A key 2011 reform: Find more money Accelerated Learning Resources

A key 2011 reform: Find more money

My reform agenda for this year focuses on one area: Funding education.

As I’ve written about before, my district had to cut $18 million dollars from the budget last year. Due to these cuts we now have 10 percent fewer adults in our school. We minimized cutting teachers, but we certainly impacted teaching. This year the district is predicting cuts of close to $25 million. While we focused on cuts at the high school level last year, which I believe was the right thing to do, this year we will have to make major cuts to elementary schools as well.

While I am alarmed at the impact cuts will eventually have on student learning, I am also concerned that cuts will kill important proposed reforms. While many of the reforms are cost neutral, they do rely on fundamental changes to the way we do things. And these changes rely on a high level of commitment and energy that will be hard to conjure up when an educator is focused on ensuring the same high level of student learning without the same resources.

The irony is that I believe in the midst of all of the cuts made to personel and to support resources, we still maintain high levels of student learning. We don’t want to maintain, however, we want to improve. To do so we need resources. We need to increase revenues!

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