The Olympia School Board held a work session last Thursday, March 30, to deliberate on specific actions the board is considering how to balance the district’s budget for the upcoming school year.
Assistant Superintendent Jennifer Priddy reported that for the 100 students they interviewed after a student survey about the budget , their utmost concern is how the deficit would affect instruction and activity support.
“Overall, the students generally agree that music and arts were a top priority for them. They also believe strongly that athletics and libraries should be higher on the list,” Priddy said.
Before the interviews, the survey of students showed the following concerns in descending order:
Staffing
Superintendent Patrick Murphy said that the district will reduce staffing in ways that do not impact most of the teaching personnel.
“We look at conversations with the principals and association groups. ‘If you're going to be making reductions, try and keep them as far away from the classroom as possible.’ Of those reductions, about 27% of all of them are central office staff,” Murphy said.
Class size
Class sizes will increase due to the reduction of classrooms. “As we increase class size, contract bargaining agreement provisions for additional overwhelm compensation would apply,” Murphy informed the board.
Paraeducators
Virtual Academy of Olympia (VAO) Principal Inger Owen voiced her worry about the 26% reduction of paraeducators.
“There are so many different and wonderful things that paras [paraeducators] do for us, and safety is a consideration where they provide supervision at recess and at lunch,” Owen said.
Murphy clarified that the board still needs to clarify this reduction figure after requesting the report on the number of employed paraeducators in the district.
The drafted reduction percentage is for the general education allocation paraeducators, and the special education paraeducators are unaffected.
The board is scheduled to hold a second reading of the Reduced Education Plan on Thursday, April 13, after two community forums on Monday, April 10. These include:
3 p.m. - 5 p.m. Click here to join the webinar.
6 p.m. - 8 p.m. Click here to join the webinar.
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JamesBishop
It is apparent that someone has lost the ability to do arithmetic, the science of numbers. In real life when a debit appears everything should stop and be reviewed before having to borrow millions of dollars that will have to be paid back by the over taxed taxpayers. I find it very hard to support our school system, it appears they have lost the ability to add or subtract 2 and 2.
Wednesday, April 5, 2023 Report this