I went to the board meeting Tuesday night. No major items on the agenda that I was interested in, but I'm a little interested in everything about the district, and I'm the board liaison for the PTO, so I figured I should go on nights that I don't have Scouting. I was late and missed the students first presentation. The 4 major points of discussion were the state aid numbers being released, the purchase of the bus garage on Hillside Ave, formally ending our participation in the Nat'l School Lunch program, and a change to the high school grading procedure.
The state aid numbers are within a percent of the projection, but still almost one FTE short of what we expected, so that's a little bit of a bummer. There's not much else to say about it, though, since there's nothing we can do. I'm going to the forum next Thursday to hopefully convince elected officials to spend more on schools, but I just don't know whether my heart is in that. I really want school funding to be as local as possible. As painful as the transition is, moving towards a budget with a smaller percentage coming from state aid is probably a good thing in the long-run.
I think buying the garage is a great idea, and I'm confident that the information will be presented in a way that everyone agrees with. It's good for the budget on both the revenue and expenditure sides, and it's not really a change from current operations. It does set the stage for easier out-sourcing of bus drivers, so that's the only group that will potentially vote NO. I am hoping it's a small turnout of mostly parents and teachers, who ought to be strongly in favor of it.
The Nat'l Lunch Program is the perfect example of why I want funding to be local. A bunch of well-intentioned politicians in DC designed a lunch program that is simply inferior in every way to what we were already doing. So the students stopped participating, so it became a money loser instead of break-even. I'm glad we're ending our participation.
The high school grading procedure presentation was dumb-founding. While I fully support the procedure they recommend, I was surprised that we weren't already using it, and especially surprised at the way the presenters talked about it. They made it sound like this complex mathematical thing that was hard to do and even harder to explain. To me, it seemed really straightforward. In the past, we converted grades from a 0-100 scale to an H/A+/A/A-/B+/.../F scale, which is a huge loss in precision. We then converted the letter grades to a "quality point" scale which is sort of like a GPA, but it had one arbitrary adjustment for H, and was different enough that colleges just re-compute GPAs anyway. Now, we'll just stop at the 0-100 scale, maintaining a somewhat arbitrary value (105) for H's during the transition.
No comments from the community during this board meeting, which is the most entertaining part, at least to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment