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SAVE THE DATE | |
Dear PARCA Supporter,
The end of the year is upon us, and it's time to start planning ahead for next year. Please save the date for the
2013 PARCA Annual Meeting which will be held on Friday, February 8th. We will have a incredible program focusing on the importance of raising expectations for our schools and our communities.
More details about the meeting, including registration information, will be provided in early January. I hope that you will plan to attend.
Jim Williams
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Improving Results with Poverty Students | |
PARCA has been looking at the trends in school performance and found that there are many schools that deserve attention for their improvements, especially with poverty students. These schools are addressing a critical gap in performance that can raise achievement for the entire system and put Alabama children in a better position to succeed in the future. Read the full analysis here.
You can see the trends for each subgroup, subject, and grade for every school in Alabama on our website. There are more than 9,000 graphs for each subgroup. |
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Alabama Competes Nationally in K-12 Education | |
In Alabama, 27.7 percent of children under the age of 18 live in poverty, the country's fourth highest percentage of children in poverty. This population increased by over 35,000 children from 2005 to 2010. One challenge accompanying this changing demographic is the wide achievement gap between poverty and non-poverty students. Although the problem exists across the country, these gaps have a disproportional effect in Alabama and other Southern states. Despite this and other challenges, Alabama has demonstrated the ability to compete nationally, when sustained attention and effort is made.
SREB's state specific report, Alabama: A Decade of Progress, highlights the state's most notable achievements: catching and surpassing the national average in reading at the elementary school level and making substantial progress in raising high school graduation rates. In this PARCA review, we examine SREB's recent work, identifying Alabama's significant progress in education, as well as our lingering deficits.
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Strange But True | |
STRANGE BUT TRUE - "The Root Cause for our Oversized Constitution"
Section 98 of the Alabama Constitution prohibits the Legislature from providing a retirement program for public officials. As a way around this limitation, the Legislature has created "supernumerary" positions for various kinds of retired officials, allowing them to receive payments in return for making themselves available to serve. These programs do not have the financial advantages of properly structured retirement programs such as those administered by the Retirement Systems of Alabama, and they have become expensive to county governments.
Many counties have succeeded in creating more cost-effective systems through the adoption of local amendments barring officials in those counties from assuming supernumerary offices and allowing them to participate in the Employees' Retirement System (ERS) on the same terms as other employees. However, when this type of amendment was proposed statewide in 1996 and 1999, voters turned it down.
As a result, 60 of the 67 counties have adopted separate, local constitutional amendments that will phase out supernumerary programs and make certain public officials eligible to participate in the ERS. Almost all of these amendments have identical language. There were two local amendments of this type, for Bullock and Etowah counties, in November's election.
The confusion of having numerous amendments with the same purpose in the Constitution is a byproduct of the complexity of managing local affairs from Montgomery. This not only makes it difficult to know what laws have passed in a given county; it is the root cause for the swelling size of our state's principal governing document.
For more information about local acts, see PARCA's Local Acts Database. It is the only comprehensive, searchable database of the 35,000 plus local acts in Alabama. |
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PARCA Friends on the Move | |
- PARCA Board member Win Hallett announces his retirement as President of the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce. Read more here.
- PARCA Board member Jim Hughey III has been elected to the bench of the 10th Circuit Court, Place 9. For more information, click here.
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