150 Parents, Teachers, Students, Staff Join To Find School Solutions

About 150 West Bloomfield parents, teachers, staff and students rolled up their sleeves Wednesday to help find solutions to the school district's budget challenges for the 2011-12 school year.

The people who attended the meeting at the  media center joined committees tasked with reviewing and creating program and budget recommendations. Those committees will meet privately until May 16, when they will finalize proposals for recommendation to the district.

The meeting combined discussion of the budget with that of the district’s strategic vision. Although the committee-style meetings were held previously, most recently in 2006, this was the first time the doors were opened to the community in helping develop the strategic vision.

“The school district’s budget belongs to everyone,” said Thomas Goulding, deputy superintendent for business and operations. “It reflects in numbers what the community wants. Tonight, they’re looking at short-term budget issues and then moving forward — where are we going with (schools of) choice? Facilities? This is strategic visioning — we’re melding where we’re going as well as short-term issues.”

The nine committees included:

• Curricula and Instructional
• Building and Enrollment Planning
• Athletics and Co-Curriculars
• District Operations
• Human Resources
• Bus Transportation
• Community Education Programs
• Revenue Enhancements
• Communication

Each committee comprised two administrators who helped facilitate discussion and helped create a list of short-term budget solutions.

Parents and teachers, who along with students largely comprised the audience, said the discussions were a relief in that they were “two-way conversations.”

“When your voice is heard, you feel better. You feel like you make a difference. This was a two-way conversation, which felt good,” said Liz Bain, a mother of two in the district who helped serve on the Athletics and Co-Curriculars group. “It was a productive meeting.”

New ideas drive positive feedback

Sandy Colvin, a district parent who helped organize the event, said that despite her familiarity with the budget deficit, that she was pleased to hear new ideas brought forth. “Some of the suggestions were new suggestions, which I hadn’t heard in the past," Colvin said. "A lot of people have experience in other areas – a lot of professionals in this district or those with experience in other districts – so I was happy to see that diversity because it led to productivity."

The short-term budget solutions which were discussed to alleviate the district’s current budget deficit of $187,000 ranged from how to raise school spirit in order to garner revenue to how to sell the district’s least-used assets. Bain said that although some committees reported contentious debate, the discussions remained civil.

“We’re not trying to cut, we’re trying to make money in creative ways. We want to get the high school athletes to the middle schools, so that they can look up to those kids,” Bain said.

Colvin said that the steering committee of the meeting was still in discussion about how to organize the lists of ideas for the next strategic vision/budget prioritization meeting May 16.

“What we did in 2006 was that the committees gave a few ideas which had the best chances of passing, and they assigned dollar values to those ideas as to how much money it could save the district. Their ideas totaled about $1.7 million, and we implemented a good majority of those ideas,” she said.

Goulding said that after the May 16 meeting, the district has until June 30 to finalize a budget for the 2011-12 school year. He added that based on predictions from  Gov. Rick Snyder’s 2011 budget proposal, the district could face a deficit of almost $4.3 million for the 2011-12 school year.

Despite those challenging figures, teachers as well as parents and administrators reported positive feedback from the meeting.

“This was the first time I had seen a chance for all voices to be heard as equals — admin, student, and teacher,” said Joanne Friday, a teacher at . “That was wonderful. I wish I would have happened sooner — to have decisions made within a month on the budget, when it’s such an important piece, it feels rushed, to me. There was a lot of passion, a little bit of contention, but that’s OK. You want people to feel that way.”