Board Meeting Comments

This whole budget process felt extra secretive this year. Please postpone. Perhaps the events around the closures and consolidations exerted too much energy and y’all are tired. It’s fair to be tired. It’s not fair to claim the engagement was the most robust ever, etc… Most of the documents offer no meaningful information and without being able to engage with staff it’s hard to tell what’s going on. The covert focus groups, one low quality survey, one meeting, and undisclosed “interviews” is very much bare minimum for so called engagement.. Please do better in these uncertain times and refocus on truly putting student need first with a new emphasis on stakeholder engagement that is representative and not performative.

Dear board members: Where in this proposed budget is accountability for enrollment declines? Just because others are dealing with enrollment declines doesn’t mean, we should keep staff who exacerbated those declines here? Where is the accountability on the idea factory that continuously comes up with “programming” or “rebranding,” ideas, that lead to no change in the student outcomes, and continue to cause enrollment declines? Some of these communities are burdened with the same staff with no accountability for enrollment?.no school should be burdened with unskilled middle management staff until they choose to retire if their skills no longer serve students. Too many cooks in the kitchen, but nobody responsible for the bad food… Right now it looks like the adults are filling up the lifeboats when schools are left to drown. Maybe that’s not really what’s going on, but not a good look so far. Thank you.

For the average community member, it can be very hard to understand what’s going on with this budget without being able to compare it to the budget when we had larger enrollment. Is it true that Central Office (specifically staff who don’t work for schools directly), is still larger than it was before the pandemic? It’s disappointing the community meetings they had last year, didn’t happen with this budget. please don’t confuse burnout with apathy. With enrollment losses it is hoped that the staff in administrative positions have been right-sized for current enrollment. Do we need 26 directors? And countless coordinators? curriculum specialists, or special project staff? If our schools don’t have regular social workers and full time nurses how can we justify that? From a superficial understanding of this budget, it does look like some buildings will have less staff, but projected to have greater enrollment? Maybe it’s just a misunderstanding, but concerns remain.

This is a great idea. Finally recognizing strong elementary schools doesn’t necessarily yield high enrollment middle school schools. Yes, revert this back to elementary school because we have too many under-enrolled choices for middle schools. Too often leadership staff come to this board and request to “expand” various programs by misrepresenting, “demand,” without evidence the community will support the change. With enrollment losses we just don’t have enough students for every site to have a separate middle school. Now is also a great time to realign Belfair middle and Park Medical middle as they are also extremely unenrolled and a cost burden to EBR Schools. The only issue is this is why wasn’t it done during the realignment process with every other school? Thank you for making this tough choice.