[quote]The school tried to enforce dress code as best as they could last school
year a few boys were called to the office for wearing T shirts that say
FCUK whcih is a brand name only I thought that was weird compared with what
some girls were wearing.[/quote]
That is a very good example of problems wit rule enforcement at TAS. In the upper school handbook is lists some very clear examples of what is in violation of the dress code, I remember “exposed midriff”.
I didn’t see any rule that said anything like “no words on t-shirts that can remind anyone of an obscenity”. (I won’t say what the word “cherry” makes me think of…)
This is something that staff with minimal training could recognize and report and doesn’t require the expert eyes of teachers or principals. Now banning t-shirts with words for which a permutation of letters could produce a word with an obscene meaning, that is something that is much more sophisticated.
It moves into the category of social protest that people have used for centuries. From the fables in the middle ages to poetry and jokes in the former Soviet Union, suppressed people always found a way to use double meanings, reading between the lines etc to communicate their disagreement and protest.
To read an obscenity in the word FCUK requires an active effort on the side of the reader. That is not the case for males with peak testosterone levels sitting a cafeteria surrounded by scantly clad teenage girls with exposed midriff.
Added on September 4
Well, if you see an underage kid, drunk with a fake ID in one of the local clubs, chances are also pretty good that you are looking at a TAS student.
Added on September 6
Later today, a representative of the search company, in charge of recruiting a new TAS superintendent (SI) will meet with parents to get their views about what a new TAS superintendent should look like.
I would be interested what members of this list think are the criteria for a good SI.
Considering the fact that the WASC committee only extended the TAS accreditation for two years, the new SI will have to complete the response to the WASC team during his first year of office. Usually it takes a year or so to learn the basic workings of a complex organization like TAS.
The current superintendent will have two years of experience with the school and especially with the WASC report. In the interest of the TAS students one of my requirements would be that the new SI needs to offer a better chance to regain the WASC accreditation than the current SI.
The fact that the SI has already been “fired” by the board doesn’t mean much: The board has hired and fired a Principal for Research and Development in the span of a week without any official reason (see board minutes of June 14). So firing and hiring an SI within a year for the good reason of improving the chance of regaining WASC accreditation should be no problem.
Besides, it is the same group who put the board under pressure to fire both R&D Principal and SI, so a new SI should be strong enough not to yield to “anonymous signatures” of unnamed teachers but base his recommendations to the board on the best interests of the students.
Everybody should respect and support the good teachers who play the most important role in the education of our students. They deserve the best support of their work. They deserve our encouragement to contribute to building a learning community and be creative and innovative to prepare our students for the needs of the 21st century. That is written into the TAS mission.
But we have to remember that the reason for existence of TAS are the students. Therefore language coming from the admin/board retreat that they need to serve teachers and students - putting teachers at the same level as students - are most disturbing. Especially because it is an invitation for abuse, to tempt teachers to become more interested school power politics than in student education.
A new SI should also have experience in dealing with passive aggressive organizations. It seems that there are administrators at TAS, who would rather bask in past TAS glory than face the new challenges of the 21st century.
A new SI needs to understand that “innovation” does not just mean asking each student to bring a laptop to school (about ten years ago I worked for a school where the laptops were at least given to the students through a grant from intel; back then one could have called it “innovative”).
Being an innovative learning community also means that the SI listens to the ideas of all members of the learning community even those who are not part of the alpha-crowd. Hand-picking a committee from the TAS community and designating them to be “representative” for the school body (such as the LCC) teaches the students the wrong sense of democracy. I recognize that the LCC members did important work for the school in preparing the WASC report (although the results are less than desirable) but they deserve to be truly representative of the school constituencies giving access and listening to the inputs of all members of the school’s learning community.
Finally I hope that the new SI will be able to convince the admin team that it is better to have an electronic forum for an open and honest discussion on the TAS site, instead of on a public site like forumosa.com.
Anyway, these are just some thoughts about what I would like to see in a new SI and as always I welcome comments and suggestions.
