It seems Pam and I are on the same plain when it comes to school funding;
Sioux Falls Public Schools Superintendent Pam Homan told members of the Downtown Rotary Club today that she thought Gov. Dennis Daugaard’s budget approach was “half-assed.â€
HELL YEAH!
A member of the audience asked what she would do if she were in Daugaard’s position.
First, she said, she wouldn’t have proposed 10 percent cuts to most programs after campaigning as though the state had no budget problem.
It’s funny how quickly people forget the rosy picture Doogard painted during the campaign.
Next, she said she’d make sure she had accurate information, and she would prioritize.
BAHAHAHAHAHA! Yeah, no shit?! Huh! Republicans prioritize. They make sure their buddies finish first.
In reference to Daugaard’s recommended 10 percent cut to education and other programs, Homan related advice from her father, who told her: “‘Pam, if you’re going to do something half-assed, don’t do it at all.’ And so, I wouldn’t make across-the-board cuts.â€
I applaud Homan, the super of the largest district in the state, using this language. I get so sick and tired of people sugar coating this stuff. You can only get the shit so shiny when you polish a turd.
Homan said the state ought to spend the $26 million it received last year from the federal Education Jobs Fund on K-12 schools, as it was intended, rather than keep it in state reserves.
Funny how the state cashes checks and forgets where they come from and there intention.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Sioux Falls Public Schools Superintendent Pam Homan told members of the Downtown Rotary Club today that she thought Gov. Dennis Daugaard’s budget approach was “half-assed.â€
Maybe…just maybe the reason doregard is attacking school funding is Pam’s own abuse of the same. She just gave herself a $5,000 a year raise to over $181,000 a year. Thanks to guaranteed incentives in 4 years she’ll be at about $210,000 a year. Now, I’m no fan of our new govenator any more than anyone else who thinks our kids deserve a first rate education. But Pam CAN and WILL give herself and her top heavy admin types bloated salary increases and tell $90 a day subs with ZERO bennies to take a hike. Til she addresses the skeletons in her own closet she’ll get no support from me.
I have to agree with Poly on this one. Had the Sup. of the Rapid City school system or Aberdeen or Watertown or any other mid-size school system said these things it could carry more weight.
I do appreciate that she was able to use colorful language without dancing around the issue – what honestly what would we expect her to say? No matter how much money the schools get, Homan would say they need more. That is part of her job, and that is how the system works, but she is a little hard to take seriously when she has been chief overseer of a school system which has spent millions on renovating PRACTICE football fields and adding new stages and custom designing new elementary schools rather than using the same plan for multiple schools to save money, and even adding weight rooms to their gyms that rival that of many large Universities.
I won’t even mention the granite flooring in some of their new schools or the iPods they handed out to students (which have been as much of a failure than the laptops and palm pilots they have tried in the past).
Homan really needs to clean up her back yard before yelling at the neighbors about their overgrown bushes.
I don’t have the link, but I believe the SF School System recently made a national ranking about best value for the amount spent per student. So perhaps she’s actually worth the bonus she’s been paid, especially if you compare her performance to other, comparably sized districts.
Homan has done more with less, including letting entrenched, half-assed teachers know they aren’t immune from the axe. In this case, she’s correct about Daugaard and how he campaigned = bait & swithc.
Whether you disagree with Dr. Homan’s administration, she is standing up for the students of Sioux Falls as well as the students of the rest of the state. She is doing her job: advocating for education.
I was really surprised to hear Homan say anything, other than being wishy-washy, like a lot of what has come out of her mouth in the past. My opinion of her went up a little after hearing this.
I will agree, I am not happy about the wasteful spending in the SF school district. A close friend of mine’s wife sits on PTA, I could tell you the stories. I’m more concerned about the small schools who get totally reamed when 10% cuts happen. Pam’s worried she won’t be able to feed her prize winning horses, while teachers in Bumfuck, SD are worried they won’t be able to feed their family. Silly really.
There was a study this month in Clark County Nevada where 27% of the population are high school dropouts. It concluded that education pays more than it costs. Employees work for higher salaries (more tax revenue). Funding for social programs is less when people have jobs. The projected return ratio is 2:1. A state can’t grow without prime focus on K-12. The state must make cuts with education excepted.
To some degree that is a valid point l3wis, but at the same time a lot of the extremely small schools refuse to accept reality and refuse to even acknowledge the need to consolidate. When compared to their larger peers (I’m not talking Sioux Falls or Rapid City here, I’m merely talking about towns with 3,000 people or so) they are incredibly inefficient.
Lets look at a real world example. The town of Roslyn spent $20,981 a year per student in FY2010. The town of Waubay spent $11,561 per student during that same period. Both of these towns are less than 15 miles from Webster which spends $6,891 per student.
Total school enrollment in Roslyn: 66
Total school enrollment in Waubay: 172
Total school enrollment in Webster: 486
Here is where I got the numbers: http://doe.sd.gov/ofm/documents/ExpData10.pdf
Last year Roslyn graduated 6 students while Waubay graduated a whopping 16, yet they think they need their own schools?
So basically we have three schools with a combined enrollment of 725 K-12 students which still isn’t large, but more than enough to justify one school and one administration. Yet the two smaller towns refuse to consolidate to Webster even though their costs are much, much higher per student.
So is a 10% hurting these schools even more than it would hurt a larger school system? I can’t say – but if it spurs some of these schools to merge than maybe it is a good thing, because the taxpayers shouldn’t need to spend $20k per student when a school 13 miles away can do it for a third of that.
Truth be told if we eliminated the most inefficient districts from the mix, we could actually increase the funding at the more efficient schools and probably still save money while allowing schools more money per student. Not to mention the efficiencies of scale that come with a larger district such as shared resources, lower building maintenance costs, reasonable class sizes, etc.
Here is something I cannot understand. From the SD Video Lottery site.
Funding Education
The Lottery has provided more than $400.8 million to the state General Fund. Each year, nearly half of the entire General Fund is used to support local K-12 schools and state universities and technical institutes.
Why are we where we are?
Costner, you are looking at the ‘capitalistic’ picture. Like it or not, our country is a democratic socialist nation. Police, fire, roads, infrastructure, military, public education. If we don’t want to fund one of these, we should not fund any of them. We seem to have this ‘survival of the fittest’ when it come to education. I don’t get it.
I’m not suggesting we eliminate funding DL, but you can’t tell me it makes sense to spend $20k per student when there are only six in the graduating class when less than 15 miles away there is a much larger school who spends a third as much per student.
It is a simple matter of economics. If you consolidate some of the many, many tiny schools we have in our state, there would be a lot more money for the remaining schools because of gained efficiencies.
A school with 66 students can’t afford their own business office, their own super, their own principal, etc. The admin costs distributed amongst that few students is a substantial amount -but roll those 66 into another school and the increase in administrative costs is miniscule so it means more money for the things that matter like books, teacher salaries, computers etc.
There are people that think their kids get a better education in a small school. They don’t consider whether or not there is more choice of subjects in a larger school. I graduated from one of those small town schools in 1958. There was 11 in my class and roughly the same number in each of the other classes in high school. When I look back I think it is strange that the school always had a shop/voc. ag. teacher for the boys all year, but could only manage to teach home ec. for half the year. All in all I think a little bit larger schools are better qualified, but I know lots of people that don’t.
Joan, I agree. I went to a small SD school 2nd grade thru 9th grade, then in my 10th and 11th grade I went to a large urban HS with 1500 students in 3 grades. I had a 3.8 GPA and I slept in every class, why? Because large school teacher’s don’t challenge you, small school teachers do. Small schools do give better education.
I had the opposite experience myself. I started in a small school where I wasn’t challenged and the several of the teachers weren’t qualified or trained in the subjects they were teaching. Case in point the Algebra teacher I had for my first Algebra class was a substitute that they hired full time but was never a math major or anything – his primary experience was in English. All he knew how to do was read from the textbook and copy the examples down on the board verbatim from his teachers text. Nobody learned a thing.
When I moved to a larger school I had more opportunities for classes that didn’t even exist in the small school – but more importantly I was challenged.
Frankly I don’t think there is a huge difference between large and small. A good administration and good teachers are what make the difference. In my experience I just happen to land at a school that was better, but I’m sure the inverse is true in many cases when someone goes from large to small.
I can see pros and cons for both, but test scores and college graduation rates generally show us that there is no advantage to smaller schools as some suggest. In fact test scores are pretty flat across the board.
The thing is – there is a difference between small and tiny. A grade of 10 students is too small to be effective or to be able to offer options to those kids. A grade with 75 students probably has the opportunity to offer more options.
Aside from the economic argument, the extremely small schools can’t even teach all the subjects so these days they rely upon video conferencing and remote teachers. That may work well in some cases, but it will never replace a live “in person” teacher.
If it was really the solution and was a true benefit, we would have it in every school, but the reality is the only schools that use it or rely on it are those that are too small to hire their own chemistry, biology, or physics teachers etc. I don’t think that is fair to the students – nor do I think keeping a small town school open simply to protect a few administrator jobs is fair to the taxpayers.
It isn’t like I live in one of those districts so this isn’t about me – I just think those small schools need to wake up and realize not every city can afford a school just as not every city can afford their own police force (which is why so many small towns contract with Sheriff Offices).
We have too many districts with too much overhead. Streamline the system and spread that money around to those schools who can make the most of it. I don’t want to toss out hard numbers because some schools are just to remote to consider consolidation, but if you have less than 150 students K-12 and another school is within 20 miles, it is probably time to consider a merger. You would have a hard time telling me that wouldn’t be better for the kids in the end.