Our school board has not set a transfer student policy to govern how many transfer students to accept and how to select which applicants will be allowed to enroll. Decisions are left to the discretion of the superintendent with no oversight. An optimal policy would probably accept some transfer students to balance student numbers acrossContinue reading “Transfer Student Policy”
Category Archives: School Budget
Small Town School Board Campaigns
I was elected to the WLCSC school board in November 2022 and before that I was one of 15 candidates for the WLCSC school board in 2020. Participating in the 2020 election helped me to better articulate my beliefs about how school board campaigns in a small community like ours ought to run. These areContinue reading “Small Town School Board Campaigns”
Financial Transparency
In a series of town halls in 2015 and 2016, school leaders presented plans for $50 million in construction (with donations expected to cover some of that cost) to build WLIS and renovate portions of WLES and Jr/Sr HS. But, then the school board quietly borrowed $95 million between 2017 and 2020 for these constructionContinue reading “Financial Transparency”
Debt Payments
In 2023, the school corporation will make debt payments of $6.15 million. This is about $800,000 more than the projected tax revenue to the debt service fund. This means that funds that had been intended for other purposes will be diverted to pay the debt on the recent construction. The school board already transferred $1.4Continue reading “Debt Payments”
Access to Information
What is the single most important change our schools need? We need to bring community input back into school decisions. This could not happen while the school board “gag order” was in place. After a policy change in April 2023, the school board packet is now posted online prior to school board meetings: This allowsContinue reading “Access to Information”
School Rankings
Our school district paid niche.com $9,900 in 2020 to promote their rankings of our schools. My opinion is that Niche is not a particularly reputable ranking site (facebook scandal, company renaming and rebranding, pushing schools to pay for a “premium profile”) and I think that whatever benefit is gained from the online advertising is likelyContinue reading “School Rankings”
Class Size
As a parent, I value smaller class sizes for my children. This has been one of the distinctive characteristics of our elementary school that attracts families to our school district and keeps our property values high. Small class size is something that was highlighted during the campaign to ask our community to vote for theContinue reading “Class Size”
Dacia Mumford 