Juneau school district superintendent Mark Miller is proposing getting rid of the district’s advisory budget committee. Some form of the group has been involved with the budget process since 2009.
Last year’s budget committee included 17 representatives from the schools, education unions and the community. One of its primary recommendations was delaying a new language arts curriculum, which the school board did not follow.
Miller says that’s not something the budget committee should’ve even been considering.
“The question to a budget committee should not be, ‘Should we adopt a curriculum?’ That’s not a role that a budget committee should have, in my opinion. The budget committee should be talking about, ‘How do we allocate the dollars so that this curriculum, which we’ve already decided is going to be adopted, gets financed?’” Miller says.
Instead of the budget committee, Miller is proposing an alternate plan. He wants to release an initial budget in early December. School principals would conduct site council meetings on the budget and the district would hold public forums in early February.
“The community’s role is to give input to the board, which they elected to make these decisions. The role of the community, I would hope, is that they have discussions with their principal around what they think is important at their school and that they attend public meetings and let everybody know what they think is important and why,” Miller says.
Coming up with a different way of doing the budget was something he was tasked with, he says.
“The board was clear that the committee process that they used the last couple of years was not getting the results that they were looking for, so they directed that we look at changing that in some way. So I did some research on what other districts do and how they go about it, so I looked at what Anchorage, Fairbanks, Kenai do,” Miller says.
The school board will discuss the budget process at a work session 4:30 p.m. tomorrow at the Thunder Mountain High School library. Members of the public can comment at the beginning of the school board meeting at 6 p.m.