According to sources, the Sioux Falls School District appears to be using fraudulent figures in their school start date surveys.
How’s this?
Apparently the school district’s published polling is using some interesting voting procedures. Since the school district does not have a way to win in at the polling booth, they had to create a “poll†of the district to create a result. The Save of Schools (SOS) group fought to set a reasonable school start date and won an election in 2015. Time has flown by and it is time to set future school calendars. Reports are, the school district is not even talking to SOS (or barely). The district is ignoring SOS and pushing the recent polling in the press to make it look like the 2015 vote was a mistake. These appear to be the rules:
- If a household has No students, no vote or invitation to vote
- Every household with a student gets a vote
- Every school teacher gets a vote
- Every middle school student gets a vote, grades 6 through 8
- Every high school student gets a vote, grades 9 through 12
Think about this formula:
- The polling started out not letting households with no students zero (0) votes
- If the household has only grade school students, they get one (1) vote in the decision.
- If the household has a school teacher they get two (2) votes
- If the household has two (2) teachers they get three(3) votes
- If the household has one (1) to four (4) students in high school add additional voters to the household total
- If the household has any students in middle school we can let them add up to three (3) more votes to the total household votes
This is how it breaks down.
- You have no kids, you’re screwed, just pay your taxes and shut up
- You have kids in grade school, you only get one vote, suffer as they get older
- All other households can sway public opinion by stacking the votes to screw everyone else
If our math is even at the 4th grade level, we see a chance for some Sioux Falls households easily having ten (10+) votes versus the rest of us not having any or one. This is not a level playing field for all citizens of Sioux Falls. This is the Sioux Falls Public School system creating a fake groundswell for going back to the way it was before.
If this wasn’t a stacked poll to create a result favorable to the schools position, we would be calling it what it is; a fraud.
I have argued all along, the school district should just put the calendar start date on the ballot this coming summer with the school board candidate. Put down three dates; 3 weeks before labor day, after labor day, and somewhere in between. Seems simpler than conducting wasteful polls, surveys and committees. Just let the voters decide again, you know, the people who ACTUALLY fund the school district.
Is this all true? https://np.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/5q3efx/south_dakota_gop_uses_emergency_powers_to_repeal/dcvy4qv/?st=iydigida&sh=d6018fad
Friendly reminder that VOTERS JUST PASSED THIS IN NOVEMBER
The bills currently being rushed through the state legislature are actually a wholesale repeal of IM-22 (the South Dakota Anti-Corruption Act) — a ballot initiative approved by South Dakota voters less than two months ago.
Here are just some of the provisions the SD GOP is using its fake state of emergency to gut:
1. Limits on lobbyist gifts to politicians. South Dakota was, and I guess will continue to be, the only state in the country that lets lobbyists give politicians gifts of unlimited value without disclosing what they are or how much they cost. SEEMS LEGIT.
2. New transparency rules that require more frequent, technologically current methods of campaign finance disclosure. If you’re a South Dakota citizen or journalist who wants to know where your politicians are getting their money, you’re stuck pulling pdf scans of handwritten forms from the state’s shitty websites.
3. Publicly funded elections. IM-22 also created a statewide citizen funding system that provided voters with the choice to give two $50 credits to candidates who agreed to raise only small-dollar donations from within the state. The SD GOP has made the biggest deal about this provision because of the “outrageous cost” (which was capped by IM-22 at $9 per resident per year at the absolute most), and stated that the only way they would fund this system of “tax dollar welfare for politicians” was by taking the money out of the 1% increase they were considering giving the state’s education budget (this despite the fact that the text of IM-22 identified several potential funding mechanisms)
4. Increased penalties for actual goddamn bribery. One of the pieces of IM-22 voters were most excited about: a provision that upgraded the crime of bribing a state lawmaker from a misdemeanor to a felony. The SD GOP’s repeal bill specifically goes out of its way to bump bribery back down to a misdemeanor.
5. An independent ethics commission to enforce all of the above. South Dakota is one of just a handful of states without any kind of independent ethics enforcement agency (the state GOP’s position is basically “we’re squeaky clean and none of this is an issue”
Crazy, right? It gets worse.
The SD GOP is using emergency powers to rush through the repeal to prevent voters from initiating a process that could “veto” their repeal bill
The SD Anti-Corruption Act was passed as ballot initiative (this means tons of people went door to door to get enough signatures to put it on the 2016 ballot, and enough South Dakota voters voted “yes” to make it law).
South Dakota has safeguards in place to stop state legislators from immediately repealing laws approved by voters. The most important one: if the legislature repeals a law that was passed by ballot initiative, voters have the opportunity to gather more signatures and put the law back to a public referendum in the next election (2018 in this case). If it passes again, it overrides the legislature / governor’s repeal.
BUT. When a popular ballot initiative is killed using the “state of emergency” fast-track procedure the SD GOP is using to rush through the repeal, that’s it. It’s gone. No revotes — everyone has to start from scratch.
TL;DR: SD GOP is literally using “emergency powers” to gut an anti-corruption and bribery law imposed on them by the voters. They’re trying to do it as fast as possible so nobody notices — PLEASE try to help blow up this story nationally however you can. It’ll take a national outrage close to the uproar over the national GOP’s targeting of the Office of Government Ethics to stop this.
Sources: 1 2 34
I trust this school board. Sure, they’re sneaking around for more revenue but it’ll be spent on education. I’m just happy Homan is gone. She was a horrible administrator.
the poll is only for if you want to start school before or after labor day. my oldest takes ap classes. those are college courses, and the schedule is set by the colleges. after college gets out, the course work and tests are done. so they sit around for a month doing nothing. isn’t that a waste of your taxpayer money? let’s refer college start times to a statewide public vote as well, so higher education can revolve around the sun known as sioux falls. once these sos kids get to high school, i’m sure their moms will be wanting an earlier start time, so johnny and susie can get their semester tests out of the way before the christmas trip to florida or hawaii.
I remember the election and my kids coming home telling us that we had to vote for the earlier start date. Seems the teachers were telling them that kids today are just not smart enough to retain the information over the Christmas break. Maybe if we stop adding extra days off to the schedule we would have enough time to get everything done within the time frame of after Labor day and before Christmas. Seems like we have way to many 3 day weekends for these kids.
They have an online survey up now, but they don’t ask the same questions as they did of the parents with start dates.
http://survey.k12insight.com/survey.aspx?k=SsXRVPsWUTsPsPsP&lang=0&data=
Gosh – I have a HS student and a MS student. I have to say, semester tests after the Christmas break when they could go back after the break, do a review and actually retain the information versus cramming for tests, was a breath of fresh air. We are not one of those families that goes to Florida or Hawaii and I would venture to say the percentage of families that does is low so that comment is ridiculous.
AP test scores went up with the change in the school calendar and there is zero data that semester tests scores are higher before Christmas break. Find a reasonable calendar….I don’t think it is that much to ask. Start the Monday before the Labor Day break and end the week before Memorial Day weekend. It just isn’t that tough, but it seems it is going in that direction.
And for what it is worth – my HS student is in a Fall sport that starts at the beginning of August. They have double days the first 2-3 weeks. It is awesome to not have school beginning along with training for their season. And, at the end of the day, extra curricular activities are a choice.