Wichita students weigh pros, cons of budget cut proposals

Wichita school district leaders reviewed budget-cut options and collected feedback Wednesday from some of the people who could be most affected – students.

“Adults get heard, because they come find us,” school board member Joy Eakins told more than 100 high-school students gathered as part of superintendent John Allison’s student dialogue session. “This is your opportunity to be heard.”

The students, who represented every Wichita high school and eSchool, broke into small groups to review dozens of potential budget cut proposals, including laying off teachers, eliminating all-day kindergarten, cutting extracurricular activities, scaling back bus transportation and moving to a four-day school week.

The district is trying to cut $16 million to $30 million from its 2017 budget, which begins in July, because costs are expected to increase while revenue will be flat under the state’s block grant funding system.

Tarik Aginar, a junior at Northeast Magnet High School, said none of the suggested cuts seemed good. His group decided that cutting 90 teaching positions – an average of one per school – sounded minimal to save a potential $4.5 million but could significantly affect classrooms.

“If you take a teacher out, there’s going to be larger classes,” Aginar said. “Some teachers teach multiple subjects, so if you take that teacher, there are less options for students.”

Madison Hofer-Holdeman, a senior at Northwest High, said cuts to transportation, such as reducing hazardous-route busing or starting schools earlier, would affect the district’s youngest and poorest students the most.

“We’re going to have to talk about carpooling … and if you don’t have friends that live near you to give you a ride or you don’t have enough money to buy a bike, we’re talking about walking,” she said.

“And we’re talking about little kids. These are elementary-schoolers that would have to walk to school 2.5 miles. That’s a lot.”

Some items on the list of 38 potential cuts seemed more palatable than others, students said. Paying for substitute teachers so classroom teachers can attend professional development isn’t a wise use of money, said East High senior Jadyn Fraley.

“If the teacher is gone for a long time and we have different subs each day, it’s even harder to get things done,” she said.

One group said the board could consider reducing facilitators for gifted programs at high schools or combining the positions of data leader and assessment coordinator.

“It would be nice if we could just stop taking the state assessments,” joked Savannah Reed, a sophomore at Southeast High.

School resource officers – Wichita police officers who work at each of the district’s comprehensive high schools – got high marks from many students, as did elementary school librarians and programs such as AVID and International Baccalaureate.

“SROs will keep our schools safe,” said Heights High student Benjamin Royal. “With safe schools, students will want to come to school. … Nobody wants to come to an unsafe school.”

Wesley Cudney, a student at Metro-Boulevard Alternative High School, said his elementary school librarian played a key role in teaching him to read and to love reading.

“As a kid, the library was important, because that’s where I learned to enjoy reading,” Cudney said. “Not in class, because all those books were boring and terrible. But I found my own interesting books in the library.

“The librarian would say, ‘What are you interested in?’ She’d give me a whole stack of books and say, ‘Read the first chapter and find something you like,’ and we always did.”

Some students involved in Wednesday’s dialogue are members of the Superintendent’s Student Advisory Council, or SuperSAC, which meets regularly throughout the year. Others were invited to participate or were recommended by their schools’ principals.

Allison, the superintendent, said he planned to share the group’s feedback with board members as they develop next year’s budget.

This story was originally published March 30, 2016 at 8:21 PM with the headline "Wichita students weigh pros, cons of budget cut proposals."