"As site council chair at my school for the last year, I was in charge of the school improvement plan. We spent months developing and writing our plan. Near the end of this year, our district--in order to meet NCLB requirements--required us to write next year's plan before we had any of the data for this year's plan. That's just wrong!

"In addition, I teach at a high-poverty school with no majority population. We exemplify diversity. In one senior English class, I had 43 students, and in the other I had 38.

"Our professional/technical funding has dried up not only because of the changes to vocational funding, but also because our district has had to cut somewhere to meet the increasing mandates of the federal government for testing and other bureaucratic requirements. This year, instead of vocational funding going to support vocational programs, it went to each high school to support a half-time bureaucrat to develop a plan to meet new career ed requirements that can't be implemented because of declining funding in schools.

"We are a magnet-type school, and yet we are threatened with closure as a result of school board policies that require students from so-called failing schools under NCLB to have priority entrance. The new policy also eliminated our only requirement for entrance, which was a letter telling why they wanted to attend a professional/technical school. As a result, we have about 125 students out of 400 from our freshman class who read below the fifth- grade level, and only 33 percent of the freshman class is in our school for a professional/technical curriculum-the very focus of our school."

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