Reply to APS budget cuts - no MS sports or extracurriculars

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]if you are concerned with APS budget bloat, especially in the central office- you need to seriously question Mary Kadera's platform of giving advisory councils 'a real voice in planning and decision making.'   
I am appalled at how many of the recommendations coming out of the committees for advisory council on teaching and learning involve additional central office staff and budget dollars.  e.g. perform an 'equity audit' across the curriculum (social studies advisory committee); add a teacher specialist to the gifted service office (gifted advisory committee); increase math coach from .5 FTE to 1 FTE for all elementary schools (math advisory committee); add a full time outdoor learning classroom coordinator (science advisory committee); develop an SEL coordinator position (student services advisory committee).
https://www.apsva.us/actl/committee-reports/

Those are FTE additions.  There are also tons of recommendations for additional mandatory training, which leads to both a budget expense and additional time off of teaching.

I think ACTL plays a valuable role- and you can debate the merits of each of these individual proposals- but I see these proposals, and then I hear the concern about central office bloat, etc.  We need school board members who are able to listen and make tough choices- not who blindly accept citizen recommendations (aka give a 'real voice.')[/quote]

I oppose the Central Office bloat too, but just to clarify, the math coaches aren't part of Central Office. The math coaches are embedded in the elementary schools and do pull-outs with the kids who are struggling. I support adding those FTEs because they are going to be working directly with the students, every day. Also, under the current allocation method, each ES only gets a .5 FTE math coach, regardless of the size of the elementary school. This has really put students at the larger elementary schools at a disadvantage.

I agree that the other examples you gave seem questionable right now, especially in light of the tight budget. Maybe those can get added in a later year when we are in a better financial situation, but they don't seem like priorities now. Although, in fairness to ACI and the subject matter advisory committees, I think a lot of those recommendations have been out there for years, even pre-COVID. So curious that Duran is suddenly listening to them now, in an extremely tight budget year.

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