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Bill Cirone: Resolutions for Parents for the New Year
This is the traditional time for making resolutions. The most important ones are worth stating so that we can focus our efforts in the right direction.

» I will always love my children for who they are — not who I want them to be. It’s an important distinction.
» I will give my child space to grow, to dream, to succeed and even to fail. Without that space, no growth can occur.
» I will create a loving home environment, regardless of what effort it takes at a given time.
» When discipline is necessary, I will let my child know that I disapprove of what he or she does, not who he or she is. Again, it’s a very important distinction.
» I will set limits and help my children find security in the knowledge of what is expected of them. They will not have to guess what is right or wrong.
» I will not burden my children with emotions and problems they are not equipped to deal with.
» I will encourage my children to experience the world and all its possibilities, taking pains to leave them careful but not fearful.
» I will try to be the kind of person I want my children to be: loving, fair-minded, giving and hopeful.
It’s a tall order, but these resolutions are all worth the effort. When carried out, they can make a real difference for all our children.
Bill Cirone is Santa Barbara County’s superintendent of schools.
Comments
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» on 12.26.08 @ 10:41 AM
Thank you for re-printing this article from Family Circle Magazine. Indeed, parenting is the most important job we as adults have.
Parents depend upon our schools to partner with us in order to do a good job, so that our children grow up to be healthy, happy, and successful citizens in the 21st century.
“To be loving, fair-minded, giving, and hopeful.” Let’s add honest and responsible to that list of characteristics.
How much did the four-hour luncheon for 150 county school employees cost the tax-payer? (December 10, 2008) Even Wendy McCaw, a billionaire, cancelled her SB News-Press holiday party this year. Money is tight.
Stop using tax-payer paid lawyers to fight parents who are advocating for their children’s rights according to IDEA and ADA.
Stop retaliating against teachers, administrators, and parents who stand up for our children.
Stop criminalizing Hispanic students who are struggling in school by expelling them to El Puente, a toxic waste site owned by Bill Levy cohorts, who collect $16,000 per month for rent.
Stop your racket of buying state-of-the-art computers for administrators and then passing the old ones down the line until Computers for Families get the five year old discards from teachers and classrooms.
The $200,000 that you spend per year on personnel for that program could buy 1,000 new computers used in Kellogg School, Negroponte’s “Laptops for Students;” (See Noozhawk.com article.)
For the amount the county spends on re-furbishing the old computers ($300.), the schools could buy Dell Child Laptops (simple and customized for children) and do away with text books—-and give each child in elementary school access to learning through the internet.
Let The People see your credit card statements from the JPA-approved SELPA, and your expense account for the county.
Our society needs a school system that provides democratic education and a loving, ethical, and financially accountable orientation. This cannot exist when the administrators at the top do not value the concerns and complaints of its constituency.
Read “School Corruption: Betraying Our Children and the Public Trust” by Dr. Armand Fusco. Santa Barbara is rising to combat hubris.
http://www.sbschooltalk.ning.com
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» on 12.27.08 @ 12:48 PM
How is it that Bill Cirone has time to run a t.v. show and write opinion pieces?
Is his position really necessary? Would the $$ used to pay his salary be better spent in the classroom.
To be fair, perhaps Bill Cirone is a great fund-raiser and brings in lots of extra $$ into the County school districts. I would like to know how much $$ he brings in. Otherwise, it seems like he has a free ride.
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» on 12.30.08 @ 12:28 PM
That party that Kate Smith referred to was a 1-hour luncheon, funded by the employees! WE are taxpayers, too, ya know?!
Get your facts straight.
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» on 01.04.09 @ 05:42 PM
Superintendant Bill Ceroni:
Originally, Princeton University was established as a School of Law and many are misinformed that the Law School is no longer there. This is considered while eating Fat Cats at Rutgers University in New Brunswick from having Hoagies out at Princeton; different types of sandwiches only twenty minutes apart but relatively close in distance. Take this kind of consideration in good faith because the issue of knowing what can, or in need, and is to address that in dictating preference of learning, impropriety is who does not know the meaning of class.
Reading your latest article, Teacher Quality: The Root of All that Matters, I could not agree more because not only mathematical in reference to the fundamental Theorem of Algebra but trebles solutions that thinking is azimuth to prerequisite the matter a teacher is to qualify teaching classes. However, consider adding if teachers, even with a prestigious fellowship from Princeton University, need more mentoring throughout their career so they stay in the profession. Inherent in our profession as educators, teachers not only teach but learn from every and each other constantly because we are also students, if any may want to know etiquettes in class.
Fellowship connotes the idea teachers are willing to learn from another in order to be a fellow like the word prestige can only imply. There are other fellowships that may be considered prestigious like being a Rhodes Scholar which is named after Cecil J. Rhodes; a statesman who promoted imperialism; a businessman for establishing De Beers; and a lawyer being a member of a Privy Council, equivalent to a Federal Supreme Court Judge. Rhodes was British but is also considered by most the founding father of The Republic of South Africa that not many students in our classes have the willingness to discover. In essence, society needs policy that teachers never compromise the class, or be adamant to understand respect for the profession because we only have lessons to make room for everyone in our classes.
In times when least expected, the duty of one teacher is to uphold the integrity of the school that in the focus of classrooms while others are uncertain of their own decisions does profess assumptions the types of classes proper not to be considered. Schools are meant to teach lessons outside the physical boundaries or beyond remedial concepts in halls of academia; another often misinterpreted sense of idea classes may have in having if any. Anyone can really hold a class if in a room, anytime, and anywhere or wherever that in calling themselves teacher as professionals, the immortality by way of craft exhibits a sense decent to profess for all classes.
For the meaning of class, students willing to learn are graded for choices made rather than faculties in knowing that impropriety in a given class can only come from not asking the teacher. When determining the type of class all may ever have, only prejudiced by one’s own sense of idea, teaches a teacher the lesson. Thus in distinguishing what class is in how teachers are perceived, any compensation comes from integrity in respect so that everyone knows the ideal sense common to us all; most often called the law of the land. The foundation which all teachers build the school through their unwavering belief and passions because no other in society has propriety – in the “I” or “am” or even in the consonant prefixes of “im” for that matter – to teach lessons for all or if not everyone to have is class.
Respectfully a Teacher,
Mr.D1.oneTeacher
Hard to think Done
Education is the Law
cc: …for if any has any sense of our class.
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» on 01.09.09 @ 07:26 PM
Mr. Cirone, I would like to respond to your opinion piece: I’m glad you finally admit that Family Circle Magazine is the source of your article. I always suspected as such, as the “professional advice” in your articles is never anything but recycled homilies that have already been done to death by Reader’s Digest, Family Circle, and Woman’s Day. If you ever once have an article even mentioning the school system’s or SBCOE’s responsibilities to provide help to struggling parents and students, or about specific services they are mandated to provide, instead of talking about the parents’ responsibilities, I will fall over in shock. And I agree with the previous comment - - If you have so much time to do all these TV shows, write insipid articles, provide lucrative jobs for your cronies, be on all the nonprofit boards and become the most politically powerful County Superintendent in California - all on the taxpayer dime - and put the discarded low-income children at El Puente School on a toxic site without proper testing of the classroom air or getting building safety permits, and then pretend there is no problem - then perhaps we should rethink whether your job is necessary, and instead give the millions of dollars of education money that is diverted by you to create your SBCOE fiefdom to the individual school districts who should be getting it in the first place. How you have the gall to come out with these absurd articles that are like a slap in the face to the families of the many vulnerable childen at El Puente who shouldn’t be there in the first place, as well as to the many other families struggling because of the systematic criminalization of their children by our county’s school systems, is beyond me.
Karolyn Renard
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» on 01.09.09 @ 09:37 PM
“Heeding these words of advice can help us focus our efforts in the right direction.”
Would that you would focus your efforts on the children and put our money there, too!
Bernie Madoff’s whistleblower was unheeded for nine years. Would that Santa Barbara would heed the words of its whistleblowers.
Geez Louise, it doesn’t take much to see there are problems but your resolutions don’t add anything, in fact, they don’t add up at all.
You have no solutions; you, your programs, and your mentality are much of the problem.
Stop telling the parents to heed your words—-we know how to parent our children. What we don’t know is how to get you to heed us.
Sarvis regurgitates your propaganda: “These are your children but they’re our children, too.” One more time, and I will throw my shoes!. WE KNOW THEY’RE OUR CHILDREN AND WE’RE DISGUSTED WITH THE WAY YOU TREAT THEM.
(Oh, don’t worry, I wear Ferragamos and wouldn’t dream of wasting them on you; call off your legal bullies or I’ll put lipstick on my pitbull and let her off leash.)
Resolve, Santa Barbara, to investigate the charges of corruption in the schools. Education reform means returning to a student-centered and teacher-driven operation.
The parents will be where they’ve always been—-RIGHT THERE SUPPORTING SCHOOLS. WRITE ABOUT THAT! CALL FOR SUPPORT OF THE TEACHERS, PARENTS, AND STUDENTS WITH THE MONEY, AND RESPECT THEY DESERVE.
Mr. Cirone: Take your high-horse, your ass-backwards way of carting kids off to jail schools, your retaliatory tactics, your misppropriations of funds, and your misguided missives and ill-advised pontifications and sit in a corner with a dunce cap.
You are not excused. When we expell you, the nation will know your name: “Mud.”
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» on 01.10.09 @ 05:15 PM
Dear “Just For the Record,”
Thank you for your response! I learn about something and then have the option of going to COE Wendy Shelton for a very painful experience with a California Public Records Act, or I put it out on the web and someone corrects me, adds to my information, or goes and investigates.
I knew that many of the holiday luncheon attendees were not getting a “free lunch” because Cirone is a meglomaniac so any time he puts on a party (with public or non-profit money) he has a photographer and a public relations article. (See Noozhawk/Partners in Education.)
The county oversees $643 M and that’s powerful—-the bankS make money off it and kicks back $150,000 each to the non-profit foundations so that Bill has a lobbying group.
That’s why when an elected official such as Bob Noel would DARE to criticize a Cirone Crony, in come the “old boys” from the School-Politico-Industrial Complex.
That Steve Cushman, former board members, et al would call for Noel’s resignation because he called for Sarvis’s is proof that were off the rails.
Visit http://www.sbschooltalk.ning.com to learn about school corruption and credit card scandals. Bill Cirone loves to party.
Exposure—-it’s gonna be big!
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