Targeted financial resources
John Heim - Emporia superintendent of schools
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
OUR SCHOOLS ARE clamoring with activity. Maintenance, custodial and technology staff are hard at work getting the buildings ready for students to return next week. Principals and office staff are processing enrollment information and preparing for open houses and orientations. New teachers are attending several days of training to learn our reading and math curriculum and how to use different instructional strategies to ensure that all children will learn. Returning teachers are visiting their classrooms to get them ready for the first day and work on lesson plans.
In the backdrop of all this activity, the business office is working with the Board of Education to build a budget that supports our business of teaching and learning. The task is especially difficult this year. Kansas school districts are trying to open their doors with significantly less funding this year. In Emporia, state funding cuts, changes to the formula and a decline in assessed valuation have stripped $1.7 million from our budget. For the first time in our memory, we are looking to use reserves to fill in the gaps.
Next week, 4,600 children will walk through our doors. Our state has a Constitutional and moral obligation to provide each of them with a suitable public education. This obligation, affirmed by the Kansas Supreme Court in the Montoy case, includes both adequacy of funding and equity in distribution of funding among school districts.
What the court said in 2004 was the quality of a child’s education should not be based on where the child lives. Because ours is a poor district – based on our assessed valuation per student — we rely heavily on state resources. In fact 85 percent of our budget comes from the state; the remaining 15 percent comes from local taxpayers.
The Legislature responded to the Montoy ruling with resources that have allowed our district to provide a stronger education for Emporia children. Our student achievement results show that we have invested this money wisely.
We have used additional state resources to build a strong core curriculum in reading and math, create diagnostic assessments and prescriptive interventions. This work has been done by our administrators and teachers with the help of instructional strategists and coaches and instructional technology tools. We have continued to place strong emphasis on professional development to help teachers learn effective instructional strategies to help individual learners. We spend more time working in collaborative teams and analyzing student data. We also have invested in better salaries for teachers to ensure they will remain in our district and our students will benefit from these teachers’ advanced skills.
The results have been nothing short of amazing. Our preliminary 2009 state assessment results show another year of improvement in reading and math for all students and all of our student subgroups. Student proficiency is at an all-time high of 81 percent in math and nearly 83 percent in reading.
We are reducing the achievement gap while raising the achievement of even our brightest students. More students are performing in the top exemplary category and fewer students are scoring below the state proficiency level.
State results will be officially released next week by the Kansas State Board of Education and we expect to make Adequate Yearly Progress in both reading and math for the second year. More importantly, the district is making good progress on its top strategic objective that 100 percent of students will improve their individual state assessment scores in reading and math each year.
This is exciting news to share as we start a new year. Our challenge will be to keep improving student achievement while faced with the challenge of shrinking financial resources.
reddog (K. B. Thomas Jr.) says...
the problem with the american school system is that the free and honest exchange of ideas has been replaced by agenda driven curricula based on preconceived notions of multiculturalism in which all cultures and belief systems are equally valid. diversity [culture and racial identity takes precedence over the common good] and political correctness[do not dare to challenge, question, or disagree]. i think most people would be absolutely shocked to know what the teachers and professors are teaching the next generation. america needs to resist the pressures of a leftist educational establishment. what is wrong with defending the concept of liberty as understood by our founding fathers?
August 5, 2009 at 9:02 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
reddog (K. B. Thomas Jr.) says...
ron paul said, we need to dismantle the department of education. i agree.
August 5, 2009 at 9:13 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )