Budget-Cutting Scenarios @ the Janesville School District

Janesville School District officials provide details on cutbacks at meeting. (Janesville Gazette, 4/1/2011)

Excerpt:    This is what Janesville education might look like with a 13 percent budget cut:

-- More suspensions and expulsions, if counselors and school-based police officers are cut.

The officers and counselors work to prevent trouble, but that proactive approach would be gone, and police would spend more time making runs to the schools to handle trouble. Schools could be less safe.

-- Fewer graduates, if the counselors are cut, because they track students' progress and push at-risk students to keep up with their graduation credit requirements.

-- Less of an effort in the elementary and middle schools to focus on individual students' academic needs, if learning-support teachers, who analyze student test data and run small-group learning sessions, are cut.

-- Teachers who have difficulty with computer technologies would not have someone on hand to help them, because the librarians—these days the schools' software experts—could be gone. Scratch library story times, too.  [Emphasis added.]

Those were a few of the answers from district administrators Thursday when Janesville School Board members asked what the district might look like if all the budget cuts now on the table were carried out.