The Seminole School Board has repeatedly rejected months of community-wide input in lengthy public decision-making processes, and discouraged many parts of this community from participating in improving the schools. This anti-family and anti-community attitude has damaged the quality of life of students, families and neighborhoods throughout Seminole County.
As a result parents started spending a lot of time analyzing local school and FCAT data. Unexpectedly, they found data that indicate serious educational issues. They came to believe that a central school board goal is "the FCAT Shuffle." By busing students between schools and taking other actions, they are manipulating the test population to conceal educational issues -- without needing to improve the quality of education. In brief, many needy and average students' educational issues are being buried, damaging these students' entire lives while the school board claims victory and moves on.
These educational findings stimulated a wider question: Is this educational data local or larger? Again unexpectedly, parallel educational issues were discovered throughout Florida's school districts. A new and clearer picture of Florida's education system emerged, which is now being shared by using our Educational Dashboards. These dashboards can be copied, emailed and posted on websites easily, with our only request to include a link to SeminoleCountyEducation.com.
Seven years of data shows the current school board does not know how to improve education at middle school and high school levels, so will need broad community support to address this and substantially improve it. Yet this school board has alienated parents and hidden from its poor results so it will not be able to surface the issues and receive broad participation to attack them.
To provide an umbrella to put a new school board majority in place, to collect and distribute donations, and to own and publicly distribute materials like the Dashboards, a "citizen journalism" corporation was formed, Restore Trust, LLC.
This is a small side activity -- we have active family lives and jobs. Our simple goal is to work hard to build a good quality of life for our children and neighbors, and to contribute to others at the same time. Our hope is this will be a small part-time activity, but also one that helps produce positive change for Seminole County, and perhaps beyond it.
First: This website exists because of a larger need, the opportunity to replace the majority of the Seminole School Board's members. Please contact these candidates. They will speak directly to the education and other issues that require that they be elected as our School Board. Contact:
Steve Edmonds: District 1
Joe Laughlin: District 2
Verdell Pugh Horne: District 5
Second: Please see if you can answer your question, or just dive in and help without contacting us.
Third: If that is not sufficient, please send communications to restoretrust@seminolecountyeducation.com.
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Copyright 2006 by Restore Trust, LLC. Anything from this website may be freely copied and reused IF:
If online or in email include a link to this website.
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