The teachers are back and ready to start a wonderful new school year. I’m pleased to report that the District received a Bright Star Award for both elementary and secondary schools for 2010. This is best on high academic achievement at a low per pupil cost. Only 81 school districts out of 869 districts were so recognized.
Please remember that we will be running full days of school this week! Let’s all work together to make this a great year!
While the District strives to be as responsible fiscally as it can during this challenging economic time , we continue to be faced with fewer revenue dollars from Springfield. Recently we learned that we will face an approximate 25% reduction in expected reimbursement for reimbursement for our regular bus routes. We also learned that we will receive no Reading Improvement dollars, so the District will be forced to fund elementary reading aides out of local proceeds.
Though some parents question the need to pay a registration fee, we try to be sensitive and respectful of the current climate and did not increase those fees for 2010-11.
Here is an article from the Chicago Tribune that helps share some of the hardship that this “cut” from the State Board of Education creates for Illinois districts.
While California previously held the mythical title of “most challenged state”, Illinois has seemingly moved into that first place role. What the General Assembly and our Governor has done to its citizens over the past several years has been called unconscienable. This New York Times article features Comptroller Hynes, who seems to carry the same philosophy as many others, that Illinois cannot “cut” their way out of this deficit…. if “cutting programs” is the only method employed.
A good friend of mine shared, “When BP or Enron devastate human lives we call for the leaders heads, when legislators devastate human lives, we generally re-elect them.”
Geneseo Schools are still owed more than $1,000,000 from this past fiscal year. Though the Governor’s budget appears to hold us harmless regarding General State Aid, there are many unknowns from unspecified cuts that he has announced. We do know that we will not receive the Reading Improvement dollars we have in the past, nor the ADA Safety and Block Grant money that we have used for many operational expenses. Those two grant programs alone account for nearly $200,000 in state revenues.
We continue to do what we have to do, collaboratively, to maintain the quality and the breadth of programs offered to students and the school community, but inevitably there will need to be changes.
Clay Shirky recently completed a TED Talk in which he compares the LOLCat phenomena and a communal, caring website called Ushasidi, and discusses how the world can create utility out of the more than 1 trillion hours humans have for “off time” work… most of which occurs online.
Our own James Roodhouse has delivered many great examples of cognitive surplus, most recently as he has created templates for iPhone and iPad apps that have far more utility than their initial function. See what you think about Clay’s commentary.
General State Aid revenues are calculated based upon multipliers of district property wealth, numbers of students in poverty and the Best 3 Months of our Student Average Daily Attendance.
The chart included in this post shows how our attendance has dropped over the last decade.
If you presume that our “net” General State Aid per pupil is a little more than $3,000 per ADA, our “lost” opportunity for state revenues would be nearly $1.2 Million.
ADA 1998–2010
1998-2010 Ave Daily Attendance
This is a reminder that Online Registration will close on June 13, 2010. To date we have more than 50% of our students who have registered for next year. You should be receiving a SchoolMessenger call on May 27th to remind you also about registration.
Here are the audio files in .m4a format (for iTunes) and .wav for other devices.
Over the past several months the news has been overflowing with reports from state budget woes, which translates to school budget woes. This link will take you to a location on the Illinois State Board of Education’s website where you can see how much money the Geneseo School District should be expecting from Springfield this fiscal year. You can check out other state revenue accounts and see what has been vouchered, but not yet processed by the State Comptroller. You can see that in regular transportation reimbursements alone, we should be receiving over $1M this year, but it looks like we will be shorted half that amount.
So what does that mean? Well, we will have to spend down our reserves or borrow money in order to make our busing payments. It seems a real shame that we not only have to worry about how to pay for the essential curricular supplies and materials we need to educate students, but now we will have to borrow money just to transport our students to school!
EDUCATION WEEK