Breaking News on the School Front!

Now that we have some 'new blood' in the School Board, it will be interesting to see if he actually PRACTICES 21st Century skills rather than just talking about it as a bullet point like the other Board members have done. None of the current Board members have ever posted anything on any of the WestAllisNow blogs as far as I know. On the opposite side of the spectrum, West Allis Alderman Marty Weigel has made numerous past appearances on these blogs and has clearly identified himself as "Father 'o Four" in his posts.

Go here to see a FOX6 report that was shown on channel 6 a few months ago:

http://www.fox6now.com/news/investigators/

...and then look through the videos for the one entitled, "Two Dozen wisconsin School Districts Funnelling Millions To Out-Of-State Energy Consultant" (you have to press the right arrow a few times to see this one in the thumbnail list). Yup, you guessed it, the WAWM School Board was one of those mentioned in the story. Our Board spent $700,000+ OF YOUR MONEY to learn how to turn lights off at night and many other common sense energy-saving things.

I'm reasonably optimisitic that Sotiros could be a good Board member who doesn't rubber-stamp every single spending request that comes before the Board without considering alternatives or the impact to us dumb taxpayers. Time will tell if I'm right or wrong. Good luck, Mr. Sotiros. I wish you the best.

First off I would like to thank all of those who have wished me luck in this new responsiblity.

Secondly, a brief amount of history regarding myself. I am a product of the WA-WM school system having graduated from Nathan Hale in 84. I am married to a wonderful wife and have four children whom I am very proud of and who do go to school in the district (2 at Hale, 1 at FLW and 1 at Hoover).

I have a lot to learn and look forward to working hard for the community.

Congratulations Mr. Sotiros... Best of luck!!!

Mr. Sotiros,

If you're looking for a small pet project to get your feet wet at the School Board, I have the perfect one for you.

Just today, I received two letters from the School District. BOTH OF THEM were addressed to "To the PARENTS/GUARDIAN OF: (insert student's name here)". The contents of both letters were identical. The only difference was the student's first name on the mailing label. Each letter had a 44 cent stamp on it, plus the cost of the envelope itself, plus the cost of the paper itself. This has been happening for a long, long time, and I'm always mildly upset that our same School District that always brags about teaching "21st Century Skills" still insists on wasting taxpayers' money by sending me TWO IDENTICAL letters when one will do. Multiply this by the number of families who have more than one kid in the system and then, you're talking about a significant amount of taxpayer money.

I would suggest that you implement some sort of process to eliminate this duplication. Anybody who's proficient with Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Visual Basic can easily develop an algorithm to flag duplicate mailing address labels and modify the label so that it applies to EVERYBODY at that particular mailing address. There's no way it will cost $700,800 to develop this as the District recently paid to EEI to learn how to save Energy. I'll do it for only $200,000 if you can't find anybody else to do it.

Seriously, please look into this waste of taxpayer dollars and modify the District's procedures to eliminate this waste. DO NOT BLINDLY ACCEPT OUTRAGEOUS COST ESTIMATES TO ACCOMPLISH THIS TASK. Better yet, make it a class project so that STUDENTS can have practical experience to do something really worthwhile without costing the taxpayers a dime. Be reasonable. Please.

You make a good point. This does not happen to us but perhaps it does happen more than we think (duplicate mailings). Take the first step and call the school to tell them that you are receiving duplicate mailings - it won't cost much of anything if everyone does that AND the schools follow up on cleaning up their databases. The contract with Energy Ed expired over a year ago and the original contract was entered into in 2003. I'm sure that it made sense at the time and that the school district would not be likely to pursue something like that now. More than 50% of the board members who approved that contract are no longer sitting on the board.