Magic Kingdom Tax Hike For CMS?
Fairy tales can come true. It can happen to you. Or in this case maybe to Bright Beginnings, which received a reprieve from the budget ax this week when the school board voted to delay a decision to cut $10.4 million from the popular pre-kindergarten program.
At the same time, the board moved forward with votes to eliminate extra funding for 134 teachers assigned to high-poverty schools, at a cost-savings of nearly $8 million, and to change school hours at more than a hundred elementary schools to save about $4 million on busing costs. The cuts were part and parcel of myriad recommendations pitched by Superintendent Peter Gorman as Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools braces for a possible $100 million budget shortfall. Other cuts recommended by Gorman will be voted on later this year.
The decision to spare Bright Beginnings, though, might prove ephemeral. The school board is slated to revisit the issue at its Feb. 8 meeting and Gorman has said the district doesn’t have the money needed to prevent shrinking enrollment in the program from 3,200 students to 1,1178 and closing all but five of the district’s pre-kindergarten centers.
To salvage the full program, CMS would have to come up with $8 million to replace federal funding set to expire this year and retain $2 million in existing county funding.
“I’m willing to do whatever work needs to be done,” Gorman told school board members Tuesday night. “But in my best thinking right now, I don’t have another option.”
Board member Trent Merchant, drawing on what apparently was an epiphany from a trip he and his family took to Disney World, offered some suggestions.
“Disney world is a place where you focus on your hopes and your dreams and you really believe they can come true,” Merchant said, referencing the big fireworks show held each night at the Magic Kingdom accompanied by Jiminy Cricket’s advice to “let your conscious be your guide.”
“It’s a place where innovation is celebrated as a problem-solving method and cynicism has no place,” Merchant said. “And it’s a place where you must be this tall to ride this ride. So there’s a barrier to access. But it’s Disney World, and they try to make it as accessible as possible for everyone.”
The same, apparently, should hold true for Bright Beginnings, a program that critics contend lacks any demonstrable evidence proving its long-term benefit to increased student achievement and advocates say is an essential component for early-childhood education success.
Upwards of 45 speakers, from parents and their children to teachers and community activists, delivered impassioned pleas urging the board Tuesday night to save Bright Beginnings.
“I’m begging you not to cancel these classes,” said Melissa Smith, the mother of an autistic child enrolled in Bright Beginnings. “My husband told me I was wasting my time coming here, but I’m praying that I’m not. Without it, I don’t know what we would have done when it was time for kindergarten. But now I think we might actually be OK.”
“If you cut this program and you make these classrooms so huge,” Smith said, “my son is going to fall through the cracks.”
CMS serves about 11,000 kindergarteners each year, Merchant said. The proposed Bright Beginning cuts, he said, would impact about 15 percent of an incoming kindergarten class. Combine that with bigger class sizes and fewer teachers and teacher assistants, Merchant said, and “it’s a recipe for community disaster.”
“We have to find a way to be innovative,” he said. “What would Walt Disney do?”
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