Madison High School athletic coaches must be better lobbyists than the Flandreau High School coaches. While the jockocracy at Madison High School mostly escaped the $28,000 axe the Madison Central school board took to extracurriculars Monday night, the varsity teams at Flandreau took their fair share of cuts at the Flandreau board's Monday meeting.
As part of a $200,000 budget reduction, brought to them largely by their sports-loving Senator Russell Olson, the Flandreau board cut $18,000 from extracurriculars by eliminating eight coaching positions, seven of them at the high school level. Football, volleyball, boys and girls basketball, track, and golf all lost an assistant. Flandreau also dropped a middle school track coach and a general coaches' assistant.
In much bigger cuts, Flandreau is attritting four faculty. They'll shift existing staff to cover the resiging K-5 P.E. teacher, fourth-grade teacher, and HS math teacher (Hey, English teacher, you're good with numbers, right?). They'll eliminate the resigning curriculum director's position. That attrition will make education $144,583 cheaper in Flandreau. It will also mean four fewer professional employment opportunities in the community.
KELO reports that the Associated School Boards of South Dakota is tracking all of these K-12 cuts and will issue a full report on teacher layoffs next month. In the meantime, you can see a running list of cuts as they come in on the Madville Times K-12 Education Cuts Project page. Readers, thank you for sending in links to stories on various school cuts. Not that I'm eager to hear about more reductions in educational opportunities, but do keep those links coming.
And the next time your legislators drop by for coffee, hand them a copy of the list and ask them how these cuts make South Dakota a better place.