Impressions from the Community Budget Workshop
Writing about the workshop is harder than I expected. I don't know where to begin. The budget workshop was such a welcome opportunity to get immersed in a wealth of information about school financing, the SFUSD books, and the breaking news about the state budget. The handouts alone will take some time to digest and review. Many thanks are due to Jill Wynns for putting this program together, and to Vernon Billie for updating us on the increasingly promising, if not arcane, prospects for this year's state ed budget, and to Myong Leigh for his insights into the top level structure and fundamental realities of the district finances. I know that I was engaged and learning a great deal from all of the speakers.
I was only able to attend the scheduled 2:00 hours of Saturday's budget workshop. The weekend vortex of family life pulled me right out of the room at noon, much to my chagrin. I would have liked to stay to the end to meet the many list members who were in attendance. I could tell the room was full of questions and I would have loved to stick around for whatever discussions ensued.
One of the handouts was a compilation of the questions received. Nancy W — aka bdget@swfusd — clearly had a problem with her out-of-office auto-responder on Friday, but she did get the emails and did compile a comprehensive set of questions. The presentations did not address specific questions from that list, but I think they were responsive to the topics that people wanted to hear about. Again, it will take time to review and digest all that I learned and review what was cover and what was left out. The speakers were very open to questions from the floor, which was great. It may have derailed their schedule and affected their ability to cover all that they wanted. But I think we all appreciated their responsiveness and their answers.
Jill talked about scheduling a series of workshops, perhaps in collaboration with PPS, that would allow them to go into more depth on specific topics. I hope this happens. There was so much ground to cover, so much complexity, and so many more questions to answer. If anything, I have more questions now than before. More importantly, if we can sustain this open exchange of informative I think a lot of the mystery and a lot of the suspicions about district fiances and be put to rest. School financing in California is a byzantine mess. Rube Goldberg could not have imagined anything so obscure, accidental, and indirect -- so Gordian. District books will never be accessible. But with more efforts like Saturday's at least the books can be more open and more intelligently reviewed by those of us odd enough to dig it.
As I digest the information I hope to write a series of posts about what I've learned. I'm not a reporter, so there is no use in me trying to recite the events of the day. Thanks to Nicole for her able reporting. For my part, if I can find the time, I hope to be able to relate some of what I heard, and share the web resources available to us. I hope some of the other attendees will share their thoughts and impressions with us here.
I was only able to attend the scheduled 2:00 hours of Saturday's budget workshop. The weekend vortex of family life pulled me right out of the room at noon, much to my chagrin. I would have liked to stay to the end to meet the many list members who were in attendance. I could tell the room was full of questions and I would have loved to stick around for whatever discussions ensued.
One of the handouts was a compilation of the questions received. Nancy W — aka bdget@swfusd — clearly had a problem with her out-of-office auto-responder on Friday, but she did get the emails and did compile a comprehensive set of questions. The presentations did not address specific questions from that list, but I think they were responsive to the topics that people wanted to hear about. Again, it will take time to review and digest all that I learned and review what was cover and what was left out. The speakers were very open to questions from the floor, which was great. It may have derailed their schedule and affected their ability to cover all that they wanted. But I think we all appreciated their responsiveness and their answers.
Jill talked about scheduling a series of workshops, perhaps in collaboration with PPS, that would allow them to go into more depth on specific topics. I hope this happens. There was so much ground to cover, so much complexity, and so many more questions to answer. If anything, I have more questions now than before. More importantly, if we can sustain this open exchange of informative I think a lot of the mystery and a lot of the suspicions about district fiances and be put to rest. School financing in California is a byzantine mess. Rube Goldberg could not have imagined anything so obscure, accidental, and indirect -- so Gordian. District books will never be accessible. But with more efforts like Saturday's at least the books can be more open and more intelligently reviewed by those of us odd enough to dig it.
As I digest the information I hope to write a series of posts about what I've learned. I'm not a reporter, so there is no use in me trying to recite the events of the day. Thanks to Nicole for her able reporting. For my part, if I can find the time, I hope to be able to relate some of what I heard, and share the web resources available to us. I hope some of the other attendees will share their thoughts and impressions with us here.
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