Thursday, September 19, 2013

New Day, Same Flip Flopping

If you follow my blog you won't be surprised to learn that Grisamore has once again flipped flopped.  He said that he might vote against the veto override to protect Missouri's most vulnerable citizens.  He was absent on the day that they voted on the original bill.  He voted in favor of the veto override.

It brings back memories of him voting present on an important bill for abused women.  He also emailed legislators and said that he would resign if his bill didn't pass.  He didn't resign.  Do we see a pattern here.

Grisamore Leaning Against Override | Missouri ScoutMissouri Scout

Grisamore Leaning Against Override | Missouri ScoutMissouri Scout

Read the whole article.  You will see how he flip flops and how he uses those with disabilities to further his own career.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Will Grisamore become second Republican to oppose the tax override? - KansasCity.com

Will Grisamore become second Republican to oppose the tax override? - KansasCity.com

FACT:  He has once again lied to make himself look good.

Fact: House Republicans in Jeff City need all 109 of their members to band together to override Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto of that big tax cut.
Fact: A Lee’s Summit Republican, veteran House member Jeff Grisamore, is hinting that he might abandon that effort.
He told the Missouri Scout that he’s “leaning against the override.”
Grisamore would join another Republican, northeast Missouri Rep. Nate Walker, in opposing the override.
Grisamore added that he has “grave concerns” about the tax cut’s potential impact on one of his key concerns — taking care of vulnerable Missourians.
The odds of an override have been fading for several days. This week, House Speaker Tim Jones said the override may not even come up for a vote unless he has commitments from every GOPer in the House.
Of course, an override could still occur if a few Democrats bolt from Nixon and support the move. But that’s not considered likely, given that Nixon is a fellow Democrat.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Petition | Create a law that protects children from bullying by teachers | Change.org

Petition | Create a law that protects children from bullying by teachers | Change.org

Allen Unveils Legislation to Combat Bullying of Students by School Staff | SenateNJ.com

Allen Unveils Legislation to Combat Bullying of Students by School Staff | SenateNJ.com

In response to several recent incidents of physical and emotional intimidation of students at the hands of school staff both in New Jersey and across the country, Senator Diane Allen (R- Burlington) is proposing legislation that will speed the disciplinary process for teachers and other school officials found to have engaged in bullying, intimidation, or harassment of students.
Senator Diane Allen (R-7) and Mr. Stuart Chaifetz, the father of a child bullied by a teacher, at a State House press conference on May 17, 2012 to announce legislation that would make it easier to dismiss teachers who bully students.
“My bill extends New Jersey’s Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights Act to bullying that is conducted by teachers and other school employees,” said Allen. “Thankfully, these incidents are rare. However, recent events in Cherry Hill and Camden illustrate that current law does not provide for adequately swift or severe punishment of school staff who engage in this behavior.”
Allen’s legislation prescribes that reported incidents of bullying by teachers must be investigated by the school’s anti-bullying specialist within four to ten days. If evidence is found to substantiate the accusation, the school’s superintendent must immediately report said finding to the district’s board of education, and tenure charges must be filed by the board against the employee within three days. In the case of a non-tenured employee, substantiated misconduct would result in immediate termination and revocation of his or her state certifications.
Tenured employees would enter into an arbitration process with the Commissioner of Education, to last no longer than 30 days, which also could result in the revocation of state certification(s).
The law also requires disciplinary action be taken against employees who fail to report knowledge of misconduct by their colleagues.
“Everyone has a right to due process, but that process must be timely in fairness to both the student and the school employee,” Allen stated. “Anyone who is found to have engaged in bullying, intimidation, or harassment of a student must be removed from the classroom quickly and never be permitted to work in a school again. This legislation would also ensure that bystanders who learn of bad behavior but do nothing to stop it are held accountable. New Jersey has been a leader in protecting children against bullying and it’s harmful effects, and we must make sure that we extend those protections not only to children bullied by their peers, but also by the professionals who are charged with their education.”
The following is a video produced by Stuart Chaifetz that includes audio recorded within his son’s classroom:

Dnj - N.J. legislation aims to stop teachers who bully students

Dnj - N.J. legislation aims to stop teachers who bully students

N.J. legislation aims to stop teachers who bully students
Posted 5/18/2012 9:30 AM ETE-mail | Save | Print
TRENTON, N.J. — Secret school recordings posted on YouTube by a father, with an adult being caught calling the man's 10-year-old autistic son "a bastard," have helped spur an effort to speed the disciplinary process for teachers and other school employees who bully students.
New Jersey GOP Sen. Diane Allen introduced a bill Thursday to expand anti-bullying laws to cover incidents where teachers are the aggressors.
Allen said she was motivated by several recent publicized teacher bullying incidents, including the recordings made by Stuart Chaifetz, who documented what he says was torment of his son for at least six months by public-school special education teachers and support staff at the Horace Mann Elementary School.
"Schools are supposed to be fertile ground where our children can grow into healthy individuals. In those few places where staff members, for whatever reason, treat them with disrespect and disdain, like they did to my son, they can really destroy lives," Chaifetz said at a State House news conference hosted by Allen.
Allen was also joined by 15-year-old Julio Artuz and his parents. Artuz last fall made a cellphone video of an incident where he said was bullied by a Bankbridge Regional School teacher.
Artuz said of the incident, "I really have a hard time talking about it, but I just want this to stop. I don't want anybody else to feel the way it made me feel, the lowest I'd ever felt in my whole life."
Allen said her legislation would speed the disciplinary process for teachers and other school officials, including those with tenure, found to have engaged in bullying, intimidation, or harassment of students.
Under the proposal, reported incidents of bullying by teachers must be investigated by the school's anti-bullying specialist within 10 days.
New Jersey Education Association spokesman Steve Wollmer said Allen's proposal eliminates due process rights, making it unlikely to survive a legal challenge, "because it would allow no more appeals to a neutral third party," he said.
"We all agree bullying is unacceptable by a student or a school employee or anybody and should be dealt with immediately," Wollmer said.
He said the union has proposed that the state could provide better flexibility in disciplinary actions by borrowing from practices in Massachusetts, where action on dismissing a teacher is in the hands of outside employment arbitrators.
"Everyone has a right to due process, but that process must be timely in fairness to both the student and the school employee," Allen said.
Artuz was allegedly bullied by teacher Steve Roth. Administrative Law Judge Jeff Masin said in a new ruling Roth had engaged in "conduct that was intimidating and bullying" but said that removal of his tenure wasn't warranted, ordering instead that Roth should forfeit 120 days pay.
The local school board responded to the ruling Thursday, releasing a statement that it "respectfully disagrees with the recommendation of Judge Masin to permit Steven Roth to retain his job after serving a suspension for the remainder of the school year."
The school board will file exceptions to the judge's decision with state Education Department in a bid to terminate Roth's employment.

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Missouri House fails to override veto of tax cut legislation : News

Missouri House fails to override veto of tax cut legislation : News

JEFFERSON CITY  •  The Missouri House has failed to override Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto of legislation that would cut state income taxes for the first time in nearly a century.
The vote, which happened after more than an hour and a half of debate near the start of the state Legislature’s annual veto session today, signaled a key victory for Nixon, who has spent the summer advocating against the tax legislation, which he often characterized as poorly drafted.
“This (legislation) is bad tax policy and bad public policy,” state Rep. Jill Schupp, a Creve Coeur Democrat who spoke out against the override attempt.
Republicans went into today’s vote with a very slim chance of overruling Nixon.
Override attempts need 109 votes in the House, where Republicans hold exactly 109 seats. Several GOP members had already spoken out against the bill, which Nixon argued would raise the prices of college textbooks and prescription drugs while leading to a drop in state funding for education and other services. The final House vote was 94-67. Without two-thirds of the chamber in favor, no vote will be taken in the Senate.
Advocates in favor of the tax legislation filled the House chamber for much of today’s debate.
“We want to help the people of Missouri grow,” said Rep. TJ Berry, a Republican from Kearney who sponsored the bill.
Lawmakers still have an opportunity to override several of Nixon’s other vetoes from this year’s legislative session.
Early on, both chambers managed to override a partial veto of a budget bill, freeing up $1 million for the reconstruction of a main building at the Pike-Lincoln Technical Center that was destroyed in a 2011 fire.
In addition to the unsuccessful override attempt, a key priority for the GOP-controlled legislature is a vetoed bill that would nullify some federal gun laws.
About 100 gun rights advocates rallied at the Capitol this morning in favor of the gun legislation, while the national Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence in a news release said it was prepared to file a federal lawsuit against the state if the override attempt is successful.
Lawmakers are continuing to work through bills and are expected to finish up later this evening or early Thursday.
Any successful override will need at least 109 votes in the House and 23 votes in the Senate, and they must start in the bill’s originating chamber. Republicans hold 109 seats in the House and 24 seats in the Senate.
Other legislation that could come up today include bills that would exempt the Doe Run Company from punitive damages in civil lawsuits in some cases and otherwise cap punitive damages at $2.5 million per suit and a bill that would bar state and local governments from attempting to implement policies related to the United Nation’s non-binding 1992 Agenda 21 resolution on sustainable development.
The GOP-controlled House led off its action today with the election of Rep. Denny Hoskins, R-Warrensburg, to the speaker pro tem post – the second highest rank in the chamber.
Hoskins replaces former state Rep. Jason Smith, who was elected to Missouri’s 8th District Congressional seat earlier this year.

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Gov. Nixon fights to sustain veto of sex offender bill : News : ConnectMidMissouri.com

Gov. Nixon fights to sustain veto of sex offender bill : News : ConnectMidMissouri.com

ST. LOUIS -- Gov. Jay Nixon joined local law enforcement and victims' advocates Wednesday to discuss the importance of sustaining his veto of House Bill 301, which would remove hundreds of sex offenders from public sex offender websites.
Nixon vetoed the bill in July, citing concerns it would undermine public safety and victims' rights by weakening state laws regarding sexual offenders.
"This legislation would also deny local prosecutors and victims of these horrible crimes the opportunity to be heard before an offender is removed," said Nixon. "The leadership of the House may be ready to help violent sex offenders hide from the public and law enforcement, but their victims, and the millions of Missourians who use these websites to help keep their families safe, are not."
If the Governor’s veto is overridden, House Bill 301 would remove an estimated 870 individuals who committed a sex offense as a juvenile (under 18) from the state and county sexual offender notification websites, and prevent any such individual from being placed on these websites in the future.  
This legislation would remove these juvenile sex offenders from the public notification websites regardless of the sexual offense for which they were convicted, including forcible rape, forcible sodomy, and child molestation.
“I do not believe that supporters of this legislation meant for its ramifications to go this far. That’s why after a very thorough and careful review of this legislation in its entirety, I communicated my concerns in my veto message to the legislature last month,” Gov. Nixon said.

School performance reviews mislead : Stltoday

School performance reviews mislead : Stltoday

The annual review of school district performance by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education claims to show how well each school district in the state performs. It doesn’t. All it really shows is the relative wealth of the population in each school district.
Compare the performance scores with rates of participation in the federal school lunch program. The correlation between poverty and low performance scores is striking. I made such a comparison for 52 local education agencies in metropolitan St. Louis that operate high schools. I excluded education agencies that did not offer high school from the comparison, because the challenges of high school and elementary school are so very different as to make any comparison between the two meaningless. I used participation in the free and reduced price lunch program as the measure of poverty, even though it does not register differences in the intensity of poverty, for example, or distinguish between someone new to the program and someone who has always lived in poverty. The degree to which different levels of participation in the subsidized lunch program tracked accreditation levels, however, was stunning.
DESE ranks districts into four levels of accreditation.
In only four of the 20 districts whose scores would earn them the “accredited with distinction” label were more than one-third of the students eligible for free or reduced price lunch, and none of those enrolled more than 3,000 students.
In none of the 27 districts that would earn accreditation without distinction were fewer than one-third of the students eligible for free or reduced price lunch (and in only two were fewer than 40 percent of the students eligible for subsidized lunches). In only one of those 27 districts were more than 60 percent of the students eligible for the federal lunch program, and that district had the lowest performance score of the group.
In the three districts that would fall into the “provisionally accredited” category, 62 percent, 72 percent, and 90 percent of students participated in the subsidized lunch program.
In all four of the districts that would be unaccredited (five if one includes the Construction Career Center), the proportion of students eligible for subsidized lunches exceeds 85 percent.
One reason that DESE’s performance review tells us more about family wealth than school performance is that it measures things on which families have great influence. Fully one-half of the possible 140 points on the accreditation scale are based on student scores on tests purchased from textbook publishers. Another 20 points are based on the results for students taking college entrance exams. The other 50 points are based on graduation rates (30 points), attendance (10 points), and the proportion of graduates placed in college or a job within six months (10 points).
The problem with the tests is that they measure so much more than just academic achievement. They measure a complex combination of traits, which includes achievement, but also includes culture and motivation. DESE and test publishers ignore that complexity by assuming a sameness to families and people that doesn’t exist.
One culture? Not quite. A question that assumes familiarity with golf, for example, introduces a cultural bias against students who grow up in families and neighborhoods unfamiliar with the game.
Everyone is equally motivated? Not so. Psychologists have found that some individuals are internally motivated to always try to do their best on tests, even it they can’t perceive of any benefit from doing so, but others aren’t. It is possible that in life children from more privileged backgrounds more often learn that effort brings rewards, and children from disadvantaged circumstances more often learn that it doesn’t.
Recent research also shows that poverty affects one’s performance on tests. When people living in poverty are most secure, they perform as well on cognitive tests as people who are well-to-do. But, when they are most financially stressed, they perform worse on the same tests.
In science, one has to isolate a variable to measure its response. Missouri’s achievement tests, in failing to isolate academic achievement from cultural influences, motivation, and poverty, fail to really tell us anything about academic achievement or school performance.
Peter Downs is a former member of the St. Louis city school board and author of “Schoolhouse Shams: Myths and Misinformation in School Reform,” from Rowman & Littlefield Education.