How can the district best approach the budget crunch it now faces and the challenge of increasing enrollment?

By Ann C. Jaquith

Two obvious ways to address the budget crunch and increasing enrollment are to explore additional revenue sources and/or to cut costs. Much good work has already been done in the area of general "belt tightening" and in exploring revenue options including the proposed parcel tax.

However, one area that deserves more attention and that could offer significant opportunity is to make more effective use of the resources that we are already investing in our schools. While the budget crunch has forced us to make some changes that we may not like, the fact remains that we spend more money per student than many other districts in the nation. We are fortunate to have strong teachers and supportive families. We invest at a high rate per child and we must be able to do more with the resources we currently have.

The opportunity to improve lies as much in the choices we make about curriculum, instruction and assessment as it does in the decisions we make about parcel taxes and cost cutting. Strengthening the overall quality of instruction is one way to ameliorate the effects of increased class sizes. As many recent articles in the popular media remind us and as comprehensive research in the education field has shown, the quality of instruction that students receive has the greatest impact on students' learning and future success. We are fortunate in our school district to have many outstanding teachers. However, in our schools, as in most schools, the overall quality of instruction varies from teacher to teacher. This reality means we should pay more attention to the teaching that takes place in our classrooms. From my own experience and from the work that is underway to improve schools nationally and internationally, I can tell you that high quality teaching can be nurtured and supported through organizational structures, distributed approaches to leadership and by establishing cultures where institutional as well as individual learning is expected, supported and rewarded.

As a newly elected member of the School Board, I would like to learn more about the systems we currently have in place to support the quality of teaching within and across our schools. I have experience implementing specific programs within schools to strengthen teaching and to create an environment of continuous improvement. These sorts of changes focus on how teachers work together and how teachers are charged with developing each other's capacities to teach in new ways rather than on how much more money we need to spend on the schools.