A statement to the Board - 3/2003

  As a parent and as a educator (psychologist), I would like to share some of my thoughts with you.  Your primary responsibility has to be to the students learning that occurs over the course of the school day.  What happens during the six and a half to seven hours that our children are in school has to have priority over anything that happens outside of the regular school day.  That means that extra curricular activities like clubs and athletics have to be sacrificed before we go and cut programs like reading recovery or increase class size.  I realize that this is drastic, but the district has already cut $25 million in the last five years.

I would really like to be standing here asking you to spend more money on Talented and Gifted education.  I would like to see my children and the estimated 5000 other children like them in our district receiving the next level of challenge.  Our District is not in compliance with state standards, and has not been in compliance for many years.  However, the budget deficits that we face are so large, that all I can ask is that you not cut funding for these services any further.

Perhaps the time has come to draw a line in the sand for both the State and the Federal governments.  As you well know our district is crippled by unfunded mandates.  In special education alone our district spends more than 51 million dollars and the proportion funded by the state and federal governments gets smaller each year.  There are 129 high needs students on whom the District spends over 5.7 million dollars.  I can’t believe that I am saying this, but is this fair?  If the state covered the costs of these high needs students as was recommended by the Kettle commission more than half of our district’s budget deficit would disappear.

I want to make a special plea for Talented and Gifted programing.  Based on the advice of the functional analysis, services for TAG were consolidated and the budget for these services were cut by more than 25%.  A small staff attempts to provide services to what has been estimated to be 5000 students

The fact of the matter is that this district has not been in compliance with state Standard (t) for over a dozen years now, further cuts are unacceptable.