Proposed MOU Between Christina and Red Clay, Appo, Brandywine, Colonial, and Smyrna Over Referendum Funds From 2003

As I wrote the other night, Red Clay, Appoquinimink and Brandywine want their share of the local funds for choice students from Christina stemming from the charter school settlement with Christina last fall.  It looks like Colonial and Smyrna have now jumped in as well.  The Christina Board of Education will hold a special board meeting on May 24th to discuss this issue.  The below document shows how much it would cost Christina if approved.

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Understanding Education Funding Cuts

Blue Delaware

Shameless plug for tonight’s meeting of Christina’s Citizens Budget Oversight Committee Meeting: 6:30pm @ Gauger-Cobbs Middle School 50 Gender Rd, Newark, DE.

It’s a rough time right now in public education. Massive cuts in state funding have sent Districts into a panicked frenzy trying to figure out how to mitigate the cuts, if it’s even possible. Governor Carney’s proposal would see $37 million in funding for public education be scrapped as one of the measures to help balance Delaware’s lopsided budget. Current projections put the State $395 million in the hole. We still have a couple DEFAC and JFC meetings to go and it’s entirely possible that number could change.

What’s not going to change though is the fact that the budget and any proposed cuts are now in the hands of the General Assembly. The members of which are considerably easier to approach and communicate with than our Governor or anyone in…

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About That Administrator Count Article…

I am never writing an article about administrator cuts ever again!  But seriously, after getting thrown on the fire for my post yesterday about school administrator counts and my suggestion that some should be cut, I am going to take a different approach to on this.  I appreciate the feedback from dozens of you on here and on social media.  To that end, I spoke with Tammy Croce, the Executive Director of the Delaware School Administrators Association today down at Legislative Hall.  She indicated the information I got was not correct, nor is the Delaware DOE’s information.  She said there are inherent flaws in the data reporting system and there is bad data out there.  She gave me a very good suggestion which I plan to take her up on.

I don’t mind posting information I receive from others, but I will be doing more homework on it in the future prior to posting it.  Perhaps the answer to this is somewhere in the middle.  It was not my attempt to badmouth every single administrator and to indicate they all suck.  I know tons of admins and they work their butt off morning, noon, and sometimes evenings.  I do know of some who got there through the buddy system and they really shouldn’t be there.  It is a complicated issue.  But I heard you loud and clear on Facebook, and you know who you are.  But let’s try not to get insulting and attempting to make me look like an idiot.  I have never pretended to get everything right, and when it comes to education, the transparency needs to drastically improve.  If you want to raise taxes on citizens to pay for education, than we as taxpaying citizens deserve to know where that money is going.  That is the unstated contract when taxpayers pay for our schools.  I wish more people would demand to know where the money is going!

I wish there were NO public education cuts.  I wish we knew where every penny the existing money is going towards.  I wish every district would list their admins along with job descriptions on their website.  I wish a lot of things.  What I can’t stand though is advocates for one district assuming the article was solely about THEIR district.  It wasn’t.  But when those same advocates kept questioning me on social media, I asked specific questions about their district and they either didn’t know the answer or didn’t want to provide it.  If you are going to defend something, please be prepared to back up your defense, that’s all I’m asking.  And as much as I may want to, I can’t go to every Citizens Budget Oversight Committee meeting.  To be honest, I can’t really get to most education meetings like I used to.  If they are close to where I live, that is one thing.  But trekking up to Wilmington all the time?  Not an option for me.  Which is why I try to have a social media presence with this blog, which I do on my own time, unpaid.

This is the part about education that baffles me.  Our state and our schools demand full transparency regarding our children: health records, test scores, academic progress, where they live, who they live with, discipline records, etc.  But when it comes time to demand transparency surrounding the adults in education and where the money is going, we fall far short in this state.  If you want to get mad, get mad.  To be frank, I expected much more  public outcry over charter schools keeping their share of the educational sustainment fund.  To me, that is a much more important issue than all this admin count discussion going on.

If anyone would care to assist, please reach out to me and we can swap ideas.