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November 17, 2003 |
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About Town Dave Uphoff |
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Attendance Centers: Get on with it!
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I suppose I could play it safe and write about some soft and cozy
subject but we are in hard times right now in our school district and it is important to keep the
community dialog going in order to try to resolve our school funding crisis. The purpose of these editorials is to
encourage dialog and stimulate thought in order to help solve community problems. Being a voter who pays a substantial amount
a year in property taxes, I feel qualified to comment on our school funding crisis.
That said, I urge the Fieldcrest Board of Education to implement attendance centers next year in order to not only help reduce the budget deficit but also to provide a more uniform and unifying education for our children. Attendance centers is a concept in which students attend classes based on grade, not on geographical proximity. Grades K-2 would be located at Fieldcrest South in Minonk, grades 3-5 in Toluca, and grades 6-8 in Wenona. Attendance centers may save Fieldcrest $200,000 a year, which is not an insignificant amount. Not to adopt attendance centers would be fiscally irresponsible of the school board given the financial straits of the school. We currently do not have a consolidated school district. Attendance centers will make it so. If cutting costs were the only advantage to attendance centers, it would be less desirable. However, attendance centers will allow students at the same grade level to be classmates throughout their school years. This should help promote equality and acceptance among the students. No more East versus West in sports. In addition, it ensures that each grade is getting the same quality of education. Collaboration among teachers is facilitated. In short, our students will be getting a better education. Isn't that what it really is all about? Sometimes I wonder if the concerns of the students are really being considered first or if other considerations are more important. It is no secret that most Toluca residents appear to be against attendance centers. From the meetings I have attended, Toluca seems to feel that having just grades 3-5 will destroy the community. I disagree. As the emails received at this website have said, Toluca's restaurants will not suffer because of the loss of certain grade levels at the school. As long as Toluca belongs to a strong school district, families with children will locate there whether or not their children actually attend a school in Toluca.
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It seems to me that many parents are complaining about attendance centers because their children will have to
ride on a bus or they will have to get the children up sooner for school. Minonk students in grades 6-8 have
been riding busses to Toluca or Wenona for ten years. I am sure Minonk parents may not have liked that but they
accepted it. If parents don't want their children riding a bus to school for an hour, why not create car pools
in which parents take turns driving groups of children to school? To put things in perspective, when I was
a student in a one room country school house, kids would walk a mile to school in all kinds of weather. When my
mother went to high school, there were no buses. During the winter she would stay with her aunt and uncle in
Minonk because the roads were too bad to traverse. How times have changed! Over the years, we have transferred
responsibilities from the individual to the school to the point now that we can no longer afford the luxuries we have
created.
In retrospect, the current situation was just waiting to happen. Consolidation did not happen in 1992. It is happening now as each community is sparring over who gets what. Consolidation will happen when all communities agree to work together and each agrees to give up a little in order to save the school district. We all have to adapt to the changing times whether we like it or not. For one community to argue against attendance centers based on considerations other than what's best for the students is counterproductive to a unified school district. Each community must remember that they voted for consolidation ten years ago and must now live with the consequences of that decision. People in Toluca have said that they will not vote for a school referendum if attendance centers are instituted. Personally, I will not vote for a referendum unless we institute attendance centers. The Board of Education must adopt some serious cost cutting measures before a referendum will be considered by the voters. It is in difficult times like these that emotions run high and tempers flare. Superintendent Michael Stagliano is receiving an unfair amount of criticsm. Some faculty continue to believe the District's financial plight is a direct result of his leadership. I may be wrong but it appears to me that they want to kill the messenger. School superintendents are usually the easiest targets for parents, teachers, students, board members, and voters. I would like to remind everyone that Dr. Stagliano is not responsible for the mess we are in. It started years ago with a previous school board and previous administrators. Dr. Stagliano has been warning us for a year now about the coming financial crisis. His knowledge and grasp of the current situation is irreplaceable at this point. It is time for all Fieldcrest communities to accept the realities of the situation and accept attendance centers. Attendance centers will bring Fieldcrest District 6 one step closer to becoming a unified, efficient, truly consolidated and educationally challenging rural school district. Hopefully, it will produce a new generation of graduates that will work together, unlike the adults in our school district. Twenty years from now they will look back and be ashamed of our current behavior. |
