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wrobert

Beach Fanatic
Nov 21, 2007
4,134
575
61
DeFuniak Springs
www.defuniaksprings.com
With all due respect I truly can not figure out how the school board is out of money after how much they collected from 2000 to 2007 alone.

Where does it all go? free lunches? transportation? lost by bad investments? over spent on building? paying for legal defense?

Approx 85% of their dollars are spent on salaries and benefits. With what little is left, they have built first class facilities.
 

Andy A

Beach Fanatic
Feb 28, 2007
4,389
1,738
Blue Mountain Beach
Busta Hustle, out of all our tax monies collected, probably the money for schools are the most well spent. Can there be improvements in expenditures? Always. IMO, most citizens do not begrudge or worry about their tax dollars for education. That includes folks like me, whose kids are long, long out of school.
 

Alicia Leonard

SoWal Insider
That is not what I said.

However, this is where the parents of the students who need reading coaches need to get the word out, because the rest of us have no other way of finding these things out. I am glad that WZEP reported it, and even more proud that someone heard/read it and posted it on SoWal. Otherwise, I wouldn't have a clue.

As far as parents contributing toward the athletic programs, what leads people to believe they don't already?


Ashley should have an article on this in next week's Breeze. The meetings are happening as we go to press, but we cover every major school board meeting that convenes. ;-)
 

Alicia Leonard

SoWal Insider
Busta Hustle, out of all our tax monies collected, probably the money for schools are the most well spent. Can there be improvements in expenditures? Always. IMO, most citizens do not begrudge or worry about their tax dollars for education. That includes folks like me, whose kids are long, long out of school.

I agree, when it's spent for education, and not for sports or other extracurricular activities.
 

Andy A

Beach Fanatic
Feb 28, 2007
4,389
1,738
Blue Mountain Beach
I agree, when it's spent for education, and not for sports or other extracurricular activities.
There should be some some expenditures for all extracurricular activities. They are education. I probably learned as much from my international relations and debate coach in high school as I did from my classes. Don't sell extracurricular activities short. They should be a very important part of the teaching scene.
 
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wrobert

Beach Fanatic
Nov 21, 2007
4,134
575
61
DeFuniak Springs
www.defuniaksprings.com
There should be some some expenditures for all extracurricular activities. They are education. I probably learned as much from my international relations and debate coach in high school as I did from my classes. Don't sell extracurricular activities short. They should be a very important part of the teaching scene.


They should go ahead and double the millage rate and get it over with.
 

GoodWitch58

Beach Fanatic
Oct 10, 2005
4,816
1,921
Book Review - The Death and Life of the Great American School System - By Diane Ravitch - NYTimes.com
The trouble all started, in her telling, with Milton Friedman, whose 1955 article “The Role of Government in Education” advocated the idea that parents should be given vouchers that would enable them to purchase schooling of their choice. In the Reagan administration, Friedman’s essay provided the rationale for efforts to promote what Secretary of Education William Bennett called the three C’s: content, character and choice. Before long, support for school choice became bipartisan when urban public officials, many of them black Democrats, saw in vouchers a way to give minority parents the same options available to middle-class families who could afford houses in desirable school districts.

Testing, as Ravitch shows, also has something of a trans-ideological intellectual history. Though conservatives historically opposed a strong federal role in education, in the 1990s they began looking with dismay at evidence that schools were failing and turned to the idea of national standards as a way to overcome the problem. Liberals, meanwhile, hoped to see more money made available to the schools, and if testing was the price to be paid to identify schools that were failing poor and minority children, so be it. No Child Left Behind, passed in the fall of 2001, seems to belong to another political century: Edward M. Kennedy, a firebrand liberal, and George W. Bush, a compassionate conservative, were equally proud of it.

For anyone who is interested in the state of American education, this looks like an interesting read...from someone who served in the first G. Bush administration and now has had a change of mind...one more problem, apparently, to lay at the feet of Milton Friedman...
 
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Busta Hustle

Beach Fanatic
Apr 11, 2007
434
34
Busta Hustle, out of all our tax monies collected, probably the money for schools are the most well spent. Can there be improvements in expenditures? Always. IMO, most citizens do not begrudge or worry about their tax dollars for education. That includes folks like me, whose kids are long, long out of school.


While I will mostly agree with your IMO I only wish to point out that school taxes doubled in the state by 81% or so from 2000-2007 to $13,231,257,749 and over 100% in Walco. In 2009 Walco schools taxed $65,896,308.

Year after year the cash rolled in. Is there none in savings? Must taxes and millages always be increased? Is any figure workable for our brain trust in Tally or Defuniak?
 

mdd88jd

Beach Lover
May 26, 2008
155
210
Sorry guys that I haven't chimed in before but, I have been busy with my day job lately. First, the district itself provides some assistance for extra-curricular sports, but, not as much as you would think. A few years back we started paying for the costs of officials and transportation for the sports programs. Those costs were outstripping the schools abilities to keep with up with them. And, the schools were have to fundraise for those costs. That subsidy approached $160,000.00. We have reduced that subsidy by half over the past three years. Of course, we pay coaches a supplement for their coaching duties, which is shamefully low, but, it is a cost. For example, a high school assistant football coach makes an extra $4,100 a year. For the number of hours they spend in practice, games, practice prep, scouting, etc., the pay is not lucrative at all. Some coaches will coach multiple sports and get a couple of supplements, but, as a whole, we don't spend a ton of money of those programs.

Gate receipts and concessions help. However, there is no way to avoid that football drives that machine. Football gate receipts at most schools fund the "spring" and "olympic" sport costs, i.e., uniforms, equipment. None of our schools' baseball programs ever take in enough at the gate to pay for their hard costs even with the district supplementing their travel and officiating costs.

Let me talk about fundraising for a minute. I have always thought of fundraising is really another tax. I had a south Walton businessman tell me that he gave over $5,000.00 to the extracurricular activities at S. Walton High one year. That same year he paid over $20,000.00 in school related real property taxes. So, although voluntary, he kind of saw that fundraising as another tax. We have tried to discourage fundraising except for the truly extra extra stuff, but, it is still a necessary evil.

Parents do pay many expenses of playing sports. I know that some teams, when they travel, do not provide food money for kids. That is an expense that parents must bear. For some parents, that is an expense that they cannot afford. And, there are other expenses I am sure they bear and have bore in the past. I have always felt that economic need should not be a barrier to full participation in any activity that a public school sponsors. Thus, my support of trying to help schools with the costs of these programs.

Lastly, as for reading coaches. Reading coaches have a distinct role, mostly in our elementary schools. They teach the teachers strategies for implementing the District's K-12 reading plan. We have cut four in the last two years and we will have four positions left. Marsh Pugh, our district curriculum specialist fees strongly that we can manage to continue to implement the reading plan with fewer coaches, especially at the elementary level. Since we have had them for many years, many of the reading strategies are in place already. Thus, Marsha felt, we could absorb those cuts without any effect on the quality of reading teaching.

We have made cuts in extracurricular funding as well. We have reduced the number of supplemented positions by 10%. We reduced summer pay by 30% and as stated earlier, we have reduced the travel and officials supplement by half.

The WZEP article was accurate as to the other cuts we have made. Our goal in searching for cuts was to preserve services to students and hopefully not lay off too many people. We did cut 20 teaching positions, most of which we will absorb through attrition and 20 support positions. But, again, we felt we could do that without a significant reduction in student services. But, we are getting close to not being able to make cuts without cutting services. And, 2.1 million of our operating budget for the coming year is stimulus money. That will probably not occur next year. Frankly, that would be about 40 more positions.

Thanks for letting me go on an on.......
 

mdd88jd

Beach Lover
May 26, 2008
155
210
Oh, as for the last poster. We did have a significant fund balance (savings) three years ago. However, with the declining tax revenues over the past three years, we have spent that trying to maintain all services to kids. Unlike most districts in the state, we were not forced to make draconian cuts. That fund balance will be very low beginning next year, so our budget cutting will get more severe this coming year. Our revenue picture has gone down significantly the last three years and we have cut expeditures to match the revenue picture without completing deleting our fund balance. But, we are close to the end of that strategy. Our millage went down every year for approximately ten years. However, we did collect more money because the property values and new taxable parcels were added at an astonishing rate. Obviously, that has changed. But, we will continue to work to provide services and quality educational opportunities, no matter the revenue picture!
 
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