Dear CNMT community,

This week the LAUSD School Board is set to vote on the cuts to next year’s budget, and I will be receiving a notification of our budget allocations for next year as well. Although they have delayed the vote for three weeks in order to explore different options and see if any additional funding was coming, most people predict that the Board will vote to eliminate Early Childhood Education and Adult Education on Tuesday.

I already know that we will be receiving significantly less funding next year. Title 1 will be reduced by 20% and Title 2 will not receive any allocation. State funding will also be reduced significantly for our school.

In short, we have over $400,000 less for next year. So cuts are inevitable.

Our budget appointment is on March 26, which means that we only have two weeks to develop and finalize our budget for next year, and even less after the official allocations come, which is supposed to be on Thursday or Friday.

The situation is dire, but we need to stay strong and focused and do whatever we can to protect our students. We have our QEIA funding, which will protect class sizes and counselor ratios, so the cuts will be coming from mostly out-of-classroom positions.

This means that more work will fall on the shoulders of myself, the counselors, coordinator, and our office tech. It also means that we need to be creative in thinking about how necessary work gets done.

The number one priority for our campus is student safety, and I pledge that any budget decisions will put security at the front. This means that we must fund an adequate number of campus aides, and we must have a system in place to promote discipline and student safety.

The second priority must be classroom instruction, which is our reason for existing as a school. Beyond teachers, we must provide adequate instructional materials, technology and classroom supplies.

My third priority, which is also critical problem is campus maintenance. The Plant Manager, William Chau, and his staff have been doing an amazing job with a skeleton crew. They are completely short-staffed, but still manage to keep our campus clean and well-maintained.

When it comes to these discussions, security, instruction and cleanliness are my personal priorities, and I think they should be for everyone, because they’re critical to making our campus a pleasant and effective learning environment. However, we must have an open and frank discussion about how we can accomplish these goals with the very limited resources we have.

These cuts are going to be painful, and we are going to have to work together to make some tough decisions, including possibly revisiting our bell schedule, if that is what we need to do to save vital programs for our campus.

We know that the block schedule costs us more, simply because teachers are only teaching 75% of the time instead of the 83% that teachers would be teaching in the six-period day. I like our schedule, and I think it could be adjusted to maximize time in areas for students, like math and English, and possibly science, but we must be honest with ourselves about the cost. If teachers only had a conference period every other day, they would be teaching 87.5% of the time and our schedule would actually save us money, but that would be tough on teachers.

I am currently looking at all the numbers, and plan to present scenarios this week, so that we can have an honest discussion. We want to preserve our QEIA carryover funds as much as possible so that we can keep the program going until it expires in 2014-15.

I encourage teachers, students, parents and staff to be as engaged as possible in these discussions, because we do need to hear many voices.

Educator of the week:
This week I would like to recognize a colleague that I have worked with for about 10 years. Mr. Baird first came to Roosevelt in 2003 as an English teacher. He has been part of the MESH SLC, and is now as a teacher leader in CNMT.

This year Mr. Baird is serving as English department chair for CNMT. He is also a key member of the ninth-grade team. In addition, Mr. Baird has taken on our new Broadcast Journalism class this year.

I knew that he would be a great teacher for this class because Mr. Baird has always had great energy and enthusiasm for his work and students, and I know that students really love being in his class.

Although they’re operating under a very, very limited budget, the students and Mr. Baird have shown a great resilience and creativity in working with whatever equipment they can find. They’re learning together, and their starting to produce some short news stories. I’m including one in this update, and I encourage you to head over to the CNMT webpage, where I’ve added a few more. I look forward to seeing more great stories from the class.

Thanks to this soon-to-be daddy for all you do for the students of CNMT!

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