Tough Choices in Tough Times
A Las Vegas Sun article about Nevada's use of stimulus funds highlights the challenges many states and districts feel as they balance the desire for innovation against the need to fill budget holes:
Although state lawmakers increased basic support to schools by $38 per student — bringing the statewide average to $5,251 for the upcoming fiscal year — local districts will actually see a slight drop in funding over the biennium because of lower-than-expected local property and vehicle registration taxes.
The real difference over the next two years will be that a greater share of the state’s higher education funding will come from Washington, rather than from locally generated taxes. That in turn will mean the state will likely have enough money to meet the K-12 budget obligations.
And although local districts are grateful for the federal help in staunching the bleeding, there is also frustration that the dollars are needed to keep basic services in place, rather than to revive popular programs killed during the early-round budget cuts or to launch new initiatives.
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The Long Turnaround
According to the numbers, Central Elementary School in Roundup, Montana, seems to fit the currently fashionable definition of a “turnaround” school. After many years of below-average test scores, the school has recently made double-digit gains in the number of its students meeting proficiency on the statewide assessment. In true turnaround fashion, that improvement appears to have happened in a very short period of time. As recently as the 2005–2006 school year, for example, Central’s math score was nearly 20 percentage points below the state average. In 2009 it was at the state average.
But ask current principal Vicki Begin about the school’s success and she’ll insist that it’s been anything but a quick turnaround. Begin, who is in her third year at Central, gives much of the credit not only to the school’s veteran teaching staff, which averages 23 years of experience, but also to her predecessor, Joe Ingalls, who guided the school from 1994–1995 to 2006–2007. Obviously, this is not a case of overnight success or of cleaning house and starting over. Read more...
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