At Maplewood High School last night, the Metro School Board listened to almost two hours of comments from parents, teachers and students upset over the proposed budget cuts for next year.
Metro Schools director Pedro Garcia recommended cutting almost 25-million dollars from next year’s budget, cuts that include closing some schools and eliminating 490 teacher and staff positions. Some of the strongest opposition last night came from parents of Jones Paideia, an elementary magnet school based on a particular educational philosophy.
Garcia proposed combining it with another Paideia school to make a kindergarten through 8th grade school. Helen Koudelkova is a parent at Jones Paideia and she says putting 5-year-olds in the same building as 14-year-olds concerns many parents. She also says parents, teachers and other “stake-holders” need to be involved in a budget process that might result in the closure of seven schools.
“One of the things that’s very disturbing about the fact, not only, that we weren’t involved in the possibility, given, not only that but we weren’t even notified. Our, our principle wasn’t even given the courtesy of a call in advance of the school board meeting on Thursday in which this was announced, and afterwards this being splashed all over the papers. You know, which involved a lot of unnecessary trauma for parents, for kids.”
The Metro School board says that Metro Council didn’t allow for revenue growth in the budget for the next few years, and says it is being forced to make the cuts to accommodate recurring expenses.
The next school board meeting will be November 17 at Pearl Cohn High.
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