This was published in Funny Times, December 2013  (www.funnytimes.com)

Dear Parents:

All of us in the District are eager and excited to begin what promises to be our most successful year to date.

First, we are proud to announce that the entire District is now dedicated to serving only Gifted and Special Needs students. This change comes after a review of last year’s student records revealed that there were no “Regular-Ed” students left.

The District’s Food Service Department has unveiled our new Culinarily Correct Cafeteria. We are now able to accommodate students with food allergies and sensitivities, as well as our athletes, and our obese and anorexic students. The cafeterias no longer serve any foods containing wheat, eggs, nuts, dairy, meat, or soy products. We now offer organic versions of Slim Fast, Ensure and Muscle Milk.

Thanks to the PTA’s tremendous efforts, all playground equipment has finally been removed. The playgrounds are now equipped with Wi-Fi, cable and virtual playground goggles that will allow students to visualize that they are playing in a safe, supportive, and healthy environment.

Our Parent Peep-Hole Portal is up and running and can be accessed from the District’s website, www.veritasdistrictschools.com. You can review your student’s attendance record, assignments, grades, contact teachers and/or watch live school action on the 72 newly installed security cameras in and around our school. If you have cable, you can watch us on Channel 112!

We are also pleased to announce that despite all the budget cuts, we have added three new staff positions at each school. An on-site Pharmacist will handle the ever increasing pharmaceutical needs of our students with ADD/ADHD, diabetes, anxiety, bipolar, depression and any other disorders. A new Grief Counselor and a Good Guy with a Gun will also set up offices where the art and music rooms used to be.

Please be sure to check the updated calendar, available on our website, as we have added 32 new teacher in-service days (no school for students on these days) to continue training our teachers on compliance with the 422 new federal and state guidelines for curriculum, administering tests and, of course, the latest teacher and student evaluation criteria.

We are striving for excellence, and we are optimistic that we can bring you this excellence within our new budget (28 percent of last year’s budget, 32 percent of the previous year’s).  Additionally, we are confident that we can do this effectively, even while welcoming the 1,300 new students that are joining us from a neighboring District’s school that was closed last year due to non-adherence to their District’s dress code.

We are relentless in our effort to improve your child’s educational experience and we will continue to try to find out just why our schools keep “failing” despite the massive amounts of time and money we are applying at the local, state and national levels.

We are rigorously evaluating our teachers, teaching techniques and student performance. In addition to those evaluations, we are conducting union effectiveness evaluations, procurement audits, administrative evaluations, interior and exterior security audits, emergency planning audits, parking lot safety studies, length of grass near buildings audits, and how the sun shines on our schools evaluations.

The only input to your child’s education that has not been thoroughly scrutinized to date is … you, the parent.

Although it sounds silly, there is some evidence that suggests that you and your expectations of your child could be the most influential factor in their educational experience. Toward that end, we have enclosed a District-wide Parent Evaluation Survey that we’d like to you fill out and send back to us.

If you don’t return the survey, don’t worry; we know how taxing all this seemingly unnecessary paperwork can be. Happily, Mr. McCarthy, our Engineering and Technology teacher, has offered to have his senior class fill in the blanks on any non-returned surveys as part of their research project in his class: Hacking, Tracking, and Tapping – Information Gathering in the Modern World.

Again, we welcome you and hope you and all our students are as excited as we are to have a successful year.

Yours in Learning,

Dr. Will Botch, Ph.D.

Proudly serving as Superintendent

Anita B. Veritas School District