Early voting final tally

How does 477,455 sound? That’s about 125,000 more than voted early in 2004, and almost twice as many as voted early in 2000.

A couple of other numbers to keep in mind: There are about 1.2 million registered voters in Dallas County. In 2004, turnout was 58 percent, and half voted early. If that pattern holds, we’ll have 80 percent turnout tomorrow. I’m not sure anyone, anywhere, has ever had 80 percent turnout. More realistically, I think we can expect early voting this year to account for about two-thirds of the total. Even then, we’d get close to 60 percent turnout, which is about what the national projections are.

Who will all these people help? The county Democrats think it’s going to be them, though their projections on Friday in the Observer are less than the number who actually voted. On the other hand, as I have noted, early voters in Dallas County traditionally favor Republicans.

Finally, after the jump, a few fun facts about just how many people voted early, which you can share if you have to stand in line tomorrow to vote.

DISD’s Hinojosa could face a ‘no confidence’ vote by trustees Monday

DISD school board trustee Ron Price submitted a letter, co-signed by trustees Carla Ranger and Lew Blackburn, at last night's board meeting calling on the board to meet in emergency session Monday to consider a vote of "no confidence" in DISD Supt. Michael Hinojosa. The information was reported on WFAA-TV last night, along with video of people attending the school board meeting chanting "Jack Lowe must go" and yelling out all kinds of things after the board meeting ended.

A "no confidence" vote, as I understand it, doesn't have any legal status, but it would continue eroding the public's support of district leadership, as well as serve to keep the big budget scandal in the news, further eroding the public's support of district leadership. In fact, further evidence of the continuing drumbeat seeking to get rid of Hinojosa showed up on the DMN's education blog yesterday. The NEA-Dallas, a teacher's organization, attempted to survey its membership concerning Hinojosa and the school board; 428 teachers and DISD employees responded, according to the poll, which was sent to teachers and also linked on the DMN blog so other DISD employees could respond. (I'm just reading this in the introduction to the survey, which you can ready by clicking here: Download neadallas_confidence_survey.pdf)

Leppert says our votes count. Except for the convention center hotel?

Here's an interesting juxtaposition: Mayor Tom Leppert is circulating an email with the top headline saying "Convention Center Hotel Critical to Dallas' Future", while the second item is headlined "Vote! It's Your Voice!" (Click here to download tom_leppert_email.pdf and see the email.)

The irony: At least one Leppert spokespuppet on the council already has chortled out loud that even if Dallas residents vote in favor of a potential referendum scuttling the $550 million taxpayer-owned convention center hotel downtown, those votes won't stop the council from moving forward to build the hotel.

So whose voice is Leppert talking about?

Dallas ISD Ethics Policy: It shouldn’t get lost in the fog of budget crisis

Thursday at 4:30 the DISD Board of Trustees will hold a called meeting that will include a closed session:

…to deliberate the appointment, employment, evaluation, reassignment,
duties, discipline, or dismissal of a public officer or employee; including
evaluation of the performance of the Superintendent of Schools.

In the aftermath of the audit, the budget crisis, the RIF, continued TEA sword rattling, and the rehiring of over 50 teachers, speculation abounds about Dr. Hinojosa's relationship with the Board and his future at DISD. 

It appears to me that this event has pushed from public consciousness the fact that at the regular Board of Trustees meeting at 5:30 the last item on the discussion agenda, item 15, calls for action on the Board's revised ethics policy. This revision had been a pretty hot topic prior to the audit results and then the surprise budget crisis. In light of the recent difficulties faced by the DISD, it seems that the revisions of this policy are an excellent place for the DISD to take affirmative steps to restore public confidence in District leadership. Oops. Review of the policy reveals another missed opportunity.

Dallas ISD after the RIF: Another perspective on what’s needed, Part 2

In my previous post, I asserted that the Dallas ISD Board of Trustees needs to be revamped to make them more accountable to the citizens of Dallas. That would be a big step, however, and would be years in the making, even if we all agreed. Which I'm sure we do not. There is something else that the Board of Trustees could do in the interim to make the Dallas ISD more transparent, more accountable, and perhaps even more efficient.

Citizen Advisory Committees

The Board of Trustees should create citizen advisory committees to assist them in a number of areas including Budget, Audit, Curriculum, Strategic Planning, Health and Safety, Drop Out Prevention, Staff Development and Training, Athletics and other issues. This would be different from and in addition to the sort of temporary "blue ribbon" committee that already exists for the bond program, or that was just formed by the Superintendent for the budget.

Each committee would be a permanent standing committee, with each Trustee appointing one member. These committees would then work with central staff to review procedures, monitor and comment on progress, ask questions (especially hard questions) and to generally help guard against the kind of oversight that brought about the recent/current budget crisis. It would be an opportunity for more direct collaboration between the administrative staff and the community and could assist the Trustees themselves in keeping tabs on the workings of the DISD.

There are a number of precedents for this. In fact, that DISD does not already have such committees could be considered somewhat unusual. The City of Dallas, for instance, maintains 28 advisory committees on a variety of subjects, as well as 15 quasi-judicial boards to help administer city laws. A list of these is available here:

Download dallas_boards.pdf

courtesy of my colleague John Miller. The Texas Governor's Office notes that the Governor appoints about 3,000 people to a very long list of boards and committees. A quick look at neighboring school districts also reveals some that have community committees formed almost exactly as I have described.

Currently, community involvement is mostly focused on individual schools. The formal, legislatively mandated system is the Site Based Decision Making (SBDM) committee that is required  at each school. The participation in these, however, appears to vary greatly from school to school and we all found out very quickly during the recent budget crisis that individual SBDM recommendations are not necessarily what they are looking for on Ross Avenue (See this Schutze/Wilonsky Observer post, bottom of page 3 and top of page 4). I also fail to find any reference to SBDM on the Dallas ISD web site. As valuable as I believe the SBDM system is, it appears that opportunities for more broadly based community involvement are needed.

Park Lane early voting

Our Rick Casner took this photo yesterday around 4 p.m. at Our Redeemer Lutheran Church at Park Lane and Boedeker in back of North Park. He said it took about 35 minutes to vote.

Through Monday, according to county election statistics, some 272,000 people have voted early. That's more than 20 percent of the total registered voters in the county. Meanwhile, some 14,000 people have voted early at Our Redeemer, which is almost twice as many as voted early in the March primary. And, for what it’s worth, Democratic voters outnumbered Republicans 2-1 at Our Redeemer in the primary. Record numbers, indeed.

Remember, if you voted early, you can tell us about it in the comments for this post.

Technorati Tags: early voting,presidential election,Dallas County

Good news from DISD: 57 RIFed teachers have been rehired

You might recall the recent news that right after DISD laid off 350 or so teachers, about 60 jobs were posted online, causing a mini-furor among some of those who were laid off. Well, good news: DISD just reported that 57 of the released teachers have been rehired, and the district's Human Development office "will continue to contct teachers who were released to notify them of additional positions as they become available." Here's the DMN's take on the story.

Dallas ISD after the RIF: Another perspective on what’s needed, Part 1

Rick Wamre and I had talked for a while about  point/counterpoint  posts on what we need to do to get DISD on the right track. I guess with this posting of his on October 19, the "point" has been made, so now it's my turn. My thoughts differ from those of Mr. Wamre and Mr. Blow.

Subdividing the DISD is the last thing we should think about doing. That's just a variation on the NIMBY (Not in my back yard) mindset. Under a plan to subdivide the district, we all get to focus on our local schools and not have to worry about the others.  While subdividing the District might allow some of the new smaller districts to more closely mimic the ostensibly more successful suburban districts, it also runs the risk that some of them would instead go down the road of Wilmer-Hutchins. Subdividing the District is tantamount to abandoning the children in the other districts in favor of those in your own new district. I, for one, am not prepared to do that, especially if the starting point is a larger school district that isn't getting the job done. That the District is too big to manage doesn't really stand up to close
scrutiny anyway when you consider that there are lots of organization and
governmental bodies larger than DISD that do not share the District's
problems. Breaking up the DISD is bad for the children and it's bad for Dallas.

Early voting update II

Forget records –- we’re past that. Through Friday, more than 212,000 people had voted early in Dallas County. That’s an astounding number, for several reasons:

• The county averaged more than 40,000 early voters a day last week. At that rate, we’ll have more than 400,000 early voters, double the number in the 2000 presidential election. In 2000, turnout was about 50 percent -– some 600,000 voters. And here’s an interesting conundrum: Early voting, as near as I can tell, often makes up about one-third of the total votes cast. At this rate, if the current average holds, we’ll have close to 100 percent turnout.

DISD layoffs overlap new job postings. It sure doesn’t look good.

In the too-strange-to-be-true category, DISD is advertising on its website for 60 new teachers — right after laying off 350 teachers, according to the DMN. Talk about a PR nightmare, huh?

Now, there could be a logical reason for this; DISD's take on it is that more teachers voluntarily left the district than expected, and that deadline was later than the RIF deadline, so in effect, too many teachers were laid off. All fine and good, so far.