Superintendent takes questions on squeezed school finances / LJWorld.com

Archive for Sunday, July 26, 2009

July 26, 2009

If state funding continues to deteriorate, Lawrence schools Superintendent Rick Doll said the size of classes could be in jeopardy.

“I can honestly say, we don’t have a whole lot of room on the list of what is left without cutting classroom teachers,” Doll said.

Doll’s comments were made Saturday morning during a meeting with the League of Women Voters of Lawrence/Douglas County that focused on education funding. Doll was joined by Mark Tallman, assistant executive director of the Kansas Association of School Boards.

Like any good classroom teacher, the new superintendent illustrated his points with visual aids: buckets demonstrating the many different pots of money the school district pools from for funding. “It’s confusing, it’s really confusing,” Doll said.

And, with such a complicated subject, the two men received plenty of questions from the audience about school financing. Some were directed at the school district’s recent decision to stop busing children who live within 2.5 miles of their school, a cut that saved about $450,000.

The school district has also had to find other ways to accommodate a $3 million drop in funding — eliminating the mental health support program and reducing the amount of clerical and janitorial staff. “You don’t cut $2.5 or $3 million without going pretty deep,” Doll said. “All the cuts made for the programs and people involved have been really, really painful.”

What the school has been able to do is keep classroom teachers, which maintains class sizes at existing levels. But Doll questioned how long that would last if funding continues to decline.

And the cuts have left the school district with a “bunker-like mentality,” which leaves little time and energy for creative thinking and innovative programming, Doll said. “You want us thinking about how we can do a better job educating our kids, … but what we are really thinking about is how do we make this next painful cut without hurting kids too much,” he said. “It isn’t good.”

Discussion

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26 July 2009
at 8:40 a.m.

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SettingTheRecordStraight (Anonymous) says…

One option is to begin charging wealthier parents for the actual cost of sending their kids to public schools. I'm generally not ever in favor of the government increasing fees on anyone for anything (it only grows the total size of government), but imagine it this way: For every $2 an upper-middle class family pays toward their child's education, $1 would go toward shoring up the existing funding gap and $1 would go toward reducing property taxes.

It's inherently fair for citizens to pay for what they get. I suppose this is why we ask college students pay tuition to attend public universitities. Why not ask wealthy parents to pay to send their house full of kids to public grade schools, all while making the tax burden on childless families and others much lower?
26 July 2009
at 9:34 a.m.

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cheeseburger (Anonymous) says…

STRS - please tell me you are being facetious!

I bet I can tell for whom you voted last fall - this 'redistribution of wealth' theme sounds eerily familiar! I can't tell you how pleased I am to work 60 hours a week just to pay my bills AND those of people who are too lazy to get off their keester and make an honest living, preferring instead to live off the system!

Perhaps some should 'redistribute' money spent on crack and meth and put it toward education!
26 July 2009
at 9:43 a.m.

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normal_entire_route (Anonymous) says…

wow, where does all this selfishness come from?
26 July 2009
at 9:21 p.m.

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kansasfaithful (Anonymous) says…

Schools have no money? Right, they just spend 4 million on new sports facilities during the worst economic crisis in decades. Schools receive over half of every tax dollar the state of Kansas takes in. So no question most of those tax dollars coming from the wealthier parents of students in Kansas schools. It really speaks to the mentality of school administrators that the only place left to cut are the teachers. I am amazed that teachers are so brainwashed with all this psycho babble. SettingTheRecordStraight and I just might agree. We should give all parents the right to pay their kids education. They should be able to take their children and their tax dollars and decide for themselves where they want to educate their kids. But until the schools and their unions are busted up and teachers free to compete for education dollars this runaway school spending will continue and for the most part our kids our teachers and our schools will continue to turn out a lousy product.
26 July 2009
at 9:40 p.m.

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Hwy50 (Anonymous) says…

@kansasfaithful, You're justing showing your ignorance of the matter if you believe the money used to pay for the athletic fields and teacher salaries come from the same pool of money. The state denies the schools the ability to used the locally raised money that pays for those fields to pay salaries.
26 July 2009
at 10:23 p.m.

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kansasfaithful (Anonymous) says…

Even another reason why the entire education system needs to change. Still any decision to build sports fields and at the same time threatening to lay off teachers demonstrates just how messed up the entire schools system really is not to mention the cost to the tax payer.