As mentioned before, I've volunteered to sit on the long range planning steering committee for the school district. Long story short, since funding for Michigan's schools comes directly (and primarily) from the state, not local taxes, and is tied to the school district's enrollment, well, with the sucky economy you have less tax dollars to go the schools and you have less students for the school. Every year, the district has slashed programs and items from the budget, closed a school five years ago....anyway, THIS effort is supposed to be to stop the cycle of cuts...with the realization that if we go on the way we are, with declining enrollments, etc, that the school district will be in a deficit in 2.5 years.
So, I'm on this steering committee. There's 60 people on it; which seems like a high number to me. And the process is just frustrating as heck for me. There are supposed to be 3 2-hour committee meetings, each followed by a 2-hour community forum, with one final committee meeting to finalize recommendations for the school board. And I just don't think that's anywhere enough time to make this type of decisions. So, the first two meetings; all they/we did was review the guiding principles and criteria that we'll use for the next 5 meetings. And all I can think is there's 4 hours that we won't have to do the important work.
The next meeting is Wednesday, where we finally get into the guts of the problem and discuss options. The school district sent out an email with enrollment and school capacity information on Friday for us to review before the meeting on Wednesday...and it's not a pretty picture. The elementary school and middle schools are about half full...just looking at the numbers, it's pretty easy to see that we could be closing 2 schools, if not three.
So, there will be some pretty drastic changes coming for the boys. Right now, the school district is configured K-5, 6-8, 9-12, and I could see it becoming K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12 or K-4, 5-6, 7-8 (or 5-8), 9-12, or some variation of that. My hope, when we started this, is that the long-range planning included everything (athletics, community education, administration) as opposed to the place where we could have the most bang for our buck. I just don't think it's right to have (and to spend) on certain luxuries(?...my word, which may not be other people's) while we are closing schools and eliminating programs.
I realize now that I'll probably leave this process extremely frustrated and disappointed by how it went. The school district has been very close-mouthed about what could happen during this process in it's announcements to the community; I understand they don't want to say anything about what might happen for fear of being accused of having the preferred alternative already in hand, but, I just don't think there's a lot of the community who understands what's coming down the pike, and I'm sure that once they do figure that out (whether by hearing it once the options are developed and presented) it's going to be a whole lot of loud public opinion.
