Cutting bus routes, raising hot lunch prices, or suspending
field trips? Schools are facing tough
choices when it comes to balancing their budgets this year. We look at the impact of rising fuel and food
costs on districts across the state. We
hear from Bill Talbott, Vermont’s
Acting Education Commissioner, who is set to host a panel discussion on the
topic at Monday’s State Board of Education meeting. Then we hear from those involved in setting
the budgets for their districts. (Listen)
Also, a recent homicide has brought to light some of the
difficulties 911 operators face when they receive emergency calls from cell
phones. We talk with David Serra,
Executive Director of the Vermont Enhanced 911 Board.(Listen)
And, back to school time always means stocking up on fresh
school supplies, and for college students it can mean spending a lot of money
on textbooks. We stop by the UVM
bookstore, where students and workers are seeing increasingly higher costs for
textbooks. (Listen)
AP Photo/Toby Talbot
Emails from Listeners–
Email from Priscilla in Middlebury-
Perhaps this is the time to reconsider the structure of our school athletic leagues. My children have taken two- and three-hour bus trips from Middlebury to compete at schools in Franklin County. Is this really necessary to their education? It certainly has a negative impact on their homework. Why can’t they play multiple times against schools closer to home?
A more radical idea (which would never fly in this town) would be to have middle-school athletics be strictly intramural. More kids could participate and get the educational benefits we hear about so often. Our middle school already has a "team" structure for academics.
Email from Brad in Richmond–
In our widespread, rural district (Chittenden East) school bus rides are often far longer than a direct trip to the school would be. So many parents drive their kids, or allow high schoolers to drive themselves. As bus ridership drops, the district must then consolidate routes and extend the length of the trips even more to get a reasonable number of kids on each bus … and that only drives more kids off the buses. The results are higher per-pupil transportation costs for everyone, plus increasing amounts of traffic, more unnecessary wear and tear on family cars, and decreasing energy efficiency and air quality. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, the solution to low ridership might well be to INCREASE the number of buses, thereby shortening the trips, attracting more kids to the system and reducing everyone’s costs of getting kids to and from school.
Email from Joanne in Ludlow–
The caller who mentioned the VT teacher pension was way off. It would be good to follow up on that misperception. Teachers do contribute to their pensions. Also
retired teachers contribute to their health care and their spouse is
not provide health care, they must buy it through the pension plan. Teachers in Vt have one of the lowest pensions in New England. After 30 years of teaching with a Masters in Education my pension is less than $24,000 a year.