Our public district is funded for about $13,000 or $14,000 per pupil (a large part of that being because of a generous community that supports levy requests) yet the claim they don't have enough and need to cut cut cut. For a while they were talking about going to a 4 day school week, cutting all extracurriculars, etc. They did actually cut from special ed, support staff, increased class sizes, etc. Yet, the AVERAGE teacher salary is about $70,000 plus generous benefits and the administrators and principals are paid anywhere from $120,000 to $180,000 (the super) plus $40,000 in benefits. It's ridiculous. We are in an average cost area, not San Francisco or New York. We are in a state which allows for a lot of school choice. So a large number of students do not attend their neighborhood school, they go to other public districts, or to charters. The district is now closing multiple schools because they don't have enough students to fill them and they are "half empty". This makes parents mad and even more students flee for other options. It's a downward spiral. The charters are overall not performing well (although a small minority are high performing). I'm not sure what the answer is, but our public district has a horrible attitude and they don't care about community input. I am thankful we have choices. But at the same time those choices are destroying our local schools. The schools actually seem to embrace all the standardized testing. They hyper-focus on math and reading scores to the detriment of everything else. They seem to buy into it, it's not just about money and they don't particularly care about attracting students either. They truly believe that if they get those scores to budge they are doing their jobs. Not the gifted kids, the kids who are right below proficiency. They want to get them up a couple points, right over the line. They push kids into AP who shouldn't be there. All of the stress is another reason students flee. Kids are either bored or pushed too hard. Kids simply aren't happy.
