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The members of the Montevideo School Board put in some long hours last week, first with an hour-and-a-half work session Monday night followed by a two-hour-plus public input session Thursday night, and then an hour-long work session that began at 7 a.m. Friday morning as they labored to balance next year’s budget.
We commend Dr. Heller and the administration for laying out the options and for explaining them in a clear and understandable manner to the members of the public who attended Thursday night’s session. We wish those in the community who voted against the operating levy last fall had taken the time to attend the session; perhaps they would have come away with a better understanding of the issue.
When all was said and done, the board members had taken some bold steps to balance the 2010-2011 budget.
The district will close Sanford Elementary School as an enrollment center and reshuffle the grades among the remaining three school buildings.
This will require some adjustments on the part of staff and students. Students will be placed in buildings with students that are four or five years older at both the middle school and high school. There will be challenges for students and staff alike, but we are confident those challenges will be overcome.
At the same time there will be advantages as staff members will not be shuffling back and forth between schools as much as they have in the past because of realignments created to deal with budget cuts. More time spent teaching and less time spent racing between buildings will benefit both students and teachers.
Less pleasant is the choice the board made to direct the district administration to proceed with $767,000 in spending reductions. These cuts will have a negative impact on students and staff and it will be no fault of theirs, or the district’s for that matter. Again, the professionals with whom we entrust our most precious assets — our children and our grandchildren — will rise to the occasion and make the most of a bad situation not of their doing.
Until the state of Minnesota realizes that public education has been kept on a starvation diet for the past decade while at the same time having more and more demands placed on it, the situation will not improve.
Forcing local school districts to shoulder an ever-increasing funding burden in the name of fiscal responsibility may play well with some, but the members of local school boards see it for what it really is: fiscal sleight of hand.
It’s time for members on both sides of the aisle in the Legislature to stand up and support public education rather than kowtow to a fiscal ideology in which there is never a good time to raise taxes. You get what you pay for.
The members of the Montevideo School Board put in some long hours last week, first with an hour-and-a-half work session Monday night followed by a two-hour-plus public input session Thursday night, and then an hour-long work session that began at 7 a.m. Friday morning as they labored to balance next year’s budget.
We commend Dr. Heller and the administration for laying out the options and for explaining them in a clear and understandable manner to the members of the public who attended Thursday night’s session. We wish those in the community who voted against the operating levy last fall had taken the time to attend the session; perhaps they would have come away with a better understanding of the issue.
When all was said and done, the board members had taken some bold steps to balance the 2010-2011 budget.
The district will close Sanford Elementary School as an enrollment center and reshuffle the grades among the remaining three school buildings.
This will require some adjustments on the part of staff and students. Students will be placed in buildings with students that are four or five years older at both the middle school and high school. There will be challenges for students and staff alike, but we are confident those challenges will be overcome.
At the same time there will be advantages as staff members will not be shuffling back and forth between schools as much as they have in the past because of realignments created to deal with budget cuts. More time spent teaching and less time spent racing between buildings will benefit both students and teachers.
Less pleasant is the choice the board made to direct the district administration to proceed with $767,000 in spending reductions. These cuts will have a negative impact on students and staff and it will be no fault of theirs, or the district’s for that matter. Again, the professionals with whom we entrust our most precious assets — our children and our grandchildren — will rise to the occasion and make the most of a bad situation not of their doing.
Until the state of Minnesota realizes that public education has been kept on a starvation diet for the past decade while at the same time having more and more demands placed on it, the situation will not improve.
Forcing local school districts to shoulder an ever-increasing funding burden in the name of fiscal responsibility may play well with some, but the members of local school boards see it for what it really is: fiscal sleight of hand.
It’s time for members on both sides of the aisle in the Legislature to stand up and support public education rather than kowtow to a fiscal ideology in which there is never a good time to raise taxes. You get what you pay for.
