Portlandia’s Proposed School Budget

Superintendent James C. Morse’s proposed 2012 budget for the Portland School District can be found here.

Normally, school websites and information systems are abysmal but kudos to the Portland School District.  First, they have a Facebook feed and it’s kept up to date.  Second, their website is modern and full of information.  Third, the school meeting was last night and they already posted the budget.

Impressive.  Imagine what schools could do if they were actually funded.

Need to read through it but I liked this line from the Press Herald article “Morse's budget also would add three multilingual teachers and two elementary world language teachers,” with the stated goal of maintaining Spanish classes for all students in grades 3-5.  That said, the cuts at the high school level and to after school sports programs are severe.  In total, nearly 80 positions out of 1100 are cut. 

If I the budget right, $39 million will go to teachers for 6,900 students or roughly $5,600 per teacher per student per year.  Which is nearly the amount I spend annually on my car payments.  Sad.

The untold backstory here though may be this graph thrown into the last page of the budget which shows Portland enrollment since 2000.  With dwindling populations and a fast-growing student diversity requiring more resources, it may be hard to fault Mr. Morse’s efforts.