Yesterday Western New York’s Business First Magazine ranked the top 25 High Schools in Western New York. Frontier High School and Hamburg High School were no where to be found. I really can’t comment on Hamburg High School since I know very little about that district. However the Frontier High School has been rated poorly for some years now.
Frontier School District has a lot of problems recently with poor school rankings, drugs in school, and unruly students that give the school district problems. Frontier High School is famously known throughout WNY as “Heroin High”, meaning how easy it has been to purchase heroin on school grounds. This very issue prompted the district and the Town of Hamburg to hire a full time police resource officer to stem the sale of drugs in the high school.
http://buffalo.bizjournals.com/buffalo/stories/2007/05/28/daily8.html?page=2
Business First Magazine ranked the top 25 High Schools in the area and this year they added private schools to the mix. For those who followed this site before the switch of our web master you would remember that I spoke openly about how poorly the high school and middle school perform for the money they get from our taxes. Last year Frontier Middle school ranked in 17th position and the High School ranked in 20th position. This year they aren’t even on the list. That disgusts me.
Do you realise that our school district is literally paying $4,000 more per child then if we sent every child to the number 1 ranked school in wny. That school was all girl Nardin Academy. Actually Nardin has been top of the list for several years and there is no end in sight. I wish that the Frontier School District would just pay for my kids to attend the private school of their choice and they probably would pocket at least 3-4 thousand dollars extra each year. It would be a win/win situation. The kids win with a better education and the tax payers would win with decreased taxes from all the money saved from nixing the School District all together. Makes sense to me.
Well the bottom line is that your taxes keep going up, your quality of service keep going down and the district keeps throwing money at the issue instead of addressing the problems that would actually do what is needed. What is that you ask? The district needs to cut the teachers who are lazy and who run out of the building at the bell. It’s time to make the teachers and staff work for their paycheck and get rid of the dead weight. Quit giving a damn what the unions have to say. If the School Board would make the unions spend hundreds of thousands of dollars taking our district to court to protect the jobs of lazy teachers then the unions will quit protecting the slackers. Money is the root of all the problems and if you take it away from the unions, then you will start seeing a real change. Hopefully it will be a change that gets Frontier High School up into the top 10 once again.
Anyone who comments on school quality should try to use proper grammar and spelling, lest his lack of fundamentals undermine his position. And he should avoid trotting out the tired old “blame the teachers” and anti-union arguments. This blog will be dead soon. Thanks for the opportunity to contribute.
I was going to comment on your lack of grammar and spelling but I was beat to it by the above comment; however, have you ever considered that maybe the top schools of WNY do not want the students of “Heroine High” at thier school? The reason they pay to attend private school is so that everyone surrounding them are kids focused on high education and they do not have to deal with the problems and distractions found at the public schools. In addition, the comment about sending all students to private schools is not thought through. Private schools have entrance exams and they carefully review students grades before accepting them into their schools so that everyone is learning at the same pace to get through the needed material before they hit the ground running in college. If they were to have more students with less dedication to school the attraction of a private school would go down to people who want their children to attend colleges of rank. This befuddles me on how you can say all problems would be solved if every child just went to private school, then the private school would turn into the public schools and we would just be back at square one, wouldn’t we?
What about holding the parent’s accountable? Only a fraction of a child’s
life is spent in school bewteen that ages of 5-18. Teachers can only do their best with the children that parents send to school. The only correlation EVER made to student achievement (measured any way you want) is that students with better educated families and highly involved parents succeed, while those with poorly educated adults and/or absent adults do not succeed!