Thanks to Vicky for the link. But I'm still left wondering what number you get if you divide the total aid by the total number of students. The comment that they are laying off teachers by itself may not mean much IF the teaching staff has fewer students to educate. The statement that class sizes are going up would seem, on the surface, to indicate there is less money per student, but it could be that this was a decision to offset the special education and other targeted cuts. And it seems to me that when you have such cuts, education was not "held harmless" as the Pawlenty administration tried to claim.
Seems to me that some of us taxpayers need to go to school board meetings and ask to have the issue defined. If the student population drops, then there obviously has to be contraction of the overall system with corresponding revenue being less. Perhaps they are trying to hold the line in areas where the state aid IS less, taking it from conventional instruction. That seems laudatory, but that also may be overreaching. The voters did NOT give Pawlenty a mandate for his ideas (44% is never a mandate for anything). But I'm fairly sure the mandate would be to keep directing money to improved results in conventional areas of instruction. My father didn't have any ESL in school when he came from Norway. I do think society should do more now than they did then, but I just don't want student achievement to suffer because by whatever fluke we are attracting a lot of non-English-speaking immigrants. Nor do I think the test results of non-English-speakers should be treated as indistinguishable from all other students. To compare a suburban district with no immigrant students to an urban core school full of them is stupid. That, at least, is a point our MPS school board should make.
Crack:NOT The Problem
"Last year, the DEA seized more pounds of meth than either cocaine or marijuana here."
http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/living/health/6717554.htm
And the worst thing about these private homes with meth-labls is that once they shut DOWN the meth-lab, they have to get special environmental cleanup to make the home habitable. I guess, if nothing else, this shows just how little people know about what goes on in other houses. And in the ABSENCE of information, a lot of people just make up what they want to be true.
________________________________________ Jim Mork Cooper Neighborhood:My Kinda Town
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