The Wichita school budget
by Steve McIntosh
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posted Jul 27 2012 1:56AM
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This week superintendent John Allison presented the Wichita Board of Education with a proposed budget for the coming school year. It’s a 628 million-dollar spending plan … 22 million more than last year. The increase would be paid for with increases in state and federal money to U-S-D 259.
Allison wants to add 60 full-time employees … 35 of them, teachers … to a work force of 4,000. That’s not many teachers, in light of the hundreds of job cuts over the past few years. Still to be considered is pay raises for teachers who haven’t had a raise for four years.
There is no proposed increase in the local property tax levy.
We have about 50,000 students in Wichita’s public schools … with the number of teachers and their pay dropping the past few years. Basically, we’re asking our educators to do more with less … something quite common in the business world.
The hope is that such frugality is not accomplished at the expense of education quality. For the students in the pipeline there is no “do over”.
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Our thought for today is from Thomas Paine:
“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.”
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