A few days ago, a message went out from my principal saying we'd hold off on ordering until August, when we were more sure what was going to happen with the budget. I tried not to sweat it too much, even though there's about $15K worth of furniture and facilities for my program in the order queue.
Today the news is worse: our anticipated budget of $490,000 has been cut to $185,000. That's for any new purchases for all of our clubs, organizations, programs, special ed, facilities and maintenance, athletics, and academic departments. EVERYTHING but utilities and payroll, essentially. So for now, no new books, no consumable supplies (looks like I'll be buying my own red pens and dry erase markers this year!), no nothing. No word yet on what it means for my program. It'll be a long year if I wind up with 4 sections of regular old English I and no compensation for the 150 or so hours of work I've done already.
My husband's boss makes more than that a year, and he DOESN'T have to run a school for 2200 kids out of his own pocket.
2 comments:
Sorry for the budget news. I know that's no fun. The special ed thing doesn't make sense. Special ed should have its own budget. I can tell you right now... $185K for a year for sped won't work. Shit, Erin, $185K is only slightly higher, maybe by $40k, than the budget my son's elementary PTA works on. Yes, my son's elementary PTA raises that much in a year! And that's only the PTA of an elementary school less than 1000 students. The school itself has a much higher budget. I smell something rotten in Denmark.
We'll have the money for operating costs and everything--$185K is just for new purchases. We'll have some Title I grant money, and Student Generated Funds for activities, but we are going to have a LOT of unhappy people who were promised technology improvements, new textbooks, and facility upgrades.
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