We spent $73 million to renovate both high schools, and at that time we had over fifty community members involved in the planning and decision-making process: attending meetings, trading emails, etc. Fast forward ten years and it doesn’t appear anyone cares how our district is going to spend the nearly $80M in CARES money the federal government is doling out to our city. There are over 300 of you (and growing) that care enough about Decatur Public Schools to read our articles, but apparently no one cares about how we are going to spend $79,613,127. Where are the parents demanding that their child needs more of an opportunity to catch up after nearly two years out of school, where are the sports enthusiasts crying out for facility improvements to bring us up to the level of our surrounding districts, where are the building principals and teachers asking to use the money to fill vacancies and reduce the need for long term subs? Maybe people think it’s complicated because it’s a federal program (it isn’t that complicated), or that we don’t care (we do, or at least we should!), or that the money won’t make a difference anyway (it will – this is a LOT of money we’re talking about), or the district administration isn’t going to listen to us anyway (hopefully not true – this new administration seems very open to public discourse). We think the problem is a simple lack of communication about the money.
We’ve already spent about $28M of the $80M and still have $52M to spend in CARES III money. The graphic below from the DPS website shows the money already allocated into certain ledger categories, but it’s our hope that those are generalized buckets and the specifics still need to be identified.
And so, we’re going to take this opportunity to reiterate our core value here at DPS Chalkboard:
We believe the most important component of how well we mold and create children that will flourish as adults is by maintaining and engaging an excellent group of teachers that work with autonomy and purpose, and are continually given the opportunity to master their teaching skills.
We wrote a series of three articles last fall (DPS61 just won the lottery! Or did they?, Time for One High School?, and District 61's Very Own "Infrastructure Bill") which identify where we would like to see the money spent.
Summarizing, we would like to see the following:
We proposed $22.2M to hire more teachers. This is hard, hard work. Hiring, particularly in this environment, is very hard. We get that. But bring in two or three temporary employees whose job is to go out and recruit teachers. You can view our original article on this here, but it’s important to note that because of the DPS teacher attrition rate this idea does NOT cause a “funding cliff” problem. We will have a few years of better instruction – lowering the number of sub days, possibly reduce class size for a few years, and then end up in two or three years with better trained teachers. And I’ll repeat – we know this is hard, but it is the most important thing we can do to help our students.
Use money (and in full disclosure we really don’t know what this would cost, but it certainly can be done for less than $10M) to transition to one Decatur high school. This would allow for more opportunities for students on both ends of the academic spectrum, including more trade programs.
Tear down buildings and update existing buildings. This is getting done! Oak Grove and Southeast are gone and Durfee needs to come down next.
If I haven’t said this enough already, this is an enormous amount of money, and even after we fund the most important thing to help our children succeed – our teachers, there will still be a lot of money left over. So, there are going to be consulting groups coming out of the woodwork trying to get their hands on a piece of it, and they will all claim to increase student learning, or engagement, or… But it’s important to note that if there were a way to increase test scores in Decatur, we would have done it by now – wouldn’t we? There are studies in education on everything –even reducing class size, which nine out of ten teachers believe will increase student learning, is not so cut and dried. And of course, we are all for increasing student engagement, things which great teachers, along with the Andreas Ag Academy and sports do, but we don’t need consultants to tell us what we need to fund, or books we need to buy, or what we need to build. We simply need to engage the community and listen! While we didn’t include this in our original article, here are a few places where we don’t want our money to go:
Consultants – except for temporary consultants with specific tasks (like to hire more teachers) consultants are in large part a waste of money. Who can point to a past program the district has used or implemented that had any real effect on teacher and student performance?
Places where the funding cliff will eventually hurt you (this is when you allocate money in a capacity where you will need to continue to spend more money even after the funding ends). This includes things like:
Salaries (Funding cliff!!!)
Non-teacher related staffing, where attrition will not bring the outlay back to normal within three years.
Virtual Learning. We, and the nation, just did a two-year experiment in virtual learning and it failed.
Mental Health (ok, we may get some flack here. There are a lot of issues here including the fact that there are avenues for a parent to take outside the school for a child’s mental health issues, and sadly this is another way where if you take responsibility from a parent, you must be prepared to have that responsibility forever – and does the school district want that responsibility forever? We simply can’t afford that forever, and so this is a funding cliff issue.)
Comment below if you have anything you want to add to either of the list of what to fund and the list of what NOT to fund!