School Board

I went to the school board meeting tonight, at least part of it. I had the little kids, and it ran late, so we had to leave. I've never been to one, but after talking with our middle school principal about the district a little and hearing rumors that we might go to a 4 day a week schedule, I decided to attend.

When we got there, the board was sitting up there, basically having their meeting, but then inviting comments from the audience at times. Kind of surreal for me since it looked like something I've seen in movies. They have a policy to review positions that become open, in this case 3 positions that were open because of retirements upcoming. They talked about the impact of replacing the person or not, deciding to keep two people, closing one other position (district librarian).

There wasn't a lot of discussion, and not a lot of info from the board. I guess they don't have time to do too many details in these meetings, and I should read more about if before I come.

Then came one of the two big decisions that I wanted to hear about. We have an alternative high school, running on the expeditionary model that Delaney did for 2nd grade. It only has about 40 kids in it (compared to 500+ for the high school). Therefore they said it costs about $15k/student to run. Compared to about $6k/student at the high school. At first glance, in a rural district, you'd say "Close it."

However if you dig a little, there are about $5k/student they're allocating to the school that is a sunk cost. Between various other activities and the pre-school, those costs still are there. So now it's $10k/student v $6k. Granted we're talking a $400k savings, or are we? Is it really then a bit less since you have to educate those students? I didn't get to ask the question because we had to leave.

A lot of parents and students from that school had shown up and gave lots of comments on why the school shouldn't be closed.

I'm torn. On one hand I think that if the district has budget issues, we should close it. It's a harsh decision since I know many of these kids don't fit into "normal" learning situations, but high school is a transition time. Life gets hard after that and you need to start learning how to get along. Even if you don't fit in, you need to go along and get along with society. Time to face some hard realities and high school does help with that.

On the other hand I don't want to spend more on law enforcement if we can start to handle things in education.

There was a partial option to let some teachers go and move 1/2 the curriculum online, but I'm not sure that's a great idea. The principal himself said he wasn't sure that was really "education"

Not sure what's going to happen there, but I'll read up.

The other thing that I missed (maybe) was moving to a 4 day a week school system. Longer days, slightly longer year, but Friday's off. That's interesting and on the surface I think it's crazy, but the middle school principal gave me some good reasons, of which cost isn't one. I'd like to hear the debate on that one and I hope there is one in March.