Supervisory Union

So let’s talk about the November 10th budget meeting. There was so much focus on broad talk about the drastic effect of the cost cutting needed to get to a 3% target that it wasn’t until the end there was talk about creative ways to cut down. One idea was to offer less attended classes less often, which makes perfect sense. How about some more talk like that? How about more talk about bulk purchases with other school if we’re not doing that? What about dropping programs that were grant funded rather than continuing to fund them out of the general budget? Well, if you don’t spend enough money you must be doing something wrong. That must be why having a low per pupil spending not always preferred. Instead of comparing graduates moving on to careers, tech schools, colleges or other such performance based goals, we are beat over the head with comparisons of per pupil spending. If we get too low per pupil we must be sacrificing something. Why? Maybe we made better decisions. Just because our spending is lower doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to keep it that way. Maybe it’s time to get more creative with cost sharing or innovative class designs to offer classes while not incurring extra costs. I took Accounting 2 with one other person. How could this be possible? Because we sat in with an Accounting 1 class and did structured self-study. No extra teaching costs. No extra classroom needed. No need to mess with schedules. Get creative.

There was also creative talk about how to bring in tuition students from other towns. That was interesting, not so much because it’s a great idea, but because the SI spoke against privatizing public school dollars. If you’re marketing what your product is, finding a way to bring in dollars by doing so and sending staff out to show your product, that’s an awful lot like private school. You’re sending guidance counselors who should be guiding your students to fairs to try and bring in new students. If everyone is so busy, why not work with the students, rather than working on the marketing.

On the subject of marketing, one smart person suggest a viral campaign based on recent sport successes and such. This is a perfect idea with the current tools available. The SI then pondered who would have time to work on this. I suggest the same person that made that beautiful blog post about how he spends his winter mornings pondering and educating himself on the weather to decide whether a snow day will occur. If you can take that time to find the pretty snow pictures and type up that, you sure can spend a few minutes to make these short posts for these things. I saw plenty of other perfectly short posts on his Twitter, so I think it would work out great.
Pre-K is going to be another great issue. Once we talked about the funds needed for that and how we’re just privatizing public funds, we skip over how we poured all those public dollars into Apple to fund the 1:1 iPad program. Seems to me that paying someone else to educate a child because you weren’t offering enough slots for parents who wanted the product is the same as paying for technology because it wasn’t fair that some kids have it and others don’t. If an iPad is a tool that enables education, why isn’t a teacher who has the capacity to offer a product that does the same thing? Getting irate about the State pushing out the initiative is showing a bit more about you’re misunderstanding of your product. You sell education, that’s clear from wanting to bring in more tuition students. Either find a way to keep the dollars and offer the product or look at it as helping you do your job and see if those private educators can supplement your Kindergarten programming. I’d take more actual education than iPads any day.

Then we have those tools. The great iPad which will make things more equal. But what about those other investments that don’t seem to have been planned or implemented well. What about those dollars that went into the online system for teachers and parents to interact where you can see you child’s work and assignments. That’s right, it doesn’t work so well so many teachers don’t use it. Now some teachers also use their own systems to interact with parents. But who vets all those systems for quality and privacy.

"The number is the number. If the number is lower, it can only be lower." Well folks, that’s the logic we should use. Let’s make a reasonable, responsible budget based on need and creativity. If we use those numbers, they can never be higher because as I’ve learned from Ned, the number can’t be higher, because the number is the number, or maybe it’s lower. Let’s just hope that number isn’t the FWSU budget, because if it’s that, we just tell everyone we found savings, use our surpluses and then ask for even more funds the next year.

I love public school. I'm the product of public schools. I'm a product of the great teaching I received there. I think creative staff making creative choices can find ways to efficiently deliver programs in a cost reasonable manner. No one is saying an increase isn't needed, but if the number is going up every year, you'd better expect to keep that number low.