First of all, a great big THANK YOU to everyone for helping us reach out to our legislators to help get Avon Schools the funding that we really need. You have helped to make a difference for our schools!

If you’re like me, you have a lot of questions about the impact that this legislative session had on our funding. We received an update this week from our administrators, and we hope you’ll have some answers!   Not all the answers are clear at this point, but what we have, we can share.

Did we reach our goal?

Our goal for this session was to increase our per-student funding by $551 – up to the previous state average. The short answer: No we did not reach our goal. BUT, you need to know that we did make strides towards that goal! The new budget brought us about half way to our goal. If our enrollment stays exactly the same, we will receive $270 more per student over the next two years ($191 for the 2015-2016 school year, and $78 for the 2016-2017 school year). Half way to our goal is a tremendous gain, considering the challenges that our legislators faced this session. So, in total, the state will be providing Avon Schools $2.4 million additional dollars above what we are currently receiving: $1.7 million this fall, and $700,000 next fall.

I read in the news that we were getting more than $2.4 million – why is there a discrepancy?

Great question! It’s one we’ve all asked! There are three areas that the media accounted for that don’t lay within the confines of per-student/per-pupil funding as outlined above.

• First: Estimated Enrollment. Because schools get funding on a per-student basis, legislators and media make estimates as to how much our student body will grow this fall. The numbers above are based on the possibility of having no increase in enrollment. The media has numbers that are based on significant growth – significantly more than Avon School leadership expects. While it’s possible that we will have an increase in enrollment, that increase isn’t something that can be used in predictable budgeting. As all of us know in budgeting for our own families, “potential” funds can be used in budgeting, but budgeting on potential must happen very cautiously.
• Second: Special Education Grant Increases. The number that was handed down from the media included the fact that we are getting an increase in our special education grant for the first time since 1994. Wow! The special education grant has not increased in over 20 years!!! So glad they are changing this. In any case, the numbers associated with this particular increase are not certain as there are lots of variables that will make a difference. We are very pleased to hear that our special education programs will finally be receiving increased funding. While the media added them to our total, we kept this estimate out of the total, simply because these particular funds will be used for specific programming and not general funding.
• Third: Kindergarten Students Count. Previously, kindergarten students only received partial funding from the state, and the rest of the funding for kindergarten was from a Full Day Kindergarten Grant. That’s changing this year! Our precious and sweet kindergarten students will officially count as whole people! Our kindergarteners this year will receive $115 more per student as a result of this change. That estimated amount was also lumped into our number from the media. Until we have all our little ones registered for kindergarten, there is no way to know the full impact of this change.

On a related note, if you have a child going into kindergarten this fall, there is still time to register!

But, didn’t the news say that we were one of the top ten “winners” in educational funding?

ACSC was ranked tenth on the list of “winners” in education coming out of this legislative session. Out of all the school systems in our state, we formerly ranked 322 out of 365 in per pupil funding, but as of today Department of Education lists us at 325 out of 365 in per pupil funds. Any significant increase in our funding looks dramatic, which is why they labeled us winners. However, due to the fact that the state average for per-student funding has been raised, we are still $446 below the state average of per-student funding. We were losing out so much before that our increase makes us look like big winners – when in reality, we still have great strides to make before we reach our goals.

Where will we see our new money being spent this fall?

From what we understand, nearly all of our new funds will be put right back into teachers. Our administration is working hard to identify areas where additional teachers are needed. As we know, the class sizes are way too big right now, across the board. Our class sizes are larger, on average, than most of the communities around us, which is having a dramatic impact on our kids. We are excited to see how this will pan out, but obviously the specific details are still emerging.

The session is over, and we still aren’t funded sufficiently to solve our problems – what happens now?

The education budget will not be reviewed in the legislature again until the spring of 2017. We don’t know what will be happening in the meantime yet. What we DO know is that our administrators are working tirelessly to ensure that the money we have is being spent efficiently. There has been a huge amount of effort as of late to make sure that every dime is spent effectively and responsibly. We know that even as resourcefully as we can possibly utilize old and new funds, we will still run into some overcrowded classrooms and other needs in our schools that are not being met.

Our responsibility at this point is to try to connect with our legislators over the next two years, so that we have a chance at making a greater gain in the next session that takes on the education budget. We also need to take a look at ways we can be helping to ease the stress on our teachers and create better educational environments for our kids. For some, that might look like volunteering time to help in our kids’ classes where we can. For others, that might mean simply keeping in touch with our kids’ teachers to find out what they need to make their classrooms run more smoothly.

But two years is a long time. Personally, I hope that as a community, we seek out the best ways we can find to help remove obstacles facing the education of our kids in Avon. There is no greater investment than the education of our youth.