Friday, June 1, 2007

Friday, June 1, 2007

Dear Parents and Constituents,

Attached is this week’s schedule of Holyoke School Committee Meetings. The agenda for Monday’s School Committee Meeting can be viewed by clicking this link http://www.hps.holyoke.ma.us/pdf/sc_agendas/Agenda_06-04-07.pdf . Please note that agendas are in PDF format, which allows me to provide the package of attachments to the agenda.

Highlights:

This is the time of year where a lot more is happening in the subcommittees than in the regular meetings. We still have ongoing collective bargaining negotiations, which will be taken up in a executive session before Monday’s regular meeting. We will consider approval of next year’s calendar, approve minutes and review some travel requests, which appears to be about it for the regular meeting.

However, on Wednesday, we will continue budget discussions. We need to reduce about $5,000,000.00 of expenses to balance the budget, and a number of choices were presented last Wednesday. More options will be shown this week, and we will then begin to make choices for presentation at a public hearing later this month. Some of the limited options included percentage cuts at each school, elimination of the Freshmen Academies and TOP programs, and consolidation of the middle schools. All of those choices together more than cover the total cuts we need to make. The clear preference at the last meeting was to avoid cuts in any schools. The Freshmen Academies are reported to be less effective than we had hoped, so they may go regardless of budget issues. Based on a report in Yesterday’s Springfield Republican, there may be some additional resources coming from the State Department of Education. We’ll see.

The Building Needs Committee has been hard at work, and will convene for the second week in a row to move forward with projects at Holyoke High, McMahon and Lawrence.

There was a lot of concern about comments made at the recent Massachusetts Board of Education meeting in Malden, resulting in some unduly negative press about the Holyoke Schools. The comments were without substance and are needlessly demoralizing. They were not based on any new information or planning. It was really little more than loose chatter, in contrast to the supportive comments made by Department of Education officials who have actually been here and know how many positive things go on in our schools. Please know that no decisions of any kind were made by the Board of Education affecting the operations of our schools- Holyoke wasn’t even on their agenda. There is no reason this school year should be ending on anything but a positive note for the students and faculty of the Holyoke Public Schools.