Amy's Weekly Writeup

This week's Shout Out goes to Joan Fitzgerald for organizing and hosting the mini-concert, giving our students the opportunity to perform in front of an audience and practice in being a good audience member....not to mention the hours that go in to preparing students for this event!

To nominate someone for a shout out, just email me!

Tuesday: 1st and 2nd grade grade level meetings

Wednesday: 1:50 dismissal: PD with Amy Chang and Talia Miller

Thursday: PK grade level meeting

Friday: Winter Frolic

Friday Fun for Feb. 7th will be in your mailboxes.

• Budget update: Our meeting with budget subcommittee went well the other day. I would say that the committee itself understood where we were coming from and how hard we have been working to make the cuts they've asked us to make, while trying to maintain programs. They understand that in order to bring a 2 1/2% budget to the towns would mean that there are deep cuts to programs, which no one wants. However, the numbers from the overhauled state funding that we were hoping would help our situation, were much lower than we had hoped. As Martha Thurber explained it, "On a net basis we received no extra funding as a result of the Student Opportunity Act, the major overhaul of the foundation budget formula that will direct over $1 billion in new funding to Mass. schools over the next 7 years (subject to appropriation by the legislature). Most of this funding is targeted to "Gateway Cities" that serve a lot of low-income, high needs and ELL students. In the Governor's budget (which is used by DESE to estimate revenues to school districts for the coming year -- FY21) we are slated to get about $140,000 more for transportation reimbursement and $20,000 more in charter tuition reimbursement than we got in FY20. But, our primary source of state aid (ch. 70) increased by the minimum amount of $30 per student and increases in our choice-out charter tuitions more than eat up those increases." So, our work continues. However, the budget subcommittee agreed to take a higher number to the towns in an attempt to avoid programmatic cuts.