Like most school board meetings, in districts across Wisconsin, budgets, finances, headcounts, and enrollment (all related, of course) occupied most of the meeting. Two topics, though, stood out.
The first was our 4-K program. Whitewater did not originate the program, but few cities in Wisconsin need it more than we do. We are, for so many, a hard-scrabble town, with poverty above the state and local average. The option of earlier programming is more useful to us than to a wealthier community.
Our schooling is closer to a safe harbor, for example, than a community like Williams Bay.
There’s a related point, and it concerns the preoccupation of education as budgeting: all the talk about finances begins to obscure the work of public education as instruction in substance. Different, more creative, and inspiring teaching need not always cost more, or be encumbered with endless talk of budgets, etc.
More time emphasizing, at each and every meeting, the substantive work of eduction, enumerating a few teaching successes, would be a good practice.
Finally, as I mentioned once before, an endowment — although a matter of money — is a good idea, if managed well, and directed toward advancing a core teaching mission.