Where the $5 million goes

The $5 million dollars (which sounds like a lot until you put it in the context of the entire budget) will come close to eliminating the $5.6 million deficit that the School Department foresees for fiscal year '09.

This won't reinstate anything. It would prevent more cuts.

Estimated fiscal year 2009:
Revenue $318,028,997
Expenditures $323,690,175

So we'd be preventing a deeper hole. It would take more than that to dig us out of the past six years of cuts, which total $58.1 million.