From what I hear, the press has descended on South Hadley and as I type, Anderson Cooper is going all 360 on Superintendent Sayer.  Unfortunately, South Hadley’s school department lacks anyone who is skilled in the art of public relations so there is zero chance the School Department will be able to show the progress they’ve made on the bullying front.  It’s too bad, because there are tons of people out there willing to share their opinion on what the schools have messed up, but not many people are coming forward to say anything good.

You’ll note that most of this has been written well before 9 students were criminally charged in connection to the suicide of a student.  Not knowing these students or the underlying causes for these charges, I’m not going to comment on the specifics.  The below represents statements I’ve been developing since February.

First, what qualifies me to speak on the issue?  Well, I’m a senior in college.  I like to think I’m sufficiently removed from the situation (4 years) whereby I can offer some unclouded views.  That said, as a student I was more familiar with the administration of the high school and school district than just about any student I met during my four years in the school.   Also, I’m not 40, married with 3 kids, and spending every waking minute on MassLive.  I’m familiar with what actually happens on sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter because I’ve used them since before parents heard about them.  Lastly, I spent most of my four years in high school observing.  I compartmentalized most of my social activities to 1.5 hours each day and spent the rest of the time watching what others did.  I was at that lunch table that was mostly empty, or standing in the corner watching everyone else mingle after lunch.  Not like in the creepy way, but in the I’ve only got a handful of friends and we don’t talk loud enough to stand in the middle of everyone and still hear ourselves kind of way.

On to the meat of the issues here…

I think everyone is on the right page when they say there are bullies in high school.  I think everyone is on the wrong page when they say South Hadley has a bullying problem, or a situation that significantly deviates from the norm.  I think the climate is providing an easy environment for people to say that South Hadley has a bullying problem because of some of the recent events and subsequent news coverage, unfortunately that’s just fuel for the mirage.  What South Hadley does have right now, that most communities don’t, is a great way to start (and continue) the conversation about bullying in our schools.  Dozens of students, former students, and parents are now coming out of the woodwork to talk about how they are/were/represent someone who was bullied during their school years.  I think this is a really good conversation to be having, but we need to get the context right.  We should all be working together as a community to solve this problem, not just dropping our complaints in the complaint box or pointing our finger around at past events… but that might just be my approach, I much enjoy moving forward.

At the School Committee meeting following the incident people lined up like it was a church confessional to detail the times they had been bullied.  All the stories were very sad, and clearly everyone is still haunted by their high school bully today, but most people failed to present reasonable next steps.  For the dialog to work, someone should have presented a story like this “I was bullied blah blah blah, but thinking back on it, I really could have used some help standing up for myself or asserting my beliefs,” not just “I was bullied blah blah blah, and you should fire everyone for not caring.”  One of the things that did stand out to me was that some people were stepping forward to speak about abuses many years ago, before lots of the current faculty/staff were in their current roles.  Maybe the current staff could do more about these sorts of things, but it seems like this trend isn’t new to this specific set of administrators or teachers… it has been going on since the dawn of time!

What strikes me as a little odd is the ratio of those bullied that have come forward compared to the bullies that have come forward (i.e large to zero).  I think people often forget that being a bully and being bullied are not mutually exclusive states.  Based on my experience, there’s actually a pretty decent probability that you’ve been responsible for “bullying” someone at least once during your four years in high school.  Maybe you didn’t want to be their partner, choosing to work with your group of friends instead, maybe you laughed or snickered when you saw their test grade and then went to tell your friends about it.  The tricky thing about bullying is measuring it, it is not like punching someone in the face.. counting the welts on face isn’t as easy as measuring the emotional damage someone may or may not have suffered at your tongue.

For example, I could tell my parents that someone made an insulting comment about my clothes in school today.  They could be worried I was being bullied without every asking how I felt.  Personally, I probably couldn’t care less if someone insulted what I wear…. but for someone else this could be a defining moment of their high school experience.

Based on my experience with the administration of South Hadley High School, they do a bang up job.  As always, there is room for improvement, but I’ve observed them doing the best they can given their limited resources.  The fact is that most people don’t care what happens at the high school until something really bad happens.  In some of the younger schools parents involve themselves in the education process with things like the PTA and parent-teacher conferences.  By the time the students are in high school, they’ve found something better to do with their time.  I attended (filmed) School Committee meetings for a really long time, and the only time I saw more than one parent show up was when the sports or music budget was going to be cut.  Parents never came to speak when the budget for counselors was reduced or when teaching positions were going to be reduced, it just didn’t happen.  If you claim the school is in a terrible state, I can assure you it didn’t get here overnight.  Where were the watchdogs last year?

There is a lot of people out there tossing blame saying that administrator X or teacher Y was made aware of the bullying and failed to stop it.  I suspect if an administrator kept a list of students who they suspected were bullied, something like 75% of the school population would be on it.  That’s not to say an administrator sees you gets punched in the face and just marks it down in a book, but they can tell when you’re having a rough day.  There is also the parent-reporting issue.  I think that a lot of the time parents report issues and kind of make a huge deal out of things.  That is not to say the mold fits for the presently discussed scenario, but a lot of the time your parent calls and they are going to be furious, failing to even consider that they’re kid could have presented them with a slightly exaggerated story.  It’s not like they were emotional or anything I’m sure.  It’s also not likely they called in concerned their student hadn’t been doing any homework or anything educational like that; some of the most effective parent-administrator/teacher relationship I saw were parents that were concerned about their child’s school experience as a package… which includes both last weeks math test and the latest rumor about them.

I try to think what I would do if someone complained to me about a bullying issue.  Having limited educational training, its a tough call.  For starters, I first need to verify that an issue exists. I’ve heard one, probably over dramatized version of the story, and I need to hear the other side.  The problem is that you just can’t sit the other student down and be like are you talking smack about person z?  They’re gonna say no, and if they legitimately weren’t talking smack about that person they now have a reason to do so.  Logically, my next step might be to conduct some digging around and ask teachers and counselors.  Unfortunately, I remembered that the teachers are short handed and underpaid so they’re not the best witnesses.  The counselors might be helpful, if we hadn’t reduced the number of them to four.  Hrm, where does that put me.  I guess I could check out some technology, unfortunately its kind of creepy to be friends with your principal on Facebook.  The school resource officer might be worth a go, but I suspect his undercover Facebook skills are worse then mine.  I guess I’m left with the hold-my-horses approach, raising an alert level but waiting until there is something indisputable I can catch someone on.  A punch to the face would make things much easier.

I have no doubts I will be classified as very pro-South Hadley Public Schools.  I don’t think that would be a lie; heck, I held a sign when I was 10 encouraging you to vote yes on 2 so we could renovate the schools.  My allegiance does not come because I spent summers working for the school or because I’ve been pretty involved.  My allegiance comes because I see that South Hadley Schools produce, on the most part, decent, successful, contributing members of society.  Sure, I can go online and find tons of underage students drinking, but I consistently find them ending up in college and doing something decent with their life.  SHHS produces very few homeless students.  I also think that South Hadley is, on the whole, a pretty decent place to be raised.  I don’t care about how many millions of dollars the golf course is eating, I care that people don’t get shot in gang related violence.  Sure, there might be some drugs here or there, but it doesn’t get in the way of an AP Calculus class.  You think South Hadley has problems, try going to Springfield!  Not that I want to bash Springfield specifically, I’m just trying to point out that things could be worse…

As most people know, Concerto uses SVN for version control.  Its worked really well for everything that I’ve needed it to, and I have no reason to complain or dislike it.  I’ve started to play around with Git for my work on the bonsai-video project and I like some of what I see.  The ability to commit locally and then send it up to the main server is a neat feature… though I’m not sure why I would every want to not push my changes to the server right away… its still neat to have the “offline” support.

The coolest thing about git isn’t even a feature of git itself, its github.com.  I really like the social components introduce into the programming area.  People can freely make their own copy of the code and start doing their own stuff… with a moderately useful web interface to tie it all together.  Typically I would download the source code for a program, make my changes locally, and call it a day.  With github there is an easy way to share those changes with others without having to formally submit a patch to the maintainers.

This social coding stuff makes me think twice about my general dislike for git and I’ve actually considered looking to switch Concerto to GitHub.  It has nothing to do with git vs svn at all actually, if the site was SVNHub we might already be there…well maybe not, there is also the issue of locally hosted vs remotely hosted repositories.  Github would certainly be a quick and easy way to track what other people are doing with their own copies of Concerto.

On another note, this past weekend we’ve finished work on the Concerto public site: http://www.concerto-signage.com which means you can finally download Concerto and start to do cool things with it!  For those of you who don’t know, Concerto is an open-source digital signage system that was developed at RPI.  I’ve been working on it since the spring of 2007 and I’m glad to see its being publicly released for everyone to enjoy.  If you just want to check out what you can do with it, the demo page has instructions to login to a demo system we’ve setup.  If you have any feedback, I’d love to hear it!

The church across the street had a picnic tonight which just finished up.  I don’t know anything about it except for that involved lots of loud music.  My closed window was unable to keep it out.  Luckily the musical wasn’t awful to listen to.

Today has been a wierd day.  I spent most of yesterday working on building a Ruby on Rails app, because I’ve yet to find a solid tutorial for Google’s App Engine that involves multiple code files and stuff.  I wouldn’t say I found rails any faster to cleaner to work in than PHP.  I’m pretty confident that I could have done the same stuff in PHP just as easily and probably just as cleanly.  We’ll see if I get the app together enought to publically release it as intended.  My main todo item is a design.. the part of making web things that I least like.  If there was only a resource for simple web designs with CSS to go along with them… I would like that.

I had some things I wanted to get done today but it was challenging.  Everyone at RPI has been going in different directions.  Now if those directions are just different from mine, or independly different I don’t know.. all I know is that I seem to know less and less until it conflicts with what I had been planning.  I know, I should be expressing what I think and stuff but thats it.. I have several times in the past and now that its time to move on something people object.  I am unsure what I need to improve on to fix this, but I shall think.

I’ve been very frustrated at RPI TV right now.. maybe more the MMS side of things.  MMS being the Multi Media Services department at RPI… they run the campus TV plant among other things.  Right now the process to airing something is fairly straightforward; I make a physical copy of the show, fill out some paperwork, and drop it off with someone in MMS to handle the rest.  A few days later I get an email telling me to login and program it when I want.  Its not a terribly bad situation when it works but as you can guess.. its not working.  I think I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again: being the RPI TV Station Manager would be orders of magnitude better if there was actually a station to manage.  Right now I “manage” the filling out of paperwork and carrying of dvds… there’s not much to it.

People ask why I stay involved with my towns PEG station (SHCTV 15) and its pretty simple.. if something isn’t working right, I can climb right back behind the racks in the head end and fix it.  If the programing thing can not interface with the routing switcher I am allowed to actually go and fix it… there’s none of this waiting for someone else to get around to it or whatnot.  No, there isn’t any fancy 32×32 routing switcher, but does the RPI TV channel really need access to all of those devices?  I think not.

If it was up to me, which it clearly isn’t, RPI TV would be as seperate from the cable tv plant operation as possible.  It makes sense to be located in their head end room,  but not to be heavily integrated into their equiptment.  I would redesign it something like this… a 4×1 routing switcher controlled by RPI TV.  Inputs might be the MMS Bulliten board system, a campus location [output from 32x32], a deck, and a digital playout server.  The output could go into the MMS 32×32 corkboard, but would be the default route for the channel.  Therefore if there was an emergency it would be completely in their capabilities to override everything we were doing with whatever they wanted.  RPI TV would still have the control of day to day operations of everything, and a digital playout server would greatly enhance the amount, quality, and usefulness of content shown on the channel.

Technically speaking members of club and I could likely handle all of the technical aspects of the system with our eyes closed.  I would even settle for a significantly less advanced implementation, just the digital playout server would be nice…The only stopper to implementing any of this is policy and people. I’m good at dealing with neither.

That was a lot of talking about RPI TV and not so much about anything else.  Katie went to New York city today.  I’m unsure what she did, something about a cruise maybe?  I look forward to getting the scoop from her when she returns later this evening.

My brother moved into Siena yesteday.  He has a triple which is pretty unlucky, but he indicated neither of the roomates were terrible to interact with.

I think I am going to rent an iTunes movie… maybe.  I want to legally watch a rental movie if there is nothing better to do.  Of course stuff to do could arise at any point, and I would hate to waste the $4 on a movie I don’t see.

This year it seems the commitee is worried about a decreasing number of students attending 4 year colleges. The Guidance Department spokesperson offer the fact that many students move on from 2 year schools to 4 year schools in an effort to justify the shift in numbers, citing increaseing financial pressure on the middle class. I don’t doubt that those circumstances may be the case, but I’ve always found the method this information is gathered to be very strange. I think graduating seniors are surveyed twice ever. Once before they leave, and once in December of the following year when the come back to speak about their experiences. Every year guidance says how challenging it is to get students to respond to their surveys to collect accurate data. I also know that only sampling a population twice isn’t a very accurate way of capturing the results of 12 years of education.

What I’ve never seen the high school done is contact students in a way thats convient for them. I remember getting my survey from the high school.. via mail. My mom kept it on top of my bureau until I got home and was able to fill it out. I wouldn’t expect every parent to do that, and how many kids actually know how to work the mail these days. The high school should really embrace technology to make this process much easier for them, but more importantly for the students.

Social networks like Facebook and MySpace make it very easy to track classmates. If you’re not “friends” with them, you could at least send them a message or identify what their current network is. I know that if I was sent a survey electronically to my email or facebook I would respond. I would probably respond to a survey 10 years from now. I doubt I’m completely alone. Sure, you won’t get 100% participation, but there are lots of people out there who will take 2 minutes to answer 5 questions if they know what its about.

I’m not saying graduates should be placed on a SPAM mailing list to send surveys out every few years, but social networks are keeping our social graphs from high school for some time after our graduation. I’m still friends with many people from South Hadley High School that I haven’t seen in years.

There is no miracle solution to get data from people after they graduate, but if you try to collect it in a way thats friendly to them… you’re certainly more likely to get something back. If I were incharge of implementing this, I might do a few things. 1: Get a facebook group going. Most schools already have something like this going on. 2. Create a 1 page web based survey. Something dead simple that takes under 5 minutes to figure out. 3. Distribute that web survery to members of the group. Have friends pass it along. If you want to get really fancy, attach some reward and send it out pyramid-scheme style. Boom. Instant data.

I’m going to check my email. I doubt there is anything there is any survey there asking if I’ve graduated my two year school yet, or if I’m still attending my four year college.