The calculated major costs associated with sports will be posted this morning to the district website under the DISTRICT link. The blog on the district budget will close as of today and comments to any of the posts will not be published from this time forward. I would like to thank all of you who have contributed to the blog and while many different opinions exist as to the governor's budget proposal and how the district should respond to the reduced funding, the opportunity to read your concerns and ideas was helpful to this superintendent.
Thank you,
Bronson Stone
Superintendent

The Board of Education has discussed the concept of pay-to-play. The impact of instituting such a program would have to be weighed against the potentially negative impact it could have on low-income students. As for dropping some programs and services for students to save jobs, the mission of the district is to provide services and programs for students.

The special education programs that have returned to the school district over the past eight years were returned when the tuition costs and the transportation costs for the out-of-district programs made it financially beneficial to the school district to return the programs to the school district. Tuition costs for out-of-district placements can range from $13,000/year/student to $30,000/year/student or more.

The major costs for each sport sponsored by the school district will be posted on Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning. The co-sponsorship football program that is funded and hosted by Susquehanna Community allows Susquehanna Community students to participate in soccer, wrestling and golf programs completely funded and hosted by Blue Ridge.

The Blended Schools Program will be reduced for next year. The district only plans on purchasing the technology component of the program (Blackboard) at a cost of approximately $12,000/year. Blended Schools will continue to be used for posting homework assignments and for creating on-line courses/learning experiences.

If the decision was ever made to eliminate separate instruction in art, music, technology and library at the elementary school, the academic standards associated with those subjects would be taught during the instructional day by the certified elementary education teachers.

The Scranton Times article simply divided district budgets by their enrollment to arrive at that figure. The actual instructional costs per student for 2010 were approximately 2/3rds of that amount. Every private and parochial school should be able to educate their select students at a lower cost than public schools given that private and parochial schools do not have to accept special education students or English language learners; they do not have to pay retirement contributions to PSERS; the transportation costs for the majority of their students are paid for by the public school districts that are within 10 miles of the private and parochial schools; and they do not have to follow the majority of the other mandates that public schools have to follow. Also, the budget numbers for 2009/10 & 2010/11 are higher than any other budget year because of the inclusion of federal stimulus dollars. These funds were provided to all schools to be spent over a two year period. They will not be included in the 2011/12 budget and the budget will be significantly less.
As for health care, in the last contract negotiations the health care package was converted from Traditional Blue Cross/Blue Shield to Blue Care PPO with co-pays.