By R.J. Sullivan Students have all heard it at some point in their educational career “such and such is getting cut” or “that teacher is being let go”. It’s a hard truth that the past few years students have watched as unique educational opportunities are being cut one by one.
In the last few years West Valley has had a number of programs at risk of getting cut. Some notables being the Chinese class last year, which was consolidated and put as a seventh period, and the removal of choir class a few years back. But after all that, how much do students really know about the budget and how it really affects them? In order to get a grasp on how much students know about the school budget, I ran a quick survey on 32 random people with four yes or no questions. The results were surprising; only roughly 28% of people felt like they knew how the budget worked, however 81% of people said they knew how budget cuts affected them. Most of our money comes from the state and is pushed down to the borough, which decides how much money gets funneled into our schools. However the state legislature doesn’t decide the amount of money the borough gets until May or June, meaning the school district has to make their budget based off estimates until they know how much money they have at the next school year. This means that some teachers might get laid off only for the district to ask for them back the next year, when the budget comes out higher or lower than estimated. So when did this start happening? According to Mr. Genson around the early 2000’s the budget stopped growing while other costs such as healthcare and utilities kept going up, meaning the district was paying higher costs but with the same budget that couldn’t handle the rising costs. So why doesn’t the borough just give more money to schools? Well it’s not that simple, they’re capped at a certain amount of money they can give the school district by law. So when the budget doesn’t grow with costs, it leads to class sizes being expanded into what Social Studies teacher Sean Genson calls “hectic” and “crazy” with class sizes averaging at around 30 students. When asked about the importance of having a healthy education budget Mr. Genson responded calling it “absolutely vital” as it “has to be a huge thing” for Alaska. As of the writing of this article most of the 8 million dollar cuts made to this years budget have been restored as the district had obtained more money than expected.
14 Comments
KIra
9/21/2018 12:24:05 pm
That is completely true not many people know that our money for schools is being wasted on private schools and thing like building a wall on the border when that money could be used to keep schools up.
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Zachary A
9/21/2018 12:25:05 pm
I have heard of budget cuts very often throughout my time in school, and I also have noticed the increase of class sizes.
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Dominik
9/21/2018 12:25:29 pm
Thank you for this information on the topic of budgets. It is very intresting how many people dont know how the budget works.
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Emma Sauer
9/21/2018 12:25:44 pm
You can tell there was lots of time and effort put into this and you can tell!
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Josh
9/21/2018 12:27:55 pm
I think it's tough how many classes are close to getting cut.
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FM
9/21/2018 12:29:38 pm
Nice article, you addressed the issue well and I think it will raise awareness.
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Ms. Gallaway
9/21/2018 12:37:03 pm
This is such an important issue and you reported well on it. I would love to see a question about if for state legislators at the candidate forum in October. I know I have way more students on my caseload now compared to 10 years ago, and it definitely makes teaching harder.
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9/21/2018 12:47:08 pm
Thank you for all the work you did. This was very informative. Keep it up.
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Lawson
9/24/2018 08:52:41 am
i never knew that most of the 8 million dollar cuts made this years budget have been restored as the district had obtained more money than expected.
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B.A.
9/24/2018 08:52:52 am
I've heard about the budget cuts and the classes expanding but i never really knew what caused it to happen.
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JG
9/24/2018 08:54:52 am
That was a really well written article, it was very informative.
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MK
9/24/2018 08:55:06 am
This article had a lot of info I didn't know about, like healthcare and utilities going up while the budget stopped growing. Was very good.
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Stevie
9/24/2018 09:03:03 am
When first mentioning someone's name the first and last name of the person is required after that you refer to them by their last name.
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