Florence 1 grows more agreeable to Apple

It once was verboten to have an open-book test in public school classrooms; we closed our books and opened our minds at test-time.

And, once, students could only use pencils, so as to keep their essays neat and free of ink spots and strike-throughs.

Likewise, there was a time when one couldn't use a calculator during testing, especially for standardized tests like the SAT. One had to know his formulas by heart, and when to use which one.

All that has changed now, and it appears that more change is coming to Florence District 1.

Come fall Florence County School District 1 students could start bringing their iPads and iPods to school for classroom use with principal approval.

We've moved, in two generations, from slide rules, protractors and compasses to iPads and iPods. Is this progress?

At a sparsely attended public input hearing, the student code committee voted to allow the devices in schools if they are turned off and out of sight except when they’re being used for instruction.

The changes still need approval from the full school board, which will pick up the issue at its April 19 meeting.

The change mirrors last year’s revision of the cell phone policy, which allows students to bring them to school as long as they’re not turned on during school hours. District officials say the new rule worked much better than a flat ban.

School board member Willard Dorriety, Jr. said that he thinks cell phones have no place in school. They used to be the most common offense, but confiscating them and dealing with the complaints became more of a distraction than the devices themselves.

How many generations of children were able to make it through 13 years of school before such things as cellular telephones were invented? What has happened to us, that we must insist that Junior carry his cellphone with him to class? What is so important that we must be able to reach him instantly, rather than calling the school and waiting two minutes for him to get to the office?

He said he thinks the same idea should work well with iPads and that they will still be taken away if they’re not being used for educational purposes.

Many of the district’s schools have already purchased their own sets of iPads loaded with educational applications, but if the rule change goes through, students could use their personal touch-screen tablets to read assigned books.

I hardly know what to say. In the old days, we had to work hard to make a teacher think we were really reading chemistry, when we had a paperback open inside the chemistry text. Now, a student only has to tap the screen on the iPad, and she's back from checking her Facebook page to poring over the War of 1812.

It was in 1812, right?

Congratulations to Florence District 1 students

Here's the sort of team I'd love to see lined up across the podium of the State House, draped with medals and receiving the adulation of an appreciative legislative body.

Perhaps in the next life.

Still, it's worth celebrating that the students of Florence School District 1 are given credit for their achievements in the local newspaper.

Teams from five Florence School District One schools met Saturday morning to test their literay wits in Battle of the Books 2012, a quiz show-style tournament at Moore Intermediate School.

Teams from the host school, along with Briggs, Dewey Carter, North Vista and Royall E lementary S chools, competed against each other in a double-elimination setting. After nearly two hours of question-and-answer rounds in the school’s auditorium, the teams from Royall and Briggs faced off in the championship match. Royall took the trophy home for the third year in a row.

Royall coach Susan Jenkins said that the team was excited to have competed.

“We are thrilled to death to take the trophy home to Royall again this year,” Jenkins said. “I feel like all the teams did great and represented their schools well. Our students worked very hard.”

Briggs coach Amy Rhodes was also impressed with her school’s performance.

“I feel like we did a wonderful job,” Rhodes said. “The kids prepared every afternoon for two months for this. They were just ready to compete and I’m proud of them.”

Susan Lane, a media specialist at Moore and the coordinator for this year’s Battle of the Books, said the goal of the event is to develop a fun way of engaging students with books.

“It’s all about reading,” Lane said. “It’s to get [the students] reading the newest, quality literature.”

Each match of the tournament was composed of two different rounds of 10 questions each. In the group discussion rounds, questions were asked to each five-player team in alternating fashion and teammates could confer on the answer. The first player for either team to “buzz in” was given the chance to answer the question during toss-up rounds. Students had only 15 seconds to answer a question.

The questions were about plot lines and character descriptions from 20 books that the students read before the event. Each book was chosen from a list of South Carolina Book Award winners or nominees.

Congratulations to the students who participated in this program. They should count themselves lucky to have access to such programs and to great public school educators in this district.

Florence 1 votes against vouchers, bus privatization

They're only resolutions that express the school board's consensus views on issues being considered at the State House, but the two statements adopted last night by the Florence 1 school board ought to be considered by the rest of our elected school boards.

Florence School District 1 trustees Thursday night at their monthly meeting took a stand against legislation that would provide tax breaks for students who attend non-public schools and school bus privatization.

Members approved resolutions in February and Thursday night voted to send the written objections to the Florence County Legislative Delegation.

House bill 4894 would provide deductions for homeschooled children, children attending private schools and for public school students who attend a school outside their district beginning in the 2013.

The bill would also allow tax credits for contributors to qualified, non-profit scholarship funding organizations for low-income students and exceptional students.

This bill would allow parents to claim the deduction in 2012-2013. The estimated fiscal impact to the general fund, according to the House Ways and Means Committee, would be a reduction of $36.7 million in fiscal 2012-2013. The bill, which has more than 60 sponsors, passed through the committee on Thursday.

“I have a sense of alarm because of the economics,” Porter Stewart, board chairman, said. ‘There’s been a great diminution of state revenues and has greatly impacted the public sector.”

The board also passed a resolution against the South Carolina School Bus Privatization Act of 2012.

House bill 4610 would move pupil transportation services from the state Department of Education to the districts. School districts would have the choice of taking on those responsibilities, forming a consortium with other districts or contracting the transportation services.

The resolution board members passed said it will require $6.2 million to fund the daily operations for the bus shop and transportation of Florence District One, should it assume responsibilities. The board also acknowledged that national and state studies on the claimed economic benefits of privatization are still unproven.

The resolutions serve as a way to show Columbia where the district stands, something Stewart said is necessary.

“It’s our duty to voice concern over issues that may negatively impact the best interests of our students,” Stewart said.

Florence 1 opposes privatization, vouchers, 1989 funding

The Florence District 1 Board of Trustees voted unanimously last night to oppose three proposed bills that, if adopted by the legislature, would devastate the small district and those like it.

The bills in question happen to be ones favored by Governor Nikki Haley, Superintendent Mick Zais, and the Florence legislative delegation. One privatizes the state's school bus transportation function, passing responsibility to local school districts to maintain or to privatize. The other two are competing voucher and tuition tax credit bills, taking public dollars away from public schools to pay for private education.

The school bus bill raised the board's collective temperature.

A major stipulation of the bill would require the district to replace buses older than 15 years. Rabon said if the bill were to pass it initially would cost the district $10 million to replace all buses, a number chairman Porter Stewart calls outrageous.

“We worked hard at this table to be financially responsible,” Stewart said, audibly agitated in comparison to his normal calm demeanor. “We’ve done what we’re supposed to do and now we’re getting our pockets picked — yeah, I’m upset.”

The bill has support from area legislators Rep. Chris Crawford and Rep. Phillip Lowe, State Superintendent of Education Mick Zais and Gov. Nikki Haley, who mentioned it in her State of the State address in January.

“We’re not interested in mandating bus choices down on our locals — what we are interested in is giving them options and getting the State of South Carolina out of the school bus maintenance business,” she said.

FSD1 superintendent Dr. Allie E. Brooks Jr. says the bill would be devastating not only to his fiscally sound district, but those smaller ones that are squeaking by.

“The bill that’s introduced to shift bus operations from state to school districts is going to adversely impact the school districts,” Brooks said. “Depending on the financial status of the district, it can run anywhere from severe to devastating.”

After discussion, Stewart passed a resolution, with full board support, to oppose the bill. Board member Willard Dorriety Jr., a stated proponent of privatization in general, said the bill doesn’t make sense.

“Privatization works if it does two things: improves services and cut costs,” Dorriety said. “But this means we’ve got to pick up the costs, in a way, to save their (the state’s) budget.”

The money, Stewart said, would have to come from the district’s building fund.

See, that's the trouble with supporting right-wing notions like privatization; it comes around to bite you in the end.

So long as it's something else's ox that's getting gored, well, life's unfair. But when it's your own ox getting the worst end of the deal, something must be done to avenge the injustice.

And the other two bills that Florence trustees opposed?

Other bills on which the board passed a resolution of opposition were House bills 4547, regarding tuition tax deductions, and bill 4576, regarding a tuition tax credit.

And why do Florence trustees oppose them?

Both bills would severely cut general fund revenues.

Again, it comes back to the man in the middle. Families in Florence expect their government to provide services to them, and the government in Columbia is so far away. So it's the Florence board of trustees -- the man in the middle -- who bears the brunt of local anxiety when services get cut. And right now, thanks to the Haley-Zais cabal leading the government, the trustees are getting bled dry of options and resources.

Passing a tuition tax credit bill, as the Florence trustees aptly observed, will drain dollars from the general fund that would otherwise go to public education. It's a lawyer's trick to get around the Constitutional prohibition against supporting private schools with public money, but the effect is exactly the same: Public schools get less money.

In terms of the 2012-13 budget year, Rabon says the state economic outlook is stable.

“The last three years have been awful. We’ve lost about $10 million in revenue,” Rabon said. “I think 2012-2013 will be stable, we didn’t receive an official budget cut this year or last year.”

Although, one major area concern for Rabon and other district officials is the base student cost (BSC) staying at the same rate as last year, or possibly lower, according to Haley’s executive budget.

The BSC for the current year is $1,880 — which is what it was in 1989. The current BSC should be at $2,790, a number that Rabon and others know is not attainable, especially since Zais asked for the same BSC in the 2012-13 budget, a move he defended on Wednesday.

“We asked for the same budget as last year, as a minimum,” Zais said to the state board. “And we had that in bold and underlined.”

Maintaining that level will cost an additional $15 million, Zais said, because of student population increases.

“We’re presently around the 1989 level and our expenditures are at the 2012 level. We need to get the BSC around $2,100 to get it at a level it should be,” Rabon said.

Brooks echoes Rabon’s feelings on the BSC, saying it’s hard to be progressive with such outdated funding.

“The sad thing about it is the state is responsible for educating its citizenry,” Brooks said. “Those of us in public education are not getting encouraging signs for advancing the opportunities for our students in the 21st century.”

Did you catch that?

Zais asked the legislature this year to fund a base student cost equal to the base student cost of 1989.

Remember 1989? It was the year George Herbert Walker Bush and Dan Quayle took office. The Exxon Valdez ran aground and dumped oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound. Rain Man won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Protestors rose up in Tiananmen Square until the Chinese government massacred them.

It was the year Seinfeld and the first full-length episode of The Simpsons premiered on television. Nintendo released its Game Boy. Lyle and Erik Menendez killed their parents in Los Angeles. Pete Rose was banned from baseball. Hurricane Hugo attacked Charleston and cut a swath of devastation across South Carolina. Germans tore down the Berlin Wall.

Daniel Radcliffe and Taylor Swift were born that year. Lucille Ball, Bette Davis and Sir Laurence Olivier died that year, and serial killer Ted Bundy was executed. The Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize.

And that year, the base student cost in South Carolina was $1,880 -- the same base student cost that our current superintendent of education says will be sufficient this year.

Not only did Zais say that to lawmakers, he bolded and underlined it in his budget request.

The Florence trustees' anger is understandable. They want the best for Florence's public schoolchildren, and their state superintendent of education doesn't.

Brooks to state: Stop posturing, do what's best for children

A note published by the Florence Morning News on Sunday discussed the issue of school consolidation, but it contained a nugget of wisdom voiced almost in frustration by Florence 1 Superintendent Allie Brooks.

Brooks told the Morning News that "consolidating districts to save money should be studied before action is taken because variables change from community to community."

“We have to be concerned about the quality of what we’re doing,” Brooks said. “We might save money in one area, administratively, particularly, but you might be a penny wise and a dollar foolish.”

So true. But Brooks offered his interviewer the most appropriate frame for this discussion, if this or any other questioner wants to take it:

Brooks said, in the end, it’s up to the state to fulfill its responsibility to educate its children. While the legislature appropriated some additional money to education near the end of this year’s budget deliberations, state allocations are down and don’t match the recommended levels produced by the funding formula in the 1977 Education Finance Act.

“If we’re going to support public education, then we’ve got to put the money where our mouths are,” Brooks said. “We’re going to have to stop all the posturing and look at the community and do what’s best for every child.”

That's precisely what has never happened on a consistent basis -- ever in the 34-year history of the Education Finance Act, ever in the 200-year history of South Carolina's pledge to provide for public education (dating to the Free Schools Act of 1811), ever in the 341-year history of the state.

It always comes back to money. Priorities cost money, and lawmakers don't want to spend it. This is how we devolve into conversations about school consolidation, like this one:

School consolidation is an old and familiar issue in South Carolina, where districts have traditionally been built around communities and the idea of a county with a dozen or more separate school districts was for years considered neither unusual nor untoward.

But the number of public school districts in the state is falling — the total is now less than two per county — and recessionary pressure on budgets has given districts still more reason to consider it. This is especially true in the impoverished Pee Dee, where during the past two years districts in Dillon, Marion and Sumter counties have all consolidated, and where a debate is raging over the fate of Florence School District 4. The Timmonsville-based district is on the verge of bankruptcy and many officials, both in and out of the district, see its only real salvation coming from a merger with a larger district, most likely the adjacent Florence School District 1.

While there is more to consolidation than just saving money, and more to saving money than just administrative costs, one clear advantage to combining small districts is the savings produced by elimination of the highest administrative jobs. Where multiple, small districts remain in place, administrators continue to get paid for duplicate positions in the same county to serve their districts despite the cost to taxpayers.

A Morning News study of district salaries showcases the problem. (See our database at http://www2.scnow.com/news/database/educator-salaries/.) While top administrators in larger districts do get paid more than the superintendents and other top brass in small ones, the small districts’ salaries are still significant; most are six figures or more.

An example of the problem can be seen in a comparison of Florence and Horry counties. The superintendents of the five Florence County school districts make more than $500,000 combined in a year, but Cynthia Elsberry, Horry County’s only school district superintendent, makes $205,000 per year. Yet, Elsberry oversees nearly twice as many children as her Florence counterparts combined. There’s no call for combining all of Florence’s districts into one, but such a move would clearly save money.

And the superintendent’s job is not only service that’s duplicated. A 2009 study by Clemson University found that the cost per pupil for administration is generally higher in small districts than in larger ones. But, as noted, there’s more to consolidation than just dollars and cents.
...
Maybe, but Dr. Steve Quick, the recently appointed interim superintendent for Florence 4, said consolidation can do more than save money. Quick should know. He worked in Marlboro County when that county combined districts and served as a consultant to Marion County when it was pondering its recent merger.

Florence 4 has had its share of financial troubles of late. The district is working through a negative general fund balance of $1,464,702 for its school district which has somewhere between 700 and 800 students (acutal numbers fluctuate dramatically).

Quick said consolidation can provide better education and services to its students. Larger districts can offer a wider variety of coures and resources for its students. And, as a veteran of several consolidations, he knows it can be done.

“It’s not that it can’t happen,” he said. “It’s, does the community, and do the administrators and does the legislative delegation have the will to do it?”

Brooks said consolidating districts to save money is a decision that must consider community ties.

“You take any school district in this state or in this nation where schools have been established for a historical period of time: the loss of that identity isn’t something you’re going to forget,” Brooks said.

Dillon School District 2 Superintendent Ray Rogers said identity is important. He said all wasn’t lost when the Dillon County Board of Education recently worked to merge his Dillon-based district with Lake View-based Dillon 2, reducing the number of Dillon County school districts from three to two (Dillon 3 is based in Latta).

“The key thing is, everybody down there had to decide that there had to be an alternative to what was going on,” Rogers said. “When you have a problem, you’ve got to address the problem.”

That has been what’s driven consolidation of late in this the Pee Dee. Districts faced with some dilemma — most often financial — turned to consolidation only when everything else had been tried or considered.

Quick said there’s another option to consolidating districts: consolidating services, programs and funding could help pull troubled districts out of hard times, but it could come with drawbacks.

“Usually the big issue is everybody thinks consolidation means someone’s going to lose a job, and in the economic situation we’re in right now, no one wants to lose a job,” he said.

Today, the Morning News editors issued an editorial in favor of consolidation as a "good and necessary thing."

A long, slow march towards fewer districts is underway. Up to the end of the 19th century, South Carolina had 1,700 public districts, limited by state law to seven square miles, presumably because of transportation concerns. By the 1950s, and with the advent of the school bus, the number of districts had been reduced to 120. Today there are between 82-85 districts in the state (the range is due to problems counting districts in transition, such as those in Marion, Dillon and Sumter counties), and a trend towards lower numbers still is clearly underway. If and when the three Pee Dee counties mentioned above complete their transition to single-district entities, 32 of the state’s 46 counties will operate as unified school districts.

There’s no doubt that consolidating very small districts saves money. A 2009 study by the Jim Self Center on the Future showed that all eight of the state’s school districts with less than 1,000 students (Marion 7, Florence 4 are among them) had per pupil administrative costs that were double, triple or more the state average of $234 per pupil. This is common sense, of course. A recent Morning News story by education reporter Elizabeth Lamb showed that the burden of high, upper administration salaries alone can place a real drag on small district finance.

District consolidation remains a controversial topic, and most district “marriages” remain shotgun affairs where one or both parties are brought to the altar against their will. In recent years, as the economy sank into the Great Recession, failing finances often played the “shotgun” role. Districts consolidated because they had no other choice. The Timmonsville (Florence 4) district likely faces a similar choice in the near future — providing it can find a willing (or slightly coerced) partner.

It is abundantly clear, from high altitude, and maybe from a low one, that consolidation is a good and necessary thing (to use still more wedding phraseology) for small districts. Fiscal efficiency is lacking in districts with less enrollment than a good-sized middle school. One national study puts the efficiency “milepost” at 1,500 students. Below that threshold, districts are generally inefficient. Above 1,500, little additional saving is seen. Students may not be as well-served in microdistricts either. Special classes — and sometimes, even not-so-special ones — may not be available in small districts. Hiring a teacher just for French, Japanese or German, or for higher math and science, is beyond the scope of some small districts. Some extracurricular activities, which are central to the scholastic experience, may be unavailable as well.

And yet, resistance remains. Larger districts, like Florence 1, are often unwilling to take on struggling partners. Smaller districts are wary of being swallowed up inside a heartless educational colossus. They do not want to give up hoary tradition, community spirit, or hard-earned autonomy.

And bigger is not always better. The same study that suggested 1,500 as a minimum for efficiency, also noted that large districts could be out of touch with students’ particular needs. Breaking up some of the really big districts might be a good idea, too.

For now, however, the pressing needs, at least in these parts, seem to be improving the lot of small, struggling districts. As we have said before, that should be a priority for local education leaders, and local legislators, in the years ahead. There’s only one reason we think that: it will better serve all children in the area.

Florence 1 budget stalls, Spartanburg 3 passes

What's wrong with Florence District 1?

The school board met last night and discussed its proposed budget for next year but apparently couldn't get past discussing it, according to the Florence Morning News. It seems that in past years, the school board heard budget concerns and requests from a parade of principals before getting down to drafting the document, and this year that didn't happen. So two board members blocked any further action on the plan presented by their interim superintendent, Dr. Allie Brooks.

Board members Alexis Pipkins and Pat Gibson-Hye Moore, who said they did not receive detailed information on items being cut throughout the district, blocked that second reading.

Pipkins and Moore said cuts to budgets for non-revenue producing sports, district landscaping, permanent substitutes, matters of attrition and other items were not presented in detail to board members as had been done in the past.

“Now, we only know what the administration tells us,” Pipkins said.

Before the motion to accept the budget as presented from board member Glenn Odom failed to receive a second, interim superintendent Dr. Allie Brooks addressed the concerns voiced by Moore and Pipkins, saying the budget was on the board agenda seven times before Thursday night’s scheduled second reading and that concerns about cuts or other issues should have been raised then.

Sounds like what we have here is a failure to communicate. Hopefully, sufficient communication will take place by next Tuesday night's meeting that some progress can be made. If not, the board may miss the June 30 deadline for adopting a new budget, in which case last year's budget will roll over into the next year, says the district's chief financial officer.

For a picture-perfect ending to a budget-writing process, Florence 1 and the General Assembly itself might take a note from Spartanburg 3, whose board and superintendent prepared and considered three different budget models before selecting the most conservative one at last night's meeting. Why three different models? Because the legislature hadn't yet decided whether to fund public education at mid-twentieth-century levels, middle-late-twentieth century levels, or late-twentieth century levels.

Optimism led the Spartanburg 3 leadership to imagine lawmakers might have adopted a budget by yesterday, in which case they could make decisions based on solid information. Reality -- and the legislature's various incapacities -- guided them to adopt the most conservative of the three models, just in case the legislature failed them.

Which, ultimately, it did, proving them wise.

In any case, Superintendent Jim Ray and his assistant superintendent for finance and operations, Greg Mack, presented budget proposals designed to restore some features that had to be cut in past years, thanks to the legislature's failure to provide twenty-first century levels of school funding.

After debating three different bottom line totals — one for each of three funding levels being discussed by state legislators — trustees approved a nearly $23 million general fund budget for the 2011-12 fiscal year. The total is a 1.5 percent increase over the current $22.6 million general fund budget.

The budget assumes a base student cost of $1,788 from the state level and was the lowest figure considered by the board. Base student cost is part of a weighted formula that funds districts for each student, depending on grade level and need.

District 3 Superintendent Jim Ray told the board that he expects base student cost to pass at a higher level, but administrators advised the board to act conservatively until a state budget is inked.

The board unanimously voted to pass the budget with a proviso that gives district administration authority to adjust the bottom line, should the base student cost rise.

Assistant Superintendent for Finance and Operations Greg Mack said that if a higher funding level is approved, a few capital maintenance items will be moved out of “capital projects” into the general fund.

“This is what I would call a ‘restorative’ budget, in that we have been able to restore a couple of items we used to balance the budget this and last fiscal years,” Mack said.

One highlight of the adopted budget is the absence of furlough days. Another is a step increase for district employees. Retirees returning to work in the classroom won't yet see restoration of the 15 percent salary cut they suffered last year, but aside from that, there's a significant reason running through this budget plan that many of South Carolina's school districts would benefit from consulting Jim Ray and Greg Mack before drafting their local budgets:

The district will save about $90,000 by cutting the equivalent of 2.2 full-time positions next year. The cuts are part of $220,000 that will be saved in personnel by hiring teachers with fewer years of experience to replace retirees and resignees.

Mack said that all personnel reductions were decided based on an annual analysis of class size and came only through attrition — retirement or voluntary separations.

Only two positions were cut, and reductions in staff came only through retirements or vacancies.

What does Spartanburg 3 know that so many other school districts don't? Or, is the better question: What parts of Spartanburg 3's philosophy would also serve well the schoolchildren, educators and parents living elsewhere in South Carolina?

Oops: Private company shreds Florence 1 student records

Here's another illustration of what happens when we turn basic school functions over to private companies in the name of saving money.

CINTAS, Florence School District 1’s document reduction service provider, inadvertently shredded the records of some 300 students at South Florence High School. The records belonged to rising ninth-graders, the students who will be transitioning from Southside Middle to South Florence High School in the fall, according to a press release issued by the district Thursday afternoon.

Florence 1 officials have telephoned parents of the rising South Florence freshmen and notified them that the records of the students are being retrieved through the school district’s web-based student information system known as PowerSchool, according to the release. Officials also said they intend to work with the local S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control office over the summer to retrieve birth certificates and immunization records of the students affected.

Since when have we been turning over birth certificates and immunization records to private companies? Does this not violate the public trust? Is there no law prohibiting the sharing of personal information of this sort with corporate entities?

Furthermore, how does a uniform and laundry company get into the document-shredding business? Unless there are two corporate entities using the same strange name, CINTAS is an Ohio-based company -- again an out-of-state business interest profiting from South Carolina's public education system -- involved in the "design and manufacturing of corporate identity uniform programs, entrance mats, restroom supplies, promotional products, first aid and safety products, fire protection services and document management services."

A company that makes workshirts, doormats and restroom supplies shredded the permanent records of Florence County eighth-graders. So much for the protection of personal information, and so much for "permanent" records.

“Our goal is to ensure parents that we will retrieve the student data as quickly as we can,” interim superintendent Dr. Allie E. Brooks Jr. said in the release. “We are also fortunate to have access to PowerSchool, which maintains the majority of the information which was contained in the permanent records.”

Brooks said the district will implement a plan of action with data reduction systems in the future to ensure the inadvertent shredding of documents won’t occur again.

Perhaps the first paragraph of that plan should read:
Florence School District 1 will adopt policies to ensure that documents containing the personal information of students, their parents and guardians, including but not restricted to birth certificates and immunization records, will be handled by Florence School District 1 personnel only, on the premises of Florence School District 1 property only, under such circumstances that will guarantee the safe handling, management and security of these documents and the information they contain. Under no circumstances will individuals not directly employed by Florence School District 1 be authorized or allowed to view or manage such documents.

See how easy that is?

Parents: Do you know if your school district hires private companies to maintain your student's permanent records? How does it make you feel to wonder about that?