Big Disappointment

I am sad to report we will be starting our petition drive on Thursday. After attending the school board meeting tonight I am reporting that we are stuck with Investigations for our children without any supplements outside of the program as we would expect them whether we like it or not. Despite all of the mountains of research offered...

* The National Advisory Panel's Report in 2008.....
* The fact that Columbia dropped Investigations after years of falling
test scores....
* The fact that Raymore Peculiar dropped Investigations because its
teachers in the junior high school felt that their students
were coming to them grossly unprepared....

* Despite the outcry of 50 or more leading mathematicians in our state
with reference to how ill prepared TERC leaves our kids
to progress into Algebra.....
* Despite the fact that Eldon does not think the same program meets their GLEs so they added a textbook mid semester because their
kids needed it.....(remember our kids have those same
GLEs...let's see not working for them, but just fine for us...
how does that happen?)
*Despite that a huge number of our kids cannot read at their grade levels and the majority of these problems are word problems and
it would appear that based on those facts that we have set
our kids up for failure....
*Despite the fact that NO ONE will answer our very valid questions.....

... here we are...I could go on and on and on, but they don't care about those facts. Our kids are stuck and we have absolutely no say. (Wow, I just heard myself say that and I don't like the way that rolls off of my tongue. Does that feel so wrong to you, too?) No matter how much evidence there is against it, that matters not. I am afraid to say that unless we come together and protest our kids will have to fail just like all of these other schools before us have for our district officials to pay attention. As my husband always says "experience is the best teacher" and we have loads of it to look at when it comes to this issue. Unfortunately no one in our administration appears to care about that. Our kids will have to fail by their standards and I hate to say it, but they will... just like they have everywhere else all over our nation. But by then it will be too late for our kids.
I will fill you in on all of the other details of the school board meeting that happened tonight on Thursday night. Looking forward to seeing you there. We will start our petition push then. We will eat @5:30p.m. and start our presentation by 6:00 p.m. with the plan to be done by 7:15 p.m.