August 30, 2018 letter

30 August 2018

Dear Gates Foundation,

Hello. My name is Bill Detzner. I am a retired public- school teacher. I taught for 30 years in Miami-Dade County Public Schools (MDCPS), the nation’s fourth largest school district. For the last 25 years of my career, I taught at Neva King Cooper School (NKC), a public school exclusively for Profoundly Mentally Handicapped (PMH) students, with IQ’s of 25 and below. During the 2011-2012 school year, my school attempted to exercise the (supposedly) legally protected right under Florida law to convert from a public school to a charter school. We did this for 2 reasons: 1) Even though the MDCPS budget INCREASED every year, our school (NKC) saw a DECREASE in its budget, year after year. The increased funding was going to grow the MDCPS bureaucracy to truly grotesque and gargantuan proportions. 2) The MDCPS bureaucracy was putting enormous pressure on NKC to abandon its highly effective curriculum (the Small Step Curriculum (SSC), in favor of a vastly more expensive and totally inappropriate new curriculum that is far above the intellectual capacity of our students. By becoming a charter school, we could cut out the vast, expensive, and inefficient MDCPS bureaucrats. By our very conservative figures, backed up by an accounting firm, we saw that we would be able to offer our teaching staff a hefty raise, increase the services we offered to our students, and still end up with an obscene surplus at the end of the school year. The MDCPS superintendent, Mr. Alberto Carvalho, illegally smashed NKC’s attempt to convert to a charter school (legal case DOAH 13-1492). For the last 6 years, NKC has been virtually under lockdown, with brutal and illegal collective punishment for the entire NKC staff. All of this is described in my blog mdcpsallegations.com The result is that although many Florida public schools have chosen to convert from public schools to charter schools, not a single MDCPS school has done this, due to the extreme sense of Fear Superintendent Carvalho seems to have deliberately cultivated in the schools he rules over. I have written certified letters to Superintendent Carvalho, all members of the MDCPS school board, Florida Governor Rick Scott, and the Florida Department of Education. Not only have none of these people taken any action, not a single one of them have even replied to my letters. This is a case of David vs. Goliath. In this case, David is prone on the ground, with Goliath’s boot on his throat. If the Gates Foundation decides to offer its considerable influence to this situation, perhaps MDCPS will have no choice but to either improve the quality of education it offers to its students, or allow its schools to convert to charter schools. MDCPS presently enjoys an undeserved monopoly on public education, and that monopoly affords it the luxury of offering an inferior educational experience to the students that it is presently serving so poorly.

Respectfully,

Bill Detzner

Bill Detzner 7722 S.W. 99 St. Miami, FL. 33156 mdcpsallegations.com billdetzner@bellsouth.net