Budget cut check in

So how hard has it been for your school with budget cuts? Class sizes at my school have increased greatly. I have 33, 34, and 25 in mine and I am not the worst. We have 8000 copies for the entire semester. Due to previous losses of calculators and wear and tear we don't have classroom calculators anymore. We have no new textbooks so some of our classes don't have enough textbooks. I know it could be much, much worse but it is still a scary situation. So what about your schools?

Damn I thought we had taken forever. Our is your fiscal year Oct to Sept?

or as I like to say, cuts vs. sutures. Granholm has headed off cuts to k-12 for as long as she is in office. Now Repub's are proposing $100 to $150 per student which will result in millions of lost revenue and of course jobs....in a state with an average unemployment of 15-25% depending on the area. Plus some districts are losing many students. Pretty glum in education here just now. Makes for a difficult work life for everyone.

But we sacrifice supplies big time. Our textbook situation is pitiful. We're running an election this year just to reinstate our salary schedule.

And next year's supposed to be worse.

Class sizes are slightly larger; by about 2 students.
We took another pay cut, and students took a bigger cut. We went to a 4-day school week, which will provide my students with 147 instructional days.

Yes, we added 30 minutes to the length of the day. My students will now be in school until 4:15. They'll be riding home on the bus in the dark come November/December.

Our supply budgets got cut. We WILL be allowed to take field trips, if we fund-raise to pay for them, including bus costs.

We got no new Language Arts books (our series is consumable,) and the on-line contract that would make us possible to print out stuff and use it without the consumables was not renewed. We're told that they are "still negotiating." That doesn't hit me hard as some; the text is only one small part of what I use.

The biggest challenge, of course, is the 4 day week, and my personal budget, dealing with losing pay this fall, in addition to the pay cut we took last March.

that totally sucks. I could see a four day week at our high school level since we have block scheduling but anywhere else it would be totally unworkable. We would have to add 1.5 hours to our day.

We also got the nice kick of an accounting error by the county to the tune of 1.5 Million. We won't be able to recoup that, but they can't tell us why. That would hire back a lot of teachers, eh?

All ECA pay was reduced or elimiated if the position went unfilled the previous year. All expense accounts were reduced by 20%.

I'm in Indiana where our wonderful Governor (R-Repulsive) capped property taxes at 1%. People think these schools are going to fund themselves. x(

How much it has affected the schools varies by district I suppose. We have a great union, so we didn't lose any staff, just through attrition.

Supplies were cut, but we go through that every year. You don't even know what was cut until they don't show up.

We are entering contract negotiations in January. God bless our local officers and negotiating team. Our superintendent is an idiot and our school board is a bunch of PTO moms who don't have a clue about running a school district.