Reese Charter Education Reform Bill Receives Committee Approval

HARRISBURG – A bill authored by Rep. Mike Reese (R-Westmoreland/Somerset) aimed at improving charter and cyber education in Pennsylvania was passed by the House Education Committee on Wednesday.

Reese said House Bill 530 meets two important objectives by strengthening school choice but also improving the formula used to fund charter and cyber charter education.

“Enabling parents to choose quality education options for their children is an important goal here,” Reese said. “But quality education is expensive and every dollar must be spent wisely and responsibly.”

The bill proposes that charter schools use an academic performance matrix developed by the Pennsylvania Board of Education and that teacher evaluations be performed, which is similar to traditional public schools. It also aims to increase enforcement of current truancy laws. Charter schools meeting these objectives will have extended charter periods. Also included is language to improve public transparency and auditing requirements.

House Bill 530 also addresses a long-standing problem with the funding formula for cyber charter schools. It will allow school districts to deduct food service costs and cyber education expenses from the previous year from their per-pupil expense paid to cyber charter schools. Combined, the deductions are estimated to save public school districts roughly $25 million annually.

The legislation calls for a charter school funding advisory commission to be assembled and work toward identifying further corrections. The commission will include members of the Pennsylvania House and Senate and various education professionals with equal representation from both charter entities and school districts.

Reese explained that revising cyber education funding is imperative.

“The funding of cyber education has become a significant expense for local school districts,” Reese said. “But the funding formula is inherently flawed and lacks critical oversight. We have to make this a priority.”

The bill will now be considered on the House floor. During the 2013-14 legislative session, a similar bill was approved by the House with a 133-64 bipartisan vote but it was not considered

by the Senate.

Tech Talk: Technology Changes News

It was 1968 when I was recruited by the Buffalo Courier-Express to cover the Allegany County, N.Y. news beat. I could not have imagined what news technology would be like 47 years later.

Even then there was computerized typesetting, as it was called, and that was a change from the way things had been done, when my mother wrote the Portage Report for the Reporter Argus. She called friends and neighbors in the area, and they called her, and then she hammered out the column on her Remington Noiseless, and it was mailed to the paper unless someone was “going in to town” and would drop it off.

At the paper, that news and the other content of the paper were set in type by the Linotype, operated at great speed by a woman who seldom took her eyes from the sheets of copy clipped at eye level. The smell of hot lead blended with the smell of ink and the grease used to keep presses from seizing up.

Heads and ads were still hand set. Young Chuck Boller used to do a lot of that.

A few years later I became acquainted with George Questa, Pennsylvania bureau chief for the Olean Times Herald. At that time the TH rented quarters for its detached bureaus in their territories. George’s office was in a very small house formerly used by the Port Motel owners. In it were a typewriter and his camera gear, some office furniture and a Simplex page teleprinter.

That page teleprinter did print, but its main function was to send what George wrote straight to the TH newsroom, via a Western Union tieline, or dedicated phone line.

The Simplex page teleprinter was like the Simplex 2B I used, a year or two later, in the Western Union agency at Port Allegany Music Center, my store and teaching studio—except that the 2B printer printed on strips of gummed paper, fed from giant rolls. That printer and page teleprinters could activate their counterparts in distant newsrooms, causing bells to ring and signal lights to flash, and row upon row of text to appear as if by magic on long, continuous rolls of paper a foot wide or so. That’s why the Jimmy Stewart character in those movies would rush into a Western Union office and scribble on Western Union blanks at the counter,

But Linotypes were no longer in common use in 1964-5-6 when I was doing some campaigning for Senator Keating and for Goldwater-Miller, and for Nelson Rockefeller. A lot of that involved publicity. I wrote and sent out press releases, radio spots and mailings. It was important to cultivate contacts in the media. So I knew the Western New York editor, Francis Byron, and when they needed someone for the Allegany County slot he contacted me.

The Courier-Express had transitioned to computerized typesetting, the perforated tape generation of it. So had the Times Herald, which also recruited me before long.

Everything else, in news technology, seemed about where it had been for years. Cameras were still a lot like the ones I used to see Virginia Kallenborn and Alice Connolly use here in town, covering events for the TH and The Bradford Era, respectively.

In 1968 I used a camera with a folding bellows and a very fast shutter and a Honeywell 700 Strobonar. Later I used a Ricoh Singlex. Film was sent by a bus that made daily trips to Buffalo, or a delivery service that went to Olean or Wellsville.

Then the Courier-Express installed a Xerox Telecopier Transciever in my office, which was in my home. It was a forerunner to the fax, and akin to Telex. I typed up my stories on long foolscap and inserted the sheets in the machine, dialed the Buffalo number and pressed Send. A high definition send took six minutes, but on deadline I switched to four minutes. Covering a flood had me sending so continuously the machine started smoking, then died.

Soon I was sending copy to the Hornell Tribune by telecopier, too. But to “put something on the wire” I had to go to Wellsville and use the Daily Reporter’s AP set-up. Of course the Courier-Express also sent any of our material to AP when they thought it should have that audience.

After moving back to my hometown I was tracked down by Alpha Husted of the Times Herald, an amazing Pennsylvania bureau chief. So did a one-shot assignment, covering a coroner’s jury. But then I found myself doing regular coverage when the Pittsburgh Corning employees went to New York city to be checked for asbestos disease…

Working for the TH and The Era, I phoned copy to “dictation” at the papers, and sent film by the Caskeys. Then we became modern and used fax. Next we were using computers dialing up to and message boards.

Eventually we were using email and digital cameras and even transmitting photos as email attachments.

Thinking of the changes that took place in the Reporter Argus, technology-wise, I remember the change to photo-offset printing and how the quality of photographs changed so dramatically. Layout was still done by hand, with the paper being literally “waxed up” on page-size forms, then photographed.

When the paper was sold to a Coudersport family, layout still was done there. Sometimes I assisted. Copy preparation by us reporters, columnists and editors was done with computers, and the results were printed out. Macintoshes were used, so I got my Hackintosh going so they could use my disks, and so I could run JusText, Joey Majot’s favorite typesetting program.

Today layout is done electronically and the digital results transmitted to a distant printing company. The Era and the TH share a press room and crew.

Other changes traceable to communications technology relate to the shrinkage of the market for print publications generally, the ongoing drift of advertising from print to other media, and the rapid expansion of online news and social networks. Also, there is a shift to fluffier news and less serious reporting, even in some of the traditionally “serious” newspapers and news magazines, as well as radio and television.

But that’s news biz. Change.

IYAM: The Times, and other papers, are a-changing

News is different now.

Time was there was competition, which was a good thing. Reporters wanted to get the information first, to break the story. They wanted to “scoop” the other papers, and radio and television too.

That isn’t the case now. Locally there used to be three reporters at the press table, one for the local weekly, one for the Olean daily and one for the Bradford daily. But for several years now there has been one, all-purpose reporter covering “meetings of record” (mainly governmental) and a number of other “hard news” events.

No matter who that all-purpose reporter might be, there is no way the result, for all the readers, could be equal to result of the other model, where three sets of eyes and ears observed, and then three different observers “processed” the information and produced the stories.

As a consumer of news—actually, a news junkie—I know that it is desirable to have several sources of news, more than one account of the same event, to read. There may be no contradictions, but one reporter may include some background or a quote that another did not. One may have realized the significance of a detail or a remark that the others did not.

That’s why, for years, I subscribed to two weekly news magazines, and received two or three daily papers and at least one weekly.

But now the Olean and the Bradford papers are owned by the same company, share some staff and swap news back and forth freely. The same thing is true in communities large and small, across the country.

There is less coverage going on when one person tries to cover too many things. There are things that can’t be covered at all, or at least not “in person,” because one reporter can be on just one place at a time.

It used to be that we could cover Annin Township Supervisors and the Port Allegany Borough Council, even though they both fell on first Monday nights. One reporter went to one, another reporter went to the other.

When the reportorial “stable” went from two to one, Annin Township Supervisors weren’t covered anymore. Borough council meetings were, though.

Other local government meetings did not conflict, usually. The borough council met on first Monday nights, the school board met on second and fourth Monday nights.

Then a couple of months ago the school board voted to meet on FIRST and second Mondays.

The reasons given sounded pretty weak. They were given by the superintendent, who might not have been aware of the conflict being created. One was that the kind of meeting that would be held on the first Monday night would be a committee-of-the-whole meeting, with the regular business meeting being on the following (second) Monday night.

That way, the explanation went, the “discussion” and “reports” meeting would be only one week ahead of the “main” meeting. The matters discussed in detail at the committee-of-the-whole meeting would still be fresh in board members’ minds.

To my protests (quickly declared out of order by the superintendent, although it would be up to the board president to make such a ruling) that this conflict would prevent my covering one or the other important meeting, the superintendent said few important matters would be voted on, in the first Monday meeting, and he would answer my questions about issues if I called him.

I would hope no one on our school board has trouble remembering, for two, or even three weeks, what was discussed in a committee-in-the-whole meeting. And as it turns out, important matters have indeed been voted on, lots of them, in those committee-of-the-whole meetings (which have been defined, for many years, as general purpose meetings as well, with the board making decisions on anything it wishes to, not just discussing matters for future action).

Other arguments made to me by the superintendent, as to why it  shouldn’t matter that I would not be able to cover the first Monday school board meeting were that members of the public who were interested in knowing what went on could attend in person, and that the papers I work for could send another reporter if I couldn’t attend, and that the school district has a website.

I find those arguments rather flimsy. Members of the press actually do not have any rights of access to information that do not pertain to the public at large. The public cannot attend two simultaneous meetings any more than I can.

So far, since realizing I could not attend the committee-of-the-whole meeting on first Mondays, the papers in question have not expanded or juggled their staff to provide another reporter.

Obviously the fact that the school district has a website does not mean that news coverage is not needed. Many organizations and government agencies have websites and newsletters, and so do various elected officials from governor to members of Congress or the legislature, and the county, etc.

That is where those agencies and officials tell us what they want us to know, in the way they want to tell us. That is not to be mistaken for news coverage. It’s public relations, akin to advertising, and it can be useful and interesting, but it is not the same as news coverage.

Press coverage had already taken a hit, school district wise, when the “late public comments” item on the agenda was eliminated. It’s important for there to be public comments before agenda items are considered, and ALSO for there to be comments on and questions about matters that were just discussed or even voted on, at the end of the meeting. The latter opportunity for public/press has been removed.

The quality of news coverage and writing in general is in decline. I am discouraged. Government secrecy is increasing, and not just in Washington, D.C. With the coming of email and cell phones, the always-in-contact rhythm of communications, it is all too easy for officials to arrange things out of the public eye, with public meetings being mostly “for show.”

Peace.