Several anonymous readers submitted questions for the Clarkston School district with their answers to a recent survey by The Clarkston News.
Those questions were submitted via e-mail to the Clarkston School district. The following is the text of the responce from Anita Banach, director of communications and marketing:
‘Thanks for sharing the questions with us. We will respond to each of the pertinent questions through our School Link publication (which is sent to every mailbox in the district) as well as updates on our Web site. If you would like to share the names of the respondents, please do so. We will be happy to send them a personal response.
We take great pride in communicating with our school community. As always, we encourage everyone to contact the district directly for quality information regarding the schools. I am pleased to say that this happens on a daily basis through conversations with teachers, bus drivers, administration, email contacts, building newsletters, personal meetings and contacts to the Board of Education.?
The following questions were submitted:
? ‘Why is there no visible effort by the district to study the possibility of sharing services with other districts to save money and to consolidate with neighboring districts if possible?
? What changes to course offerings and personnel does the district foresee in response to the newly approved state graduation requirements? Does this indicate reduced resource requirements for high school electives, Renaissance High School and vocational training? How are Renaissance and voc training funded today? How/when will this affect the middle school and junior high curriculum?
? How ethical is it for the school board president(Karen Foyteck)’s family to do business with schools for a non-bid job?
? Why don’t we use all of our new buildings 12 months?
? What are the realistic plans for handling future growth of our district?
? Why doesn’t the school board publish notices in our community paper anymore? How can we know what’s going on if the school board doesn’t publish notices?
? Will another high school be necessary?
? Have they considered changing their pay scale (for teachers)?
? Why doesn’t the middle school offer more after-school opportunities?
? (Can you) explain the mixed message by collecting more than 18 mills?
? How many special education students do they have? What is the cost to educate a special education student?
? Where does all the money from the Homecoming dance go? Tickets cost $20 per student, the dance is in the school, no refreshments were served. I can only see a small portion of the money collected being paid to decorations, DJ and janitorial staff. I think the money from the dance should off-set the prom cost for graduating seniors and the school should stop asking for money from the Junior parents and the community to fund the senior all-night party.
? How many additional teachers could be hired if the position of school spokesperson was eliminated? In what way does (the communications department) contribute to the instruction of our students? I do not think it would be unreasonable to expect school board members, the superintendent and his administrative staff to speak for themselves.
? Why are they spending thousands of dollars on such things as new football turf, cars for the administration and many other frivolous things rather than on the three ‘R’s?’
? Why have artificial turf on the fields? Eight years longevity for over $800,000.
? Is (the district)’s existence really necessary? Could our tax dollars be put to better use if we were not paying for the duplicity of the salaries of the many overpaid administrators?
? Why does the school board believe they can openly violate the Michigan citizen passed Headlee Amendment?
? Why are they having such an increase in racial tension over the past year? The administrators need to be trained on preventing hate crimes in the schools against Hispanic students.