Monday, April 5, 2010
Special Meeting of The Board of Education April 7th at GDS, 7pm
The Monona Grove Board of Education is holding a special meeting this Wednesday, April 7th in the Glacial Drumlin IMC at 7pm. The meeting was called to examine and discuss several budget reduction proposals. These proposals include imposing a 5% building and department budget cut, extending our district walk zone to two miles, eliminating 4 FTE IMC paraprofessionals, and reducing related arts instructional minutes per week for grades K-5. Please note that due to time constraints, public appearances will be limited to three minutes per person with a thirty minute total time allotment.
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These would have been some very painful cuts, but it's also irresponsible to not balance the budget, so what do you think should be done?
ReplyDeleteWe are up to 811K, about 90K short of where I personally feel comfortable being. We continue to wait for the financial analysis of a 5% cut of our district's department budgets. This is information that I have been requesting at televised Board meetings for the last two months. We still have not been presented with this information. Other budget cuts are still being examined by our administration and we will continue to wait to see what savings can be realized from them. What do you think should be done? What cuts would you like to make?
ReplyDeleteJessica, thanks for your reply. What cuts would I like to make? None, of course :) Like everyone else, I wish I knew the magic answer, but I don't. I wish we could keep all buildings open, build new ones, keep class sizes low, keep our wonderful strings program, etc., etc., etc. But we can't.
ReplyDeleteSo to answer your question more, I would like a closer look at athletics and extra-curriculars. Those are are extemely popular, however, so I think making cuts there would be extremely unpopular. I'm guessing you would see new faces at board meetings if those were more threatened :) I think cuts there would be preferable to increased class sizes and reductions and/or elimination of programs and staff in areas like art, music, phy. ed, library, office, etc.
Those are the types of programs that I think should and could be be more self-sustaining. They are "extras." Very popular and useful extras (so please don't think I'm against them) but not critical to student achievement.
I'm glad I'm not in your shoes, stuck having to make the hard choices, but I'm very worried about what's happening (and in some cases, not happening.) My family, my kids in particular, will certainly be impacted by the decisions the Board chooses to make as well as the ones they choose to postphone.