It's always nice to be able to post about good news for HSD! As you have probably read in one of the local papers or on the HSD website by now, an unexpectedly large contribution from Gain Share resulted in about $728000 extra showing up in our budget. At the August meeting, we agreed to use $466000 of that to restore the final 'budget reduction' day that had been cut from our district calendar. The remainder will be targeted towards augmenting staff for particular classrooms which are identified as having special need, such as larger-than-expected classes in September (advance registration is never 100% accurate), or other academic challenges.
At the meeting, I was a little skeptical about restoring the day. Of course restoring a lost day sounds like an objectively good thing. But almost all the arguments in favor of this sounded to me like they were primarily based in either public relations, or in emotion: "I want to feel like our district is no longer broken". But as I see it, the question we should be asking is: what will make the biggest difference in the lives of some of our district's children?
If students attend school for about 170 days of roughly equal importance, an additional day is only about a 1/170 (0.6%) improvement to each child's education, a barely noticeable amount of across-the-board change. On the other hand, if we have a kindergarten class of 35 in one of our challenged high-poverty schools and are able to supply an additional teacher's aide to that class, that is probably a real, noticeable improvement to the education of those 35 kindergarteners. So, my inclination would be to not bother with restoring the lost day, and instead direct all the extra money to such targeted local improvements.
I didn't argue too hard on this, though, because I saw one compelling argument in favor of restoring the day: keeping our implied promises to the unions. The employee unions had willingly agreed to the budget reduction days when times were tight, and though we did not have a contractual obligation, it was strongly implied that this decision would be reversed when we had the money. Because of this, it made sense to me to follow through and restore the missing day, even though I didn't find the other arguments that convincing.
Anyway, as always, I would love to hear your thoughts on these issues. Send me an email or FB message anytime, or come visit my next Constituent Coffee, held the first Saturday of each month, 10am, at the Human Bean at 10th & Oak. I hope to see you there!
BTW- If you're curious about the followup on my discussions of problems with the district Equity programs: In one of those "be careful what you wish for" situations, it looks like the solution will be to put me on the committee designing the next round of Equity training. Stay tuned for further updates as that committee starts to meet...
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As a father of a child who had a kindergarten class size of 35 not too long ago, I am glad to see you heard us when we came to the board meeting, and were thinking about that still. I felt the exact same way. An extra day would probably be spent watching a movie in many classrooms, but an additional teacher would have made a world of difference to about 70 kindergartners. Promise or no, I'm sad this tipped to the unions. It sounds like we came close to putting students needs first for a minute there. Keep thinking about that, please.
ReplyDeleteBTW, however it happened, our school did get another kindergarten teacher this year (half day) even though there are less than 70 students this time, from what I heard. We are really glad to see that happened.
ReplyDeleteever-- Just to clarify, a portion of the additional funds still did go to providing additional staff in targeted areas, just not 100%. Sounds like your child benefited from the areas we were able to target. Glad to hear that it helped!
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