Volume XX, Issue 1 September, 2011

Passing Notes

  September |
| October |
| November |  |December/January | |February |
| March |
| April |
| May

Contact Your Legislators
As the State of Illinois’ budget woes continue, the impact is directly felt by your students. When you registered your child(ren) for school recently, you were confronted with the reality that ‘free public education’ is not applicable to most. To pay for educational services at Central A& M, three sources of revenue are utilized. Federal revenues for the Education Fund account for 4% of the revenue stream, 51% come from the State, and 45% are generated locally through your tax dollars. The educational cost (total expenses for the year divided by the number of students) per pupil is $6,484 per year.

The State of Illinois utilizes a formula based on the number of students/attendance and computes that against the Equalized Assessed Valuation – the total property assets – of the district. (For Central A& M, the EAV is $78,110,936.) Therefore, as land values increase, the amount of money sent by the State per student decreases. In effect, this means that more and more of the burden for educating our students is placed on the local taxpayers. For the next several years, there will probably be no relief in that respect.

What is particularly disconcerting right now is that the funding obligations from the State are not being honored. For instance, the district started the year still owed $213,539 from last year. Our transportation costs are supposed to be reimbursed at 80%. The level of reimbursement has now dropped to less than 60%, and those reduced checks are still months late. The per pupil allocation has been frozen and recently we were notified that, while the Governor has claimed to be maintaining level funding, the $6,119 amount is going to be prorated this year down to 95%. Additionally, other grants have been reduced or eliminated.

The mantra for the year is, “Do more with less.” We would like to encourage each of you to contact your legislators (repeatedly) and request that they properly fund the amount for which they are obligated. Contact information is found on our website at www.cam.k12.il.us.  Type in your address and zip code and you will be able to obtain federal and state elected officials’ information.

Increasing Student Attendance
One of the areas of focus for Central A& M as we begin another school year is how to increase student attendance in our schools. During the past three years our Average Daily Attendance (ADA) rate has consistently decreased. The ADA is important to school districts because it is the primary factor in computing the State Aid that will be generated to the district from the State of Illinois. Improving attendance is important because of financial implications, but it is also critical because student learning will certainly be negatively impacted if the student is not in class. 

Last year our ADA dropped nearly 18 students (state aid is approximately $6,119 per student each year … recently prorated down to 95% of that amount), and this mirrors the approximate number of our district-wide student decrease. One way to negate or minimize the impact of a declining enrollment is to increase attendance. By statute, a student must be in class for at least 300 instructional minutes each day for the state to compute it as a full-day’s attendance. So, if a student is not at school or leaves before (approximately) 1:45 in the afternoon, he/she loses classroom instructional time and the district loses the dollars in the state aid formula computations.

While we may have no control over a declining enrollment because of smaller families or because of relocation outside of the district, we absolutely have control over the attendance issue with our children. Please help us improve our district-wide attendance this year by: 1) making certain your son/daughter is in school every day, 2) reserving vacation times for the summer months or during holidays already built into the school calendar, and 3) scheduling doctor/dentist appointments later in the day when possible.

We will try to monitor the attendance percentages for each building and report it back to parents and the community. Increasing our rate of attendance is an easy and painless way to increase student learning and also increase revenue to the school district. During the next year, you will hear more about raising test scores and about raising attendance. Please help us as we try to aggressively move forward on both fronts.

Search for New Superintendent Begins
The Board of Education is beginning the process of hiring a new Superintendent for the district, effective July 1, 2012. The vacancy being filled is due to the retirement of the current Superintendent, Randy Grigg. The search will take several months to complete, and periodic updates will be posted as the quest progresses.

Meetings
Committee Meetings for September will be held at the Middle School on Monday, September 12, beginning at 8:00 p.m.

The regularly scheduled Board Meeting for September will be held at the Middle School on Monday, September 26, beginning at 7:00 p.m.

Experience Pride and Excellence at Central A & M.

Randy Grigg,
Superintendent

Raiders Digest © 2010-2011

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