’s classroom where passages about masturbation were read aloud. As a parent Annie was confused as to why she was never notified so she asked Kristen Maxwell to put it on the school committee agenda to find out why the policy wasn’t followed.
When she showed up at that school committee meeting, Dan Shibilia had his wife recruit over a dozen left-wing activists to bully her at public participation where they called her a fascist, a Nazi, and accused her of trying to “ban books.”
While Annie Kivlehan was the victim of the rabid mob, the public humiliation ritual was not really for her it was to send a message to every other parent thinking of complaining that if you speak up in the Methuen Schools it will be YOU who is the center of public attacks, humiliating accusations, and it will be you getting called a fascist Nazi and religious kook. Not to mention the retaliation against their kid in the classroom the next day.
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS – IS IT TIME FOR RECEIVERSHIP?
Methuen City Councilor Neily Soto seems to have kicked a hornet’s nests this month. She has the school administration in a total panic after merely suggesting publicly that state receivership may be the only solution to the decades of systemic failures in the Methuen schools.
While Lawrence has been in state receivership for academic failures over the last eleven years, their reading, math and academic proficiency numbers are far and away above Methuen. In fact, the lack of academic proficiency in Lawrence eleven years ago (when they first went into state receivership) was better than Methuen’s academic proficiency numbers are today.
So, this begs the question, why isn’t Methuen in state receivership and why are all the politicians and academic elites scrambling to make sure that never happens?
SYSTEMIC RACISM
While regular education and special education kids are being neglected in the Methuen Schools we also now have evidence that systemic racism in Methuen has Latino kids crammed into an English Language learners’ program (bilingual) regardless of their ability to speak, read, or write English fluently.
We also know that in order for a Latino kid to get out of these bilingual type programs and go into regular classes they have to pass a proficiency test that most kids who speak English in regular ed classes can’t pass.
That’s done by design.
This is done to keep the state money flowing. There is even an administrator tasked with actively recruiting Latino kids who live in Lawrence to enroll in the Methuen schools to inflate their numbers and make sure that funding continues to increase to cover up the spending gaps of all the money they are illegally misspending.
To hell with the fact that they are dooming these Latino kids to failure in life just to make more money.
If Lawrence was doing that, people would be going to jail. But in Methuen it’s just standard operating procedure as the mayor and most members of the school committee actually deny that it’s happening, even after an administrator admitted it at a school committee meeting.
ITS ALL ABOUT POLITICS
It’s hard to imagine the Methuen Schools getting any better under local control in the coming years as the mayor, school committee and voters have all proven for three decades that local officials either can’t or won’t fix the problem.
Brandi Kwong’s administration has run roughshod over this community with no accountability just like her mentor Judy Scannel ran roughshod over this community with no accountability and yet not only did Methuen not learn its’ lesson it seems they purposely repeated their mistakes as here we are again in the exact same place we were seven years ago.
A dishonest and corrupt school administration that exploits children to line their pockets, blames everyone but themselves, while the mayor and school committee only cares about maintaining the status quo.
Can we really believe that the school committee and this mayor are going to pick someone different now that Kwong has abandoned ship and announced her resignation at the end of the school year and gone on “medical leave” to get a free paycheck without working between now and June?
Does anyone really believe that her replacement will be focused on improving reading, math, science and other academic subjects instead of pushing the woke mind virus that got Methuen to where it is today?
Councilor Neily Soto doesn’t seem to think so.
Neither do I! ◊