Iowa City School Board Opens up Reserves to be Used to Lower Class Sizes
After a long and heated deliberations Tuesday night, the Iowa City School Board agreed to lower the cash reserve balance required for next year's budget by board policy, allowing that money to be spent on additional teachers to address crowded classrooms.
For months, Longfellow Elementary School (and other spots in the Iowa City School District) have been feeling the negative effects of a reduction of federal funding combined with over 400 students in the school district that were not predicted to be there by the administration. As a result, some classroom populations have ballooned to barely manageable sizes. Before Tuesday night's long and sometimes heated debate at the Iowa City School Board meeting, there was both board policy and a calculated administrative risk standing in the way of this problem being solved this school year. After the meeting, there now remains only the calculated risk. The school board unanimously voted to change the board's policy requiring that the school …
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Dan Shaw
4:58 pm on Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Great work. Patch. As a concerned parent who has been at all of these meetings, your analysis and description of the events is by far the clearest and most well-informed. Stephen has scooped his more established local media counterparts with better writing and more accurate information. I appreciate that you were able to include accurate background information to clearly frame this debate. Nice … more ›