Ann Arbor Parents for Schools

In last Sunday and Monday’s Ann Arbor News, former Board of Education trustee Brad Orr made a number of what he called “outside the box” suggestions for bringing the AAPS’s budget deficit under control. His first article focused on short-term proposals: 1) Don’t open the new high school; 2) eliminate busing; 3) have elementary principals supervise two buildings; 4) freeze administration pay and eliminate Board of Education compensation.

I saw this letter to the editor in the Ann Arbor News last Friday (13 April) and was grinning from ear to ear! In three short paragraphs, Ms. Angle, of Ypsilanti, deftly summed up the reason we invest in public education and why it’s worth defending. I wanted to share it with you.

In what must be one of the shortest public meetings on record, the AAPS Board of Education received the news that the Ann Arbor teacher’s union had approved changes in their contract necessary to restructure the middle schools, and then went ahead and gave their approval to the agreement tonight as well.

As I learned about the middle school restructuring, it seemed to me that some of the teaming and other MS features were cut back in order to keep class sizes down. I asked a friend, a middle school teacher in Ann Arbor: “What about smaller class sizes, I thought research indicated that smaller class sizes are better?”

As part of its efforts to meet the expected deficits over the next two years, the AAPS launched an initiative to restructure the middle school program and curriculum so as to find about $2 million in cost savings. They started with the middle schools because they have the highest cost of operation per student. Cutting funding from programs that do not have a lot of leeway is never a desirable thing, but it is clear that the district will be under a lot of budget pressure for some time to come.

The question is, are the current proposals the best solution under the circumstances?