SHOCKING QOTD
From a school district facing budget cuts:
One of the ways the district has tried to address funding shortages is by not filling positions when people retire. Summers said the district is trying to avoid firing teachers, so they just won’t hire anybody they don’t need.
“We would love to have more, but we have to live within the budget,” Summers said.
They’re not hiring folks they don’t need? What is the (education) world coming to?! As usual, IAATM.
In the just-concluded school year the district lost 49 students which represent more than $280,000 based on the level of funding the state gave the district per student in the last school year. That money did not come out of the district’s budget; it merely represents how valuable each student is.
Yes, each student is valuable. But only for how much money they bring in. Does that mean a special needs student, who might cost the district more than she brings in, is worthless and should be discarded? Seems to follow.
She added that the district’s budget is about 35 percent local and 65 percent state funds, and more than half of the budget is spent directly on students.
I call “Bullshit!” School districts typically spend 75% of their budgets on salaries. I don’t think teacher salaries should be described as money being “spent directly on students.”
I hope this sentence wasn’t written by a graduate of the district:
At the high school level the district has developed a new foundations class in an effort to try and better prepare students for success and put them in position to go where they want after leaving the RE-1 district, and it’s also implemented the Reading Recovery program, which identifies weak readers in the first grade and tries to correct problems early, with the idea that better readers will be better students.
“Try and”? Geez!
But, finally, some good news at the end:
An interesting sidenote is that the number of home-school students in the RE-1 district has nearly doubled between the fall of 2001 and 2005. According to the state of Colorado, there were 33 home-schooled students within the RE-1 district in fall 2001 compared to 75 in fall 2005. Summers said she doesn’t have an answer as to why that number has gone up. In a March interview, she said that perhaps people home school because they want to spend more time with their kids.
Perhaps. Or perhaps parents want their kids to be valued for who they are and not for how much money they bring in.
6 Responses to “SHOCKING QOTD”
 Comment by JJ Ross July 1st, 2007 at 12:04 pm |
Some see schooling as more blatantly about economics than ever and use this week’s SCOTUS decision to prove the point. We’ll probably have to speak that language if we intend to affect public education policy: |
 Comment by Daryl Cobranchi July 1st, 2007 at 12:27 pm |
That was my first thought when I heard of the decision. If there’s going to be any kind of AA it ought to be based on economics, not skin color. Under the perverse AA laws of this country, my kids could officially be declared Hispanic and eligible for all sorts of bennies. But I make a decent living and there’s no way they’re underprivileged. Over privileged? Perhaps. 🙂 |
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Comment by JJ Ross July 1st, 2007 at 12:55 pm |
And once one gives up the pretense of pure education and openly accepts economic analysis as THE basis of schooling decisions, then all sorts of other interesting findings demand equal access to the pubic debate — for example, family and neighborhood income matter more than FTE funding or teacher income, so from a hard-nosed economic argument, to economically enhance kids’ lives we should forget about schooling and and pour all those dollars from school budgets directly into underfunded families and neighborhoods, without passing through middle-class teachers first. If we reject that obvious solution, then we have to admit that it’s more about teacher and school service economics than it is really about what’s best for underprivileged kids of any color . |
 Comment by SarahG July 1st, 2007 at 5:48 pm |
Daryl wrote: “Yes, each student is valuable. But only for how much money they bring in. Does that mean a special needs student, who might cost the district more than she brings in, is worthless and should be discarded? Seems to follow.” I reply: Yes, in some districts that is exactly how it works. When we lived in California, I heard our district was rabidly anti-homeschooling — until I tried to place my special-needs child in school. Providing a FAPE for my son would be prohibitively expensive, so the school administration explicitly asked me to take both children home and continue homeschooling them. Accommodations would have cost much more than the school would have received from the state for two additional students, so they did not want us at their school. Now we live in New Jersey, and I have indeed heard of (some, not all) districts here that work to prevent special-needs children from enrolling, because they are a drain on resources. |
 Comment by Darren July 2nd, 2007 at 9:40 am |
We (HSLDA) ran into some school districts in Kentucky and Tennessee back a few years ago that encouraged “problem kids” (truancy, bad attitudes, etc.) to homeschool, just to get them off the public schools’ hands. |
 Comment by HS Mom July 2nd, 2007 at 10:12 am |
Daryl wrote: “Yes, each student is valuable. But only for how much money they bring in. Does that mean a special needs student, who might cost the district more than she brings in, is worthless and should be discarded? Seems to follow.” Unfortunately, this sort of crap happens all the time. I’m currently suing the CA Dept of Education for telling me to “take your problem elsewhere”. This was said in front of my then six-year old daughter. The school wouldn’t even look at my daughter’s enrollment forms. As a result, my child missed the first week of second grade because I had no where to enroll her. She is now homeschooled. I *never* considered my daughter disabled until I moved to this state. |