Good afternoon. I made a mistake on my first posting on this issue so please let me try again.
With every challenge, a new opportunity is born. I think that Ms. Wilde�s comments regarding KBEM are good ones and somewhere from where to start. More on that in a moment. I sat through the School Board meeting yesterday and was very encouraged by the strong words of support starting with Dir. Moriarty. She made some excellent points about the need for the continuation of KBEM from within the MPS ownership. Her words were echoed by Directors Farmer, Johnson and others including the Superintendent and her cabinet. Since the reach is a 54 mile radius around the cities, and since the core goal is to serve education, it would make sense to me to take what Ms. Wilde is suggesting for the private sector and offer the same opportunity to the other metro area school districts. If you consider a rough hourly estimate at $80/hour (annual budget divided by hours in a year), this is a very affordable and exciting opportunity for other districts to open up KBEM learning opportunities to their kids while keeping MPS as the owner of KBEM. Another positive by-product of this is would be better exposure for the non Mpls student body and their parents to the MPS and our city. This would be one small but much needed step to get the metro districts to look at each other as one group with similar funding goals and challenges rather than a series of unrelated districts who have to go it all alone. Misc. notes from the 1/11/05 School Board meeting: + Approx. $700,000 annual budget (hence the $418,000 MNDOT cut is very painful) + Not funded from the MPS general fund + $630,000 of the budget is for 7 full time and 9 part time announcer salaries + Emergency fundraising as well as cuts are in progress Kudos to the KBEM team in charge for their immediate actions thus far and best of luck in weeks and months to come. Tom Madden Lowry Hill REMINDERS: 1. Think a member has violated the rules? Email the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[email protected] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
