Hello Liverpool School District Residents and Voters!
This year’s budget process has made many of us aware of the ma-lease that has plagued the LCSD for over a decade. The process is broken. The Board of Education is not doing the job they were elected to do – to represent the residents of the LCSD. For weeks we have gone to the podium and expressed our disapproval with the rushed nature of this budget and the lack of planning on the significant portions of the budget – the closing of WRE and the implementation of the academy plan. The vast majority of our questions have gone unanswered and not once has a BoE Member, our representatives, spoken up when our questions were ignored by Dr. Johns or other District Administrators.
The connection between this budget and the US Department of Education’s Race to The Top initiative is undeniable. The US Dept. of Education has dangled a $4.35 billion carrot in front of each State Dept. of Education basically blackmailing them into making the broad reforms that they want to see implemented. Simply put, the more school districts per state who implement these changes, the better chance the State Ed. Dept. has of getting a piece of the $4.35 billion carrot. But, as with any plan like this, the devil is in the details.
Only half of any monies that each state is awarded is to be shared with the participating districts. So, for example, if NYS receives $400 million, only $200 million has to be shared with the districts. If there are over 400 districts in NYS that are participating in the contest and low performing schools are to receive the majority of the monies, that means Liverpool will get next to nothing. In fact, the State of Texas quit the Race to The Top contest because they calculated that they would have to spend $3 billion in order to be awarded no more than $750 million.
If you have any questions about Race to The Top, just email us at LCSDBlog@gmail.com and we will get back to you right away.
March 16, 2010 at 6:52 pm
Thank you for all your doing!!