Loudoun County is a wonderful place to live, work, and play, and because of that great quality of life, we attract many new residents and businesses every year. Our growing community means our local government provides more services every year, from Fire and Rescue to teaching our children.
The goal of this blog is to create a dialogue in the community about how we can best utilize our tax dollars to provide those valuable local services. I want to look for ideas together for where we can find efficiencies and economies of scale, identify and reduce waste, do things in a smarter way, etc. We have a highly educated community, and I am hoping that together, we can make Loudoun an even better place to live.
I will take the good ideas that we generate here back to the County Administrator and see what we can implement. I will report back any savings we are able to achieve.
Welcome to Streamline Loudoun.
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Welcome to the blogosphere!
ReplyDeleteTotal savings in the proposal that follows are about $18 million dollars. If Dr. Hatrick thinks all of his employee positions are needed, then they all have been saved and the only cut is a week of school in mid to late June when not much is really being learned anyway.
ReplyDelete1. Place LCPS on a different calendar (LCPS application to the State Depart. of Ed) that does NOT require LCPS to build in 15 snow days to its schedule. You can roll the dice. The chances are HUGE that we will not have another winter like we did this year next year. It is a little risky, but the odds are great in your favor. Fairfax, Clarke, Frederick, Warren, Fauquier and Shenandoah counties have all reduced the length of their school year in recent years by being on a different schedule.
2. Then, since you are not required to have these 15 days built in, you can cut the school year one week shorter in June. Presently LCPS attends school 1080 hours during the year(LCPS web site during the blizzard).This is 90 more hours than required by the state which equals the 15 days that must be built in to the schedule. If the school year was shortened by one week LCPS would still be attending school 60 hours (2 weeks) longer than required by the state of Virginia. Shortening the school year would mean furloughing teachers for 5 days, BUT this would be giving them 5 more days of summer vacation. Savings will be at least $11.5 million dollars in doing this (Dr. Hatrick's own numbers).
3. Then cut 3 days of Teacher professional training (furlough) at the beginning of the school year. Times are extreme. Sorry Dr. Hatrick. Something has to go. You have to do something to balance the budget. One day in-service trainings like these are known to be very ineffective. Doing this will have less impact on the students and on the system than anything else that you can do. Teachers do need 5 days of work time in their classrooms to get ready for school. Savings by removing these 3 days = $6.9 million dollars. Trade off; teachers get 3 more days of summer vacation. New teachers and new hires to LCPS have NOT been affected by this. Still have them come in for those training days. Students have NOT been impacted at all.
Times are extreme. Loudoun County has to wake up and realize that the country is in a recession! People don't have jobs and they are NOT happy when the school always wants more and more. You may be surprised as to how many people are on the edge of financial collapse in Loudoun County. This proposal seems like the simplest way to cut a huge chunk of money and yet still retain the school system in its present condition. Teachers at least get something in this scenario, 8 more days of vacation.
Welcome to the Loudoun County blogosphere! There's lots more to do, to make this blog helpful and usable - looking forward to it.
ReplyDeleteJohn, Alasa, Kelly... sorry for the delay in publishing your posts! I've been around the Internet world since 1983, but am new to this blog software. I think I have it figured out now.
ReplyDeleteAlaska, thanks so much for your detailed posting. There is a discussion going on right now about furlough days, because the School Board decided to furlough teachers for two days this year based on the reductions that the Board of Supervisors made to the School Board's requested budget.
ReplyDeleteI welcome suggestions for the schools and will give them to Sally Kurtz who heads up the Joint Committee of the Board of Supervisors and the School Board. The suggestions you have made would ultimately need to be done by the School Board. John Stevens, chair of the School Board, is following this blog, so I know he is seeing your ideas. I will also share this information with Dr. Hatrick and our county administrator Tim Hemstreet.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts here. As things move along with this blog, I plan to take input like yours, after I've done some research, and make a new, standalone post for people to debate. I really appreciate you helping us get going on these discussions.