This is left by an anonymous parent which deseveres everyone's attention.
Agree that BOD meeting should be open with advance announcement. Also when BOD decides to ask/hire/invite some people outside the board to do things vital to NWCS like "leading the effort to get our Open Hearing logistics together", announcement should made BEFORE their work with brief explanation about why they are chosen and whether they are paid or not, certainly NOT AFTERFACT. This at least would eliminate legitimacy problems caused by secrecy.
Many people have been volunteering in NWCS. Some are visible (like June Hu, some of 22 concerned parents, and others). But majority of them are invisible. However if it means you have more say about how to govern the NWCS because you volunteer more or just in merely more visible way, your MOTIVATION of volunteerism become questionable. In my eyes, that TAINTs the spirit of volunteerism.
Another thing we should look at is the payroll list. I do think payroll list should be PUBLICIZED every half year. Information should include name with simple explanation about what position he/she holds in NWCS. The exact compensations of any key employees like Principal, Vice Principals, Treasurers etc. should also be publicized. Also BOD should make any contract work (like accounting, cleaning, etc.) public. We used to have information about names of teachers for each class and names of administration members as well as BOD members's names available Online. Why has it stopped for last two years? Can we restore that?
In conclusion, TRANSPARENCY and COMMUICATION are the key issues here. If we make sure transparency of governing NWCS and constant commuication with total members of NWCS, it would help to eliminate any misunderstanding, so called "22 concerned parents" issue and "throwing tantrum" behavior.
There is a email calling for "some tangible proposals". In summary, I give my proposals:
1. BOD meeting should be open with ADVANCED announcement.
2. Payroll list (with names and exact compensations for key employees) should be publicized.
In the end, I thank every teacher/staff for his/her deligent work to teach our kids and all volunteers to keep NWCS going.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
19 comments:
"However if it means you have more say about how to govern the NWCS because you volunteer more or just in merely more visible way, your MOTIVATION of volunteerism become questionable" Well said.
"I do think payroll list should be PUBLICIZED every half year. Information should include name with simple explanation about what position he/she holds in NWCS"
That's right. This won't be a privacy problem either. We should have the right to know who we are paid to. Does anyone have rough idea how many classes we have? How many teachers?
I agree. The name list on the payroll should be publicized. We have the right to know who are paid.
I have checked the school web. It said that we have close to 80 teachers and stuff. Lets say we have 6 Admin plus zhoulin, we then have 73 teachers. The website also states that we have 47 Chinese class on both sites, 40 in kirkland 7 in seattle. Do we have 26 math and music class? does anyone know?
The board did not ask some parents to "lead the effort" for open hearing. They are PTA members, remember, so anyone can contribute to the work. In fact, Jerome Jin just volunteered to bring numbering machine to stamp the survey sheet. What a good idea! So, if you just keep anonymous and say things, it is not THAT helpful. Sorry. We all need some actions.
I agree that regualr board meeting should be open to all members. In fact, we did two and half weeks ago. A few parents and teachers showed up. This next one will be in two weeks. We will let everyone know. See you then.
I am not sure whether we can open the payroll to the public. Maybe summary information, but not detailed to a person.
Thanks for your suggestions and input.
Dear Peter
"I agree that regualr board meeting should be open to all members. In fact, we did two and half weeks ago. A few parents and teachers showed up." How come the invitation was never send out to us, all parents? why only a few parents and teacher there? Who are those parents? don't tell me there are the 22 people or their spouses again.
Here is the update email board send out, my question is why they can't publishing the result, this is a election hearing, right? What does the privat mean? They come to elect,right? I confuse about this, looks like PRIVACE IS A TOOL FOR SOMEBODY TO HIDE SOMETHING IN OUR SCHOOL! Zhoulin use it to refuse payroll report, Board use it for something too, can we have a lawyer to explain this for all the parents?
"Dear NWCS Members,
Please note that the Board has made some changes on our 6/9 Open Hearing Logistics. Some of you have called me and emailed the board regarding the survey results. After careful analysis, the Board has decided NOT to publish the results, due to privacy concerns and potential bias (statistical sampling, availability of attendees, fairness to all candidates, etc). Since the survey results will be ONE of references to the board decision, we will include it in our decision making process and show its impact in our announcement.
The key thing to remember: this Open Hearing gives every member the chance to meet the candidates that you may never meet before. I know that two hours are not that long and there is no perfect system, but at least we are trying our best to serve each and every one of you!
Please come to support our candidates on 6/9 from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM!"
Agree, what are they trying to hide???
Peter Huang said:
"The board did not ask some parents to "lead the effort" for open hearing. They are PTA members, remember, so anyone can contribute to the work......
I am not sure whether we can open the payroll to the public. Maybe summary information, but not detailed to a person. "
If it is PTA called the meeting. then it is PTA's responsiblity to inform the whole body of NWCS members IN ADVANCE. Should June Hu explain this? If we say facts wrong. It shows that we don't have accurate infomation here. Who should bear responsibility of this? Us or PTA or BOD? Peter, please answer me this?
We only request the NAMES on the payroll list (and what their working capacities in NWCS are) NOT exact compensation EXCEPT key employees. Please do not forget NWCS is non-profit organization and we own public (I mean whole society, not just NWCS community) this. So when people get hired, they should made aware of this.
Peter:
Please remember you sent out the emial indicating appreciation to Liu Jinghao and Liang Luping for their work on "leading the effort for open hearing". If we remember correctly, you are BOD Chair, not PTA Chair, right?
So stop picking on this kind of matter. If there is misleading, it is DEFINITELY NOT from us.
２２家长是充当了周琳的打手之一。
２２家长对周林现在的下场和学校现在的局面负有不可推卸的责任。像当年的中顾委把胡耀邦赶下台一样。
刘景浩，梁路平，胡小君，胡志华，田红旗仅在这一点上是中文学校历史的罪人。
A Parent's Proposals says:
"I do think payroll list should be PUBLICIZED every half year. Information should include name with simple explanation about what position he/she holds in NWCS. The exact compensations of any key employees like Principal, Vice Principals, Treasurers etc. should also be publicized."
We agree 100%. As non-profit organization, what is it that the school trying to hide under the name of "privacy"? You can check the salary of UW professions, why as paying parents have no right to know where our money goes?
I was paid $1,300 a semester for doing what you can see every Saturday and what you may not see during the weekdays. However, I was happy to be helpful even though I knew I deserve more than this ,but I aslo knew this is non-profit organization, which means volunteering work should be involved in. I absolutely agree that all the NWCS members have the right to know where the money goes. Now at least you know I made this portion of total revenue of the school.
totemlake:
你一周教两个小时的课？ 还是4个小时?
I was at the admin.
Totemlake, you still did not tell us how many hours per week you had been working on an average? Would you please be more straightforward? Thanks!
Please do not turn the disccusion bewteen the Zhou Lin and all the concerned parents (vs 22 concerned special group) into a discussion between school hard working admin and parents.
I wanted to thank shcool Admin for their hardwork and relative low pay conmparing to what Zhou Lin earned, for example, on this site, the new post suggested Zhou Lin made over a thousand dollar for every hour, while the school income dropped signaficantly.
孙本经假正经！！ 作为董事自己工作没有做好，校长违法乱纪不敢说，还怪别人说出去，怕丢中文学校的脸。活该！早干嘛了？！
不知道那封信的内容，有人知道的话，别忘了放这里大家分享啊！
Memorandum
Re: Ms Zhou Lin’s Moral Degeneration
To: Administration, Lake Washington Technical College
June 7, 2007
Dear President Mr. Mike Melted and LWTC Administration:
We are a group of parents of Northwest Chinese School (NWCS – a non-profit weekend Chinese language school). Ms. Zhou Lin (your employee) is the current principal of the NWCS. Ms. Zhou had committed misconduct to have abused the school property by altering and forwarding email to all parents of NWCS which caused month long confusion and mistrust in the school.
Though, Ms. Zhou has reluctantly extended apology a month after the misconduct, her apology is far from sincere, which unveiled her integrity issue. In the apology, she worded “… under stress I have unintentionally merged selective message from two email trains. …. “ . Our opinion is that Ms. Zhou has trouble to tell the truth, at a minimum.
Though, she committed the misconduct in NWCS domain, we believe that it is important to inform you since you are a Washington State public school, a place where misconduct by abusing public propriety and lack of integrity are strictly prohibited. We expect that all of your employees and officers should have higher bar in integrity and morality to enable that our next generation is well educated. As such, as a non-profit, on state funding education institute, your staffs morality is paramount important. We recommend you to investigate Ms. Zhou’s conduct in your school as an education administrator so to ensure your school staffs have the highest ethic standard.
Please contact the board of NWCS to acquire the board’s direct formal criticism/conclusion on Ms. Zhou’s misconduct.
NWCS Board announcement to all members of NWCS on this incident is in the appendix.
For further questions, please contact board@nwchinese.org and admin@nwchinese.org
Looking forward to your reply.
Sincerely,
A Concerned Group of Parents of NWCS
CC: SBCTC - Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges; State Board of Education; Ms. Zhou Lin
P.S.: Apology in advance that we have remained anonymous for now.
Appendix:
Dear NWCS parents and teachers,
I am writing on behalf of the Board to close out an issue happened on May 7th at 8:42PM when our Principal, Lin Zhou, used School Admin Account sending an email entitled "Note to the NWCS parents: please take a look at those emails" to all NWCS members which exposed an on-going discussion among board members and a small group of parents. The Board has privately criticized Zhou Lin for what she did, because she set a precedent in the school. Although the discussion among a small group of less than 30 parents and the Board is not confidential to all parents, the inappropriateness of Lin's action includes: 1) using our School Admin Email Account to forward such a discussion to about over 1000 members without prior consultation to the Board; 2) forwarding the messages with no introduction or explanation of the topics under discussion and with no signature line; and 3) forwarding edited information that triggered confusions and mistrust.
We are happy to see that Lin Zhou has admitted her mistake and apologized to related party, the school and the Board. She also promised not to repeat this kind of mistake again in the future. The board has accepted her apology and decided to close this issue. Admittedly, the Board has not handled the entire incident in an optimal way during the past month. Let's all put this incident behind us and move forward to build a better school for our children and community. Now, the board and the school are focusing on finishing this semester and starting to operate the summer program. I, hereby, call actions to all members to continue working hard with our teachers, the admin team, and the board to open the next page of our school.
I want to call for re-focus on our volunteerism and promoting Chinese language and culture. Your participation in our school at all levels are much needed and appreciated.
Thanks!
Peter Huang, Ph.D., PMP
Chair, NWCS Board of Directors
Post a Comment