Mack the Knife - AUSD edition
At last night, school staff released Proposed School Reductions in order to stave off a deficit of over $2million for FY 2007-2008.
I haven’t had a chance to look too closely, or try to understand what some of the cuts are, but key one’s that jump out at me are consolidating 3 Middle Schools into one $600K. I would imagine that means Chipman and Wood merge based on what’s happening with enrollments on the East and West Ends.
Elimination of $100K in Junior ROTC funding. Yeah, you read that correctly. I was surprised that after $6million in cuts over the past 6 years, there was still $100K going to JROTC? (We are scrounging for Arts programs in Alameda schools and yet fund JROTC, doesn’t make sense to me). $100K in reductions in athletic stipends (I’m hoping this is extracurricular sports and not Phys Ed.)
Oh, and there’s $62K in reductions in stipends for band and art! Because we haven’t managed to gut arts and music in the schools enough.
But there’s no hope here. We’re into cutting essential services no matter what we do.
I’m organizing information on some of the structural ways that we got here, hope to have it by the end of the week.
Lots of info available on Mike McMahon’s website
Barbara Kahn
February 1st, 2007 at 4:29 pm
If the mi;ddle schools consolidate, the plan is not to combine wood and chipman, but rather reconfigure boundary lines and end up with 2 approximately equal schools. Hopefully the district would, as it does not now do, enforce the boundary lines. Kids who should be at Encinal are permitted to attend Alameda with a wink from the district. Similarly, kids who should be at Wood or Chipman are enrolled at Lincoln.
More to the point, is the usual, stick it to the west end schools and spare the east end. Encinal and Chipman are slated to love a vice principal. Both schools serve a very broad segment of the community–from the affluent neighborhoods to the transitional housing on the base. The kids from the traditional housing come in from an assortment of traumatic experi;ences–from homelessness to having moved from school to school, and thus with greater needs, academically and socially. No Child Left Behind imposes the same expectations on these schools as on schools with a less varied population.
The kids who do well, do well. The perception, fostered by the newspapers among other sources is that Encinal is inferior academically to Alameda–As many of Encinal students are admi;tted to the UC system as are Alameda students, who should by proportionality have more admittances, but this is not the case.
A previous administration posited that equity was give everyone the same amount of money. That is not ;how equity works. Equity means create an even playing field first.
Mark
February 1st, 2007 at 10:57 pm
ROTC is a tough one. I think more kids get something out of it than get talked into joining the military. Half the funding for ROTC is from the Army (another $100,000 one would guess), but the kids in the program aren’t in P.E.. The claims at the meeting tonight were that if you cut ROTC you have to hire two additional P.E. teachers, so you don’t evenm save the entire $100,000.
In the past I would have supported retention of at least some funding for ROTC, but the picture is so bleak this year that it seems like time to drop it.
What was unclear is is how much of this problem is likely to reappear next year? How much is due to enrollment drop? The district keeps phrasing the deficit as being “because of the arbitration with teachers ” as if the district didn’t owe the money because of a previous commitment to teachers which they didn’t keep and hoped to dodge through arbitration. They tried to pretend that they would win the arbitration and thus ignored this looming deficit which is not a take away on the part of the teachers, but a long term bungle of the budget.
Alamedans For Better Schools (Ron M)
February 3rd, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Great to see the comments and questions.
We are holding a meeting Thursday 2/8 6:30pm to organize those who want to help Alameda public schools funding.
Barbara Kahn and Mike McMahon has great information as does the Alameda Education Foundation web site http://www.AlamedaEducation.org
The funding problems are layered and long standing. No one is blaming the teachers that I have talked to, in fact I think we’d love to figure out how to pay more. Our reality is that unless we want to let the State run the District we have to run a very efficient District and schools while trying to get more dollars in now and the future.
It is a big problem, but WE can make a difference if we all work together!
You can email AlamedaSchools@alamedanet.net to help and get more information. We’ll send along to this site as well!