Worcester Back to School report

 The slides from Dr. Monárrez's presentation on Thursday I've shared here. The opening of school report starts about 11 1/2 minutes into the video of the meeting. The T&G write up is here.

As I've noted elsewhere, the thing I want to flag is the kindergarten enrollment report: 

You might remember that the main falling off in enrollment these past few years has been the younger grades. Kindergarten is only one grade, of course, and that first note is intriguing! 
This is important for at least two reasons:

1. The budget (you knew I was going to say this). The foundation budget, which is about* what the Worcester Public Schools' budget is, is enrollment based. More students? More funding.
2. More (yes really!) importantly, this is contrary to the narrative that schools have lost trust, etc, etc coming out of the pandemic. While again, this has been shown through survey to not be the case, it does continue to be a narrative. 
   We'd like our families to trust the district with their children.

I also will say that it was SO USEFUL to have a picture of where we are with staffing:

This is 2629 educators employed this year, of whom 183 are new; 

we have 48.5 vacancies in those ranks.
This is a big category, and it includes some of the following.

This is 146 employed overall this year, with 15 new;
we have 7.4 vacancies, of who all are psychologists.

This is 674 employed this year, with 51 being new;

we have 35 openings.

Remember, this isn't everyone we employ, either! As of last month's F&O meeting, for example, there were 28 custodial vacancies. Clearly, something we need to be keeping an eye on.

And I do have to just say somewhere that having the Superintendent's opening of school report start with the photo of a Worcester Public School bus, and have the hard work that's gone into district transportation praise, was such a wonderful, important change in perspective.