Our budget – Zero Options for Zero Hour

An email to the School Board from a few days ago:

XXXX via isd709.org
Mar 17 (3 days ago)

to schoolboard
Dear School Board members,

I am writing to protest the proposed removal of Zero Hour options from the high school curriculum. Zero Hour classes allow students to take more electives, to pursue diverse interests, and become more well-rounded citizens. These classes are an important component in readiness for college and in meeting increasingly competitive college admission requirements. Without Zero Hour, there will certainly be fewer options for advanced classes available to students.

My daughter Xxxxxx is a freshman at Duluth East. Next year Zero Hour would allow her to be in both Band and a foreign language. Without Zero Hour, she will have to choose between the life skills she can gain in music and the college readiness benefit of another year of foreign language. Because the instrument she plays is not used in Jazz band, retaining music ensembles in Zero Hour is useless to her (although a benefit to others). In her junior year, she planned to leverage Zero Hour to take Journalism as an additional English elective to further her love of writing. That opportunity would be lost.

I am appalled that the school district would consider cutting this important part of our high schools’ college and career readiness efforts. This flies in the face of your own stated value: “Providing the right tools and curriculum to maximize each child’s potential, which is key to helping students be independent, lifelong learners.”

Removing options that allow students to pursue diverse interests and be better prepared for college is not the way to stem the tide of declining enrollment in our high schools, especially as Edison prepares to increase your competition.

If you would like to discuss this further, please email me at XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.

XXXX

My Reply:

Harry Welty
9:15 AM (0 minutes ago)

XXXXX,

I agree with you. This is a terrible idea. It was a terrible idea a dozen years ago to end the seventh hour. One of the things that distinguished the Duluth schools from many others in Minnesota was our rich curriculum. When I left the Board in 2004 about 500 students from surrounding schools open enrolled into ISD 709.

I have yet to study our finances from my first election to the school board in 1995 year by year until today but I kept one document from 1997 which has allowed me to compare differences between that year and 2016.

In both years the percentage of money from the state would have been roughly 70% of our financing and the local property tax levy would have been roughly 22%. The rest would have come from Federal money which is restricted to what the Federal Government orders us to spend it on.

In 1997 our local levy was about $22.5 million dollars of which $2.5 million was dedicated to paying off past facilities bonds. After the implementation of the Long Range Facilities Plan our annual payments for facilities bonds skyrocketed to about $24 million dollars. Our local levy has increased too but only to about $32 million dollars. In 1997 the School Board had about $20 million dollars to put into the general fund. Today, by the time we subtract out our payments for facility’s bond repayments, we only have about $8 million. Add to this a drop in General Fund spending a $3.3 million dollars and you can see we don’t have the luxury of avoiding painful cuts.

This decision has not yet been made. That will come in June. We need input from families before we set our final budget but you can be sure if we don’t cut the zero hour some other uncomfortable cut will have to take its place.

I saw Xxxxxx at the Duluth East Think Kids meeting but didn’t notice it was Xxxxxx because she was sitting directly in front of me. I only recognized her by her voice when she made a very smart observation about our schools at the meeting. It is a rare student who makes an appearance solo at such meetings. There were only about six parents present.

Wish us luck. We on the Board will need it as much as our students.

Harry