I was talking with Joe Luft last night and he was asking how my year is going. Well, the work at school has been going pretty well. We are making progress in a lot of areas. We are currently in the middle of a residence by a local artist and the work that he and the students are producing is looking great. He is working with students to create large mosaic piece that will go up outside of the main entrance to the school. It should be done in a few weeks and it should look great. This year we also have our music teacher, Tony Jamesbarry, working with older students in the computer lab on various activities that incorporate multimedia into some interesting projects related to classroom units. For example 4th grade students have been using GarageBand to create radio plays. 5th grade students are using Google Earth to track the birthplaces of passengers on the Mayflower as part of a social studies project. He has introduced all of his students to GarageBand and students have used it to create sound tracks for slide presentations. Lots of interesting work and high quality work and collaboration between him and the classroom teachers.
Like I said, this stuff is the fun part. On the other hand my district is again facing a drastic cut in funding because of a series of events related to school funding. These include a reduction in state funding, a decline in enrollment, the expiration of a local income tax, and the expiration last year of a local property tax measure. All have combined to produce a $57 million dollar shortfall for next school year, on top of a $35 million dollar cut that is in effect this year. All of this based on a total budget of roughly $370 million dollars. It is all kind of complicated and I think this article from the Corvallis Gazette-Times does a good job of explaining the issues. Kind of the Cliff Notes version to bring you up to speed...
If you would like to follow along at home, the local Portland paper, The Oregonian, has a page up with all their most recent articles about the PPS budget situation. I'm finding that the Yahoo News and Google News RSS search feeds to also be a good source for not only news articles about the situation, but also links to local blogs where folks are talking about this situation. Also I have a been using del.icio.us to tag articles and such related to the budget situation. http://del.icio.us/timlauer/pps57
Luckily we are on Spring Break for the next week. The real fun begins April 4 with the official announcement of our superintendent's proposal for school closures and reconfigurations. Stay tuned...
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