Effects of Budget Cuts on SCRL...

Our school, being a high need school in the South Bronx has been hit pretty hard in a relative sense. Our budget is reduced by approximately 3.8%, which is enough to tighten our spending on after-school programs and per-session hours for teachers.

I say relative since there are schools that have budget cuts up to 5.8%. Many of these schools are high performing schools like Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant High School, so they may not necessarily use their funds to equip their classrooms (since they're pretty much equipped for the job it's a matter of programs and personnel). I can't even imagine what they will do to cope with their budget cuts...

For our school though, there's a bit of a crunch for funding in terms of getting new materials for prepping students so I guess we'll be pretty strapped for funds so we'll have to make the most of the resources we have at our disposal.

I don't know too many details about our school budget but my personal spending budget may have to go up for my students. I've already spent more than $1000 on random class stuff this past year, and they only really reimburse you up to $260 in December with teacher's choice money.

Luckily, our school is not looking to fill budget gaps by getting rid of personnel. So my position in the science department is fairly secure at this point.

It's interesting to compare the budgets of these American schools when you look overseas and their budgets are more than double. We sent our principal and ELA teacher over to London to scope out schools in similar residential areas and areas of similar socioeconomic backgrounds and their budgets are more than double what we get.

I suppose it's a testament to how adaptive these students really are in a global sense. I mean in London they have a very different attitude towards education and their practices may not be considered ethical if practiced over here but it's still effective.

I wish our school tracked or streamlined the students. I don't seem to understand the arguments against tracking when the school itself if already homogeneous. If you are unfamiliar with the idea of tracking, it is the practice of sorting students based upon their academic abilities. So developing tiers or levels of courses so that students are placed into classes based on their competencies rather than their requirements.

With this new students progress tracking system coming out City-wide anyway (ARIS), it'll just prove that we're decades behind in educating our urban youth.