Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Comments from the members: Palmieri

"talking about the budget and how we're going to balance it, but not much about education"
Any adverse impact on North High?

proceeding forward with North High, made the commitment...in short, no. We're good on North.

Maybe the Councilors could meet several at a time with the superintendent for "a real dialogue"

Hope we can talk about a whole host of educational issues: K-8 education

4 comments:

outofmass said...

K-8 education will COST the City mmoney as federal grants, particularly Title I, will be required to give additional funds to non-public schools. This will come to an amount close to 200,000 that the district will have to give to the non-public, e.g., parochial, Yeshiva, schools

Tracy Novick said...

Can you explain that, please, outofmass? Why does it being K-8 education make non-public schools eligible for Title 1 funding?

outofmass said...

Sure. The Title I regs read that a district is required to give funding to non-public schools at the same grade levels it funds its program. For example, Title I could choose to service only students in grades K-3 in public schools--however, if those students are in a school which services K-6 students, then when the district calulates the title i funding for non-public schools it must include all non-public students K-6 in determining an allocation since those students sit under the same roof. Now, if these same K-3 students are suddenly in a K-8 building, then the district is reponsible for providing funds to all non-public schools students K-8 rather than K-6. The differnece in cost is the amount of non-public students who the district currently does not fund for grades 7-8 who would suddenly become eligible in the funding formula. If it is only certain schools that provide K-8, the district may be able to count only those students in non-public schools who would have gone to that school had they selected public education. This is the first year that the federal government has made WPS pay funds to non-public schools for those students who would have been in a WPS middle school where the free or reduced lunch numbers were about 75%. Not sure how this played out in the final Title I allocation, but the WPS is already paying more, this year, for non-public students.

T-Traveler said...

why can't north be a regional school drawing from the blackstone valley? why no branch library in the plan?