The Kent County Teachers Association told the commissioners on Tuesday that salary cuts and teacher/staff reductions are likely if the school system assumes the $500,000 in annual costs of nurses who serve the school system, a cost that was historically paid out of the health department’s budget.
“It’s going to dock the school budget an additional $500,000,” said Cheryl Bachman, vice president of the Kent County Teachers Association. “Now it’s up to the school board and the superintendent to find places where we can cut.”
Bachman said the number of teachers will be reduced and class sizes will likely go up because of the new burden.
The school system will have over $860,000 more in revenue this year because the commissioners are required to make up for last year’s Maintenance of Effort shortfall. The fiscal 2012 school budget was cut from $16.9 million to $16.1 million because the state cut local funding to education. The Maintenance of Effort law passed in regular session this year requires the counties to makeup the cuts from last year.
“Essentially we are going to have a chunk of money more than we had last year, but last year we were running on fumes,” Bachman said.
She said the cost of the nurses halves the increase in funding and doesn’t take into account a national curriculum, Common Core, which the county is required to adopt. School Superintendent A. Barbara Wheeler said the costs of implementing the new curriculum are unknown–but she said the cost of training teachers will run $60,000 just for this summer.
“It’s a national curriculum that many states have signed up for,” Bachman said. “It will standardize our curriculum so we are more likely to be teaching what everyone else is teaching across the country. It gives us better guidelines and it adds more rigor to our curriculum so our children are more college and career ready.”
Gren Whitman says
Ahem, we all know where our school dollars are!
According to the Center for American Progress, the price tag for a single M1 Abrams tank is $5 million, and the U.S. lost approximately 80 during its futile, aimless, and irresponsible escapade in Iraq, along with 55 Bradley fighting vehicles (at $3.17 mil per), 20 Stryker armored vehicles ($1.42 mil per), 250 Humvees (cheap at $186,000), etc.
You can rest assured the military is already replacing its missing equipment!
It’s pretty clear where cash-strapped Kent County, and other underfunded Maryland counties, plus the State of Maryland, plus its 49 sisters should be looking to pay for urgent public necessities (roads, schools, water supplies, health-care insurance for everyone, hospitals, parks, public safety, etc.).
Let’s get our priorities straight!
We can’t afford to continue spending more on our military than the next 14 nations combined (including China and Russia)!
Wouldn’t it be great if the Pentagon had to hold a bake sale to pay for its expensive toys?
joe diamond says
I gotta ask,
I have run through the educational plumbing and am about to hit the big tank………so I gotta ask……………..How did we get this far without:
“It’s a national curriculum that many states have signed up for,” . . . “It will standardize our curriculum so we are more likely to be teaching what everyone else is teaching across the country. It gives us better guidelines and it adds more rigor to our curriculum so our children are more college and career ready.”??????????????????????
For a moment let us pretend the (k-12) education system is fixed. All learning problems have been addressed early in every child’s school experience. All are ready for college or a career……..or more college……for a career after college.
NATIONAL CURRICULUM! Are they nuts!….not enough of that button!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is worse than NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Latin, “educare”…..to lead or teach. Manufacture = to stamp out identical wonks…….NATIONAL CURRICULUM???????…………!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Cause why?
Joe
Concerned Community Member says
I sure hope they get everything figured out because by doing all the different cuts they are proposing will only hurt the students in the long run. I would think the school system would figure out a way to make everything work since these kids our our future!!! Its been done in the past so why cant get do it now!!!
Editor says
Anonymous comment approved by editor
Cheryl Bachmann says
Just to be clear, the countries that we all want to compete with globally have national curriculums. It does not mean that teachers cannot implement their own lesson plans and be creative, it just means that if a 9th grade student in Arkansas is learning about the Reconstruction Amendments, then a student in Maryland will learn about them too. Maybe not the same year, maybe not even in the same unit, but they will learn about it because the Common Core thinks it is a topic each student should learn about. As for the money, some people in the community seem to be confused. Last year, the county commissioners broke the law of Maintenance of Effort without any penalty. The General Assembly saw fit to fix the law this year to make it harder for counties to not fund the schools. Right or wrong, the county now has to pay MOE. The Commissioners are trying to shift a cost (school nurses) to the school system. They are not paying this cost over Maintenance of Effort. This portion will come out of the school’s budget, which was already set slightly above Maintenance of Effort. The school system will now have to fund the school nurses, plus cut the $300,000 over MOE that they had included in their budget. The school system is not getting $800,000 extra. If you are an employer and you tell your employee that you can’t pay them $100 out of their paycheck one week, and then you give them $100 more in their next paycheck, you haven’t given them extra, you have given them what was owed. You are free to agree or disagree, but our county needs to be more invested in education and in building up commerce to bring young families in and to bring our graduates back as productive members of our county.