Budget Woes

So, even though school have been in a “budgeting crisis” for some time now, the bomb was dropped on us officially last week…Keller ISD is in a 38 million dollar hole. This is after we made almost $10 million in cuts last year. Your first thought is probably Keller ISD needs a lesson in finance management, but no, this is a statewide problem. The entire state of Texas is in a crisis and all districts are feeling the pinch. Forget the fact that we are one of the Top 40 most efficient districts in the state, that doesn’t get us a break.

Step one- cut $16 million. Easy right? Ha. This means cutting sports budgets, operating budgets, technology budgets, activity budgets, transportation budgets, pretty much everything. And we better hope nothing in the building breaks, leaks, expires, etc, because it’s not being replaced. OK, totally do-able, no problem, we can all cut back, we’ll make it work.

Step two- TRE election- Tax Rollback Election. This is where we need help. If we do have this election, everyone in Keller needs to go out and VOTE! If this passes, it could save a lot of headache in the long run. While it won’t solve all problems, it will be a step in the right direction. Even people who don’t have children in Keller schools, we need you to vote.

If the vote doesn’t pass, we are REALLY in trouble. This is when jobs get cut. If you think education is in trouble now, you have no idea what will happen if we have to cut jobs. We aren’t just cutting elective teachers, core classes will be cut too. This means instead of having 25-30 kids in a class, we will have 30+ students in each English, Math, Science and History class. You may not think those numbers are that high, but from experience, trying to teach writing to 27 7th graders is nearly impossible. When it takes an average of 10-12 minutes to grade a two page essay, multiply that by 27 (that’s 270 minutes, 4 ½ hours for you non-math people), then factor in the 5-7 minutes you have to meet with each kid to discuss that essay (that’s another 3 hours) . Well over 7 hours on ONE writing assignment. All this so we can teach 7th graders how to compose proper, complete sentences. This is just writing, don’t forget ELA teachers have to teach reading, too! Classroom management is going to go right out the window. With more students and less teachers, more kids are going to “slip through the cracks”. No Child Left Behind, right, that’s a joke! More children will be “left behind” because we have to follow a set curriculum and cover specific topics by certain dates. “Sorry kid, you don’t understand how to change a decimal into a fraction, oh well, we have to move on…the district only gave me 4 days to cover this and I have 34 other kids in the class I have to keep quiet and in their seats, I don’t have the time to re-teach it.”

Hey, state of Texas, you want to help out the budget, how about we spend LESS money “testing” our students and more time actually TEACHING our students. To do that more effectively, we need MORE teachers, BETTER resources, SMALLER classes.

This is going to be a scary few years in education unless some drastic changes are made. Eventually, we are going to have to decide that the education of students comes before superintendent’s housing allotments, car allotments, cell phone allotments. Until things like that happen, the teachers and kids will suffer the most.