Several Listmembers had concerns regarding offerings in the latest MPS
Community Education Catalogue. Concerns included: separation of church
and state and appropriateness of offering less than "core curricular"
offerings by a district that has low reading and math scores, graduation
rates etc.
The state provides separate finance mechanisms for general education
funding (K-12 Education) and community education. The statutory
definition guiding Community Education can be found at MN Statutes
124D.18 et seq.:
124D.18 Purpose of community education programs.
The purpose of sections 124D.18 and 124D.19 is to make
maximum use of the public schools of Minnesota by the community
and to expand utilization by the school of the human resources
of the community, by establishing a community education program.
The finance mecahnism is a separate community education levy, in a
separate fund to finance course offerings to the community. The
description of the levy mechnism can be found at Minn Statutes 124D.20.
In summary, the mechanism provides a specific dollar amount of levy
authority per capita for community education programs.
Community education revenues are separate distinct and not in
competition with general education revenues. It would be innappropriate
and illegal to use community education revenue to fund general education
and vice versa - general education revenue can not be used to finance
community education programs.
The commnunity education revenue finances the course offereings in the
catalogue and a number of other programs folks will recognize: the GED
General Equaivalency Diploma Program; Adult Basic Education; ECFE -
Early Childhood Family Education and more.
With regard to content, I am not qualified to speak to whether a Yoga
class violates the establishment clause and will leave it to
constitutional scholars lurking on the list to advise us on whether we
have crossed any lines there.
I should also clarify that there seemed to be some confusion between
Community Education Programs targeted to the broader community and MPS
Community Schools, neighborhood schools offering a comprehensive
elementary (K-5) or (K-8) education.
Finally, in a post to this list Mr. Atherton states:
"I believe that the Minneapolis Public School District
Administration is a left-wing "progressive" organization.
On their website,
http://www.mpls.k12.mn.us/about/referendum_class_size.shtml,
they claim that their "Data shows that small class size
increases achievement for students of all races." This
is a totally bogus, deceptive, insincere, and intellectually
vacuous statement and anyone with a decent introductory
statistics class knows it. And they know it too."
I think we have a case where reasonable people can have reasonable
disagreements.
Mr. Atherton, I presume you are reasonable. I had the pleasure of
meeting you during your campaign for school board. I know you have
written in this forum that you don't believe investments in class size
are wise.
MPS district administration, and the voters of Minneapolis, three times
over the course of eleven years, respectfully disagree. The MPS
district administration and voters are not alone. The federal
government, other states, school district adminstrations and voters have
embraced class-size reduction as a valid reform tool.
We don't think class size is a silver bullet. We think qualified
teachers, grade-level expectations, research-based curricula all matter
and we make significant investments in all these areas.
In the current budget cycle we are looking at all our investments in
student achievement and will be forced to choose from among those that
are good and those that are best to find savings.
The debate can rage on over whether small class-size is just
"good-practice" or is it "best-practice".
As we conduct the debate internally and externally we do our best to
respect that reasonable people can and do have reasonable differences.
In my experience labelling your opponent, and your opponent's positions
does not advance the debate nor bring the issues to a resolution.
Happy New Year!
Jim Grathwol
MPS Lobbyist
W. 11
612-668-0223
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