School Budget

As a school board member, what programs and services will you prioritize at budget time?

The priorities will be centered around student achievement. While our schools are improving over the last several years – on the standardized testing, we’ve seen our scores improve generally; we’ve seen the ratings of our schools improve over time as well; we’ve seen our graduation go up – but I also see that we have performance gaps. While 75 to 80 percent of our students are proficient or better, that still means about 20 percent of our students aren’t.

Within that there are many things that we can focus on, but one area that I think is of particular importance is early education. In the primary years, the impact on being able to get our youngest students doing well sooner will have an impact and a payoff to us throughout their entire educational career. The PTRs (Pupil-Teacher Ratio) across the board are probably higher than they we’d like them to be, but especially in the primary years, we need to lower the PTR.

Many kids don’t arrive at school ready for school and there’s a line there or the responsibility of the school district that typically ends. The school district does support some pre-K education. I’d like to see how we can articulate better with pre-K programs that the state and federal government can support and see what role local government or school district can have in helping more kids to be ready when they get to school. But once they get into kindergarten, we need to increase our support at those levels.

Our priorities when it comes to the budget should be based on several different sources of input. First would be what items are non-negotiable as far as our school district leadership is concerned. Those things need to be taken off the table. Second, what does our community feel should be the priorities of our budget based on the community values and what individuals in the community indicate through the budget process is important when looking at increasing student achievement and continuing to increase the high school graduation rate.

I think that those programs which best support our kids in the classroom to achieve academic success and specifically go beyond that in becoming graduates and beyond high school are important. There’s a whole variety of programs going on in our schools, K-12. I certainly do believe in the current improvements that we’re doing to curriculum and professional development for literacy, math and sciences along with music.