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Wednesday, July 25, 2012

California Commission on Teacher Credentialing and NON-Fruit Based Computers…

(July/31 update: After a week with no updated status for the new school year, a second visit to the district office was needed to get registered and good to go for the 2012/13 school year)


It’s that time of year again. The new school year starts Aug/15. If I want to work the 2011/12 school year, I need to renew my credential.

My “California Commission on Teacher Credentialing 30-day Substitute Teaching Permit” expires August 1, 2011.

The yearly bribe to renew, which is not tax deductible btw, previously cost me the equivalent of ½ a full day assignment pay rate. The state of California is evidentially broke, so they increased the fee to about 2/3 of one days pay starting this year.

For that fee, I previously received in the mail a credential certificate that I could copy for the local school district(s). The fancy certificate was done away with a few years ago due to budget cuts

“Click here to print your credential permit” saves the state millions on envelope costs, postage and handling I guess. I know the drill so it’s no big deal…except the local school district won’t accept the credential as printed from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing web site.

While the web site will print a page with all the correct data, including name, document number, expiration dates, etc, it won’t, for some reason, include the official “California Commission on Teacher Credentialing” identification banner on the top of the page.

This banner is prominently displayed on the computer screen, but for some reason it isn’t included on the printed copy. Maybe some fruit based computer does print this page correctly, but the only way to get almost the same result on a Microsoft computer is to use the screen capture key “Prt Scr”, and then “paste” the result onto a blank photo editor program page like MS/Paint. You then need to crop all "not credential" looking stuff off and print just the credential image.

Of course that clips off all original web site identifiers and time stamp info that district claims they need to make it official.

I would hope that the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing might use some of the increased fees they charge to  hire a professional web page developer to redesign and TEST this “print credential” feature using a few more of the popularly used computers…not just the fruity ones.


2 comments:

Patti said...

Does your school district still require it on paper? In my state, licenses went to PDFs a few years ago. While new subs and teachers still turn stuff in on paper, I want to say that last year I simply e-mailed the sub coordinator my sub certificate file and it was no big deal. She may have printed it out, but she also has access to the state licensing system if she really needs all the gory details.

KauaiMark said...

Yep! You'd think being in the middle of Silicon Valley "paper" would be obsolete.

They have access to all the credentials online but as described, the computer records aren't very user friendly.

As a result the school district prefers to go "old school" with paper and three-ring binders until Calif can get it's act together.