Skretta's Scintillating Salutations

I am at the Nebraska School Boards conference in Papillion. The place is crawling with Superintendents, district administrators, and school board members from across the state. Yesterday were the pre-conference workshops and the regular sessions run today and conclude with a Friday luncheon. Yesterday afternoon I attended the NE School Business Officials meeting. Speakers included Russ Inbody with the NE Department of Education's School Finance office and Michael Dulaney, the Executive Director of the NE Council of School Administrators. These guys and the other school finance folks who spoke were eloquent and informed, but it was like a three hour Debby Downer monologue. Here's one factor to worry about: Timeline: The timeline on state aid is not going to work out well for school districts for budgetary planning purposes.  By law, schools have to inform teachers of their employment status for the next year by April 15th.  Though the target date for getting a certified st...

All right, Senator Adams, a longtime York educator and chair of the unicameral Education Committee, did not so much speak today as he gesticulated emphatically, hammering his point home about how those of us in the schooling business need to be especially mindful of the fact that 'The Cliff Effect' is coming. He spoke to Superintendents today at ESU 6 in Milford. For the uninitiated, the Cliff Effect is the appropriately ominous phrase for what happens in state aid to education in Nebraska (and elsewhere) when the federal stimulus dollars have disappeared and the state lacks the revenue to replace those lost dollars back to schools. It's coming - in fact, it's just around the corner. It's not actually true that all the stimulus money is gone next year. The feds passed another multi-million dollar package on the EduJobs bill that was designed to save teacher jobs. That money will come to NE in the form of another $58 million. Sadly, 58 million sounds like a lot of di...

I’ve come across three interesting articles recently that I wanted to share. To me, they all relate to the same theme, which is that the economic challenges facing schools in our neighboring states are real and that they are likely to play out in a similar fashion, soon, in Nebraska. While 2010-11 still looks pretty decent in comparison to what’s coming the next couple years after that, there are already many districts in our own state that are floundering. There is an abundance of information out there right now about this. Clearly, it behooves us to pay attention to this finance information so that we are cognizant of what our policy-makers at the state and national level are doing (or not doing) to address the crisis and so that we can respond thoughtfully and strategically rather than reactively. On a local basis, it may be instructive for us to examine how other school districts handle this to better prepare ourselves should we encounter such challenges. The Des Moines Register ht...