Board of Education – making cuts.

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Last night, Jeremy and I sat in on the school district’s budget meeting. Our school district has 150,000 kids in it, it’s pretty big. The budget for this year is very difficult – as one can imagine, cuts need to be made and lots of people made impassioned pleas about keeping such vital services like buses, magnet programs and media specialists. Lots of people representing different clusters in the county got up and said basically we are asking for nothing, no building improvements, no special programs, we are just asking for no staffing reductions. Everyone is trying very hard to keep staffing in place.

We were there last night to try and save Edda’s preschool program, MPAC, which is run by the ARC of Montgomery County. Edda graduated from MPAC last June and we were sad to see her leave the program. MPAC has been a partner with the school system for over 30 years and was a wonderful place for Edda. Now the school system wants to no longer outsource the preschool program to MPAC, rather they want to create an internal program run by the school system itself. About 20 parents spoke out in support of keeping MPAC open. It was very emotional to listen to 20 parents of special needs kids talk about something important in the lives of their kids. Someone took video of my testimony! More information on Special Needs Truth ’08 blog.

Doris Lee: Testimony on Special-Needs Preschool from Mark Miller on Vimeo.

9 thoughts on “Board of Education – making cuts.”

  1. Great job Doris!!!

    Well, any cut, politically, is to cut at the places that ordinary citizens can feel the pain. It is the game that plays out here and there, again and again.

    Why? It is part of the scheme – asking for more money from YOU! Imaging that if the cut is to reduce wastes on Big Wheels, nobody feels the pain (or inconvenience). The money got cut is foreever gone and it not going to return to them soon.

    As the bail-out process clearly indicates that either it is "too big to fail" or "too important to leave – therefore big bonus is needed to retain them".

    Right now, we (USA) are still doing okay because we are well-fed & well-stocked by our hard working generations before us. But we are on a steep slope now and we are going down fast and faster just like all the GREAT EMPIRES – too much irresponsible commitments internally and externally.

    These irreponsible ommitments, without balancing the book, will break our treasury, a bit here and there, piece by piece, chunk by chunk, until it is all gone.

  2. Thanks guys – my heart was pounding so loudly right before I got up to speak, it's been a long time since I've done presentations in front of a large audience.

  3. Well, while working with former employers, I received a lot of public presentation courses. I also received a lot of communication tricks, public or private.

    After all that, I guess the best one is that your heart is in it, not just your brain. And you don't try to mislead someone intentionally.

    How true it is? Everytime, I watched our political campaign speeches, the best one is coming down reality. But, few get elected that way. How ironic it is?

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