This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Schools

Proposed Budget, Middle School Redistricting Presented

The public portion of the Board of Education's budget process kicked off on Monday night, and administrators floated a proposal to alleviate unequal middle school enrollments.

Schools Superintendent Deborah Low presented a proposed $78.98 million budget for fiscal year 2010-11 and Scotts Ridge Middle School Principal Marie Doyon recommended a "minor redistricting" in sixth grade at Monday night's Board of Education meeting.

Proposed Budget 2010-11

Low's initial budget proposal, which would be a 2.87 percent increase over the current year's budget, includes implementing all-day kindergarten, one of the district priorities.

Find out what's happening in Ridgefieldwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

"It's not just the kindergarten experience," Low said. "It's what follows the kindergarten experience—being able to leverage the remaining elementary years."

Low estimated in her budget presentation that instituting all-day kindergarten in the fall would cost about $770,500—a figure that includes hiring 8.5 teachers—but that it would be somewhat offset elsewhere in the budget by 3.9 teacher reductions from declining enrollment, low teacher salary increases and no health benefit increases.

Find out what's happening in Ridgefieldwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

At Low's request, Scotland Elementary School Principal Mark Solomon also spoke, ardently supporting bringing all-day kindergarten to the school system.

Other proposed budget additions for next year include hiring an elementary-level reading resource teacher, adding a seventh-grade teacher to deal with high class sizes at Scotts Ridge Middle School, new sixth grade math and seventh grade science texts and 0.5 nurse at the high school. The budget would also drop the extra high school fee for weight training.

The school system's capital budget proposal is on the agenda for Tuesday night's Board of Selectmen meeting, and the first Board of Education budget workshop (on curriculum, instruction and technology) is Wednesday night at 7:30 p.m.

Middle Schools Redistricting Proposal

The budget proposal adds a teacher to Scotts Ridge Middle School to help alleviate the population density inequity between it and East Ridge, but that addition would not fix the disparity for incoming sixth graders.

As a quick and relatively easy fix, Doyon and ERMS Principal Marty Fiedler proposed changing a 16-street area containing 14 rising sixth graders from SRMS to ERMS. Of those students, only two have older siblings already attending SRMS.

"We've been putting band-aids on the situation," Doyon said. "Just a few students can make a huge difference ... I'm asking you to consider allowing us to put this into motion." The middle schools have already started their transition programs for current fifth graders, she said, so time is of the essence.

The change would mean that 14 more Scotland Elementary students than would normally matriculate at ERMS would do so next year, bringing the number in the split-district school from 12 up to 26 out of about 75 students.

Board members discussed making the miniature redistricting optional or making it mandatory for the affected families, and Doyon agreed to come to Wednesday's budget workshop meeting with some requested class size projections to help the board act on the matter as quickly as possible.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?