I couldn’t help but find humor in the School Board members’ remarks regarding the large number in the audience last night. It would be hard to describe the meeting as ‘crowded’ but I suppose compared to a handful of people from previous meetings this was a step forward.
A large number of public speakers were from the Milwaukee German Immersion School, who passionately spoke to the lack of funding at their schools and how that resulted in tough and painful decisions, pitting class size against keeping on specialists in art, music and gym. Many of the speakers spoke to MGIS’s great success and how this is a school that is bringing parents into MPS, a district faced with declining enrollment. Without diminishing these great accomplishments by the school, one of which is having such an engaged and committed group of parents, which I certainly applaud, one needs to remember all the school communities that weren’t able to show up and speak last night. All schools are facing tough decisions. All schools deserve an art teacher and a music teacher and gym teacher. In the fight for appropriate funding for our schools we need to keep in the forefront our goal as public educators and as a community—to provide a quality education to ALL of our students.
As an early childhood educator, I was happy to hear the testimony from both Kelly McMahon and Dawn Calarco. Kelly pointed to the inequality of funding as an issue of social injustice. The Board, failing to pass the appropriate tax levy has cost the school district $6 million in state aid. This is a crime, as Kelly stated. It’s nothing short of a violation of civil rights as it robs our children of educational opportunities enjoyed by their suburban counterparts.
Dawn made a great point on the importance of early childhood education, and said that 1st and 2nd grade teachers often comment on how those children able to enroll in K4 and K5 experience greater success later on. The way to offer quality early childhood education is to make sure class sizes remain small. When Director Petersons asked Andrekopoulos what the district was doing to reduce class size in early childhood programs, the Superintendent remarked on how he doesn’t want to see children turned away from these programs, saying if you cap the class at 20 how can you turn away the 21st child?
I say to our School Board that of course no teacher wants to see children turned away from school. You don’t turn away a child, instead, you hire the adequate number of teachers. Otherwise, this becomes a slippery slope. You don’t want to turn away the 21st child or the 22nd or the 23 and so on. But you can’t keep adding these numbers to existing classrooms. When a classroom becomes overcrowded it diminishes the educational experience for all children, turning all away from the experience they deserve.