On the eve of the school board election, the Madison Central school board gave $10,000 to the Madison Booster Club to cover part of the $23,000 the club spent buying a used mini-bus for travel to contests. The board then axed $28,000 from extracurricular activities, mostly in the form of cutting coach positions.
Interestingly, the cuts to sports happened almost exclusively at the middle-school level, with just one ninth-grade volleyball coach cut. In our high school, we will still have six guys running around on the sidelines coaching football, six basketball coaches, and six track coaches.
What cuts the board did impose on the high school focus on the arts. Rather than supporting and promoting the arts, the board chose to eliminate the assistant oral interpretation coach, the assistant debate coach, a high school summer band camp, and the music director for the spring play. So much for staging Godspell or Grease any time soon. And so much for encouraging the growth of speech and arts activities that have a much more direct relationship to satisfying academic objectives and building direct job skills than throwing balls and tackling each other. At the high school level, when it is arguably less important for kids to play ball and more important for them to diversify their academic and artistic experiences to get ready for college, Madison still puts sports first, arts second.
Note also that there was no public discussion of these cuts prior to Monday night's meeting. The Watertown school board held a public forum March 28 to solicit public input on potential budget cuts. Rapid City's superintendent has been doing the same thing, holding four public budget meetings over a month (last shot: April 18, General Beadle Elementary, 6-8 p.m.!). The Vermillion school board floated cuts for public discussion first.
But Madison? Nope. We just drop the bomb, then tell the paper the board "will review other budget reductions in the future," with no indication of what those cuts might be.
Madison Central, do you know how easy it would be to seek public input on the budget cuts we have to make? Have Vince Schaefer shoot a five-minute video outlining the current thinking, put it on YouTube, embed the video on the district's front page, and open the comment section. Even if only 15% of us want to show up and participate in an election, we still need to keep opening the doors and eagerly reaching out to draw public participation. If Madison's school board would do that, they might hear that some constituents believe there are better places to cut at the high school than the arts... or that maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't be cutting high school programs at all and should instead be making the case for more revenue to support those vital opportunities.
Or we could just avoid all of the cuts for at least one more year with a simple accounting trick.
What concerns me in terms of how an educational product is delivered to students is what kind of emphasis is placed on educators themselves. We seem only too willing to discuss brick and mortar but serious discussion on staffing levels, program offerings, and salary levels takes a back seat. During the evening of the open forum on the MHS renovation project, all the talk pro and con dealt with a B & M project involving a 1.12 million annual payment while a $380,000 drop in school aid funding by the state barely brought mention. The real crisis facing our students is much more than larger bathrooms, art room kiln, and event center gym. The real issue is how we bring on board excellent educators every year with better professional pay at a staffing level that serves students not handicap them. Like everything in life where and how we spend our money reflects our values. Better education NEEDS and expects funding. Until we change the way we fund education, we will continue to escort education to the dirty cistern of indifference and neglect.
Dells didn't have any public forums, either.
Shelly, a lot of school boards and other government officials still don't get what public participation means in the Internet era. We have some training to do!
Folks, I've lived here 21 years, and it's fairly obvious to me that the school board doesn't want public input. Nor does the city commission or the county commission or the state legislature. In South Dakota, the basic attitude appears to be, "you elected us, now we're in charge, so leave us alone."
My Dad was much more political that I am. I miss him dearly, even after almost 8 years. I use the things my Dad said in my classes. Anyway, my Dad used to say that people ran for office thinking they wanted to help other people but as soon as they won they thought they had won a beauty contest and that they knew everything. I have never taken the time to validate his statement, I just liked his down home spin on things.
{CAH: That's funny, Wayne: I thought Nathan, the youngest candidate, was the cutest. ;-) }
While I'm tempted to agree with Eve, I would like to see solid examples of city and county governments doing things differently and successfully in other places, with specifics before that condemnation. Was it actually different the last place Eve lived? Why so then. It's human nature to sit on the couch unless motivated. Tom Farrell seemed sincerely frustrated by a lack of input early on, so I'm not ready to let the electorate off so easily.
And John, I can sympathize with Tom's frustration. If we open the door for public participation and no one comes in, that's depressing, just like Tuesday's abysmal turnout. However, the proper and necessary response is to try even harder, to not just open the door for folks to come in but to go out that door and get people, to reach out even more actively.
Half the people at that school board meeting started with, "I said I wasn't going to say anything." They went to a public meeting determined not to talk. That's crazy, and not the fault of the school board. Granted, some easy to return questionnaires and a web presence encouraging feedback should have happened early on, but it's to the point the electorate needs a free pancake supper to get em down there.
Please don't completely blame the electorate either. We were at a school board meeting and voiced our concerns with the cost and manner of paying for it before the final vote to proceed, but we left with the feeling that our opinions didn't matter. They knew what they wanted and that's what they were going to do. I'm not at all sure that the board wants input from the public if it doesn't agree with their wishes.