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By Steve Alexander Reporter

M30o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr Mobile Teacher Cuts Delayed

Published: Wed, April 23, 2008 - 12:53 am
Last Updated: Wed, April 23, 2008 - 1:12 am

Steve Alexander

There will be no teacher cuts in Mobile County, at least right now.
The Mobile County School Board Tuesday night approved a motion calling on the superintendent to review his budget cut proposal and try to make fewer cuts.
The gymnasium at Tanner Williams Elementary School was packed with people calling on the board to try keep the almost 260 teaching jobs.
The meeting began with more than a dozen people speaking before the school board.
Many made impassioned pleas to board members to prevent teacher cuts.
Michael Woodard said, "Board members, please do anything but take the teachers out of the classrooms. Ask those staff members making more than $100,000, give ten percent of that."
Emily Prine, a teacher said, "Please consider letting people know (about their jobs) sooner rather than later."
After listening to the speeches, board member Bill Meredith made a motion before the board.
The motion asked the superintendent to see if fewer cuts could be made, to sell more timber off of land the school system owns and ask the City of Mobile for a move that could mean an additional $2.5 million for the school system.
Meredith said, "We're going to make a request to Mayor (Sam) Jones and the City of Mobile to consider giving us the revenue that came from the annexation because we're not getting any of the property taxes at all, and that could put about 30 people back to work."
The motion was approved unanimously.
When asked whether he can pare down the list of cuts, Superintendent Roy Nichols said, "We probably can if we get better information about what the state is going to do. So I think there is a little wiggle room there and we'll cut it down a little bit. I was trying to be conservative when I put the list together."
As of now, the teacher cuts may not be discussed until May 5th.
That's the date of the next school board meeting.

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What a dilemma! Fire the nontenured teachers who can teach, passed the praxis, want to be in the classrooms and lose the federal funding.

Fire the tenured administrators who won’t teach, can’t pass the praxis and are draining the bank account. Then spend the bulk of your budget on legal fees.

How did this happen? It’s obvious there are some people on the school board, who have been there a long time and should be impeached for incompetence! The CFO should be fired if that hasn’t happened yet. The state should step in and clean house…

Posted by emilcg on 04/23/08 - 5:32 pm • Report Abuse .

I think the MCPSS property manager needs to look past his own job security and unload some of the tax burdens he’s managing. How much tax are they paying to keep those properties? Are they paying insurance and making payments on properties which should be unloaded? What’s his salary? Maybe we can save some money by eliminating both! It makes more since than impacting 500 families and thousands of students. Why would MCPSS need to develop the properties if you don’t have enough teachers now?

173.5 locally funded teacher units, $9.1 million.
Central office positions, $3.5 million.
86 state-funded, special-education teachers, $5.4 million.
107.5 state-funded, special-education paraprofessionals, $3.3 million.
32.5 locally funded assistant principals, $3.5 million.
17.5 counselors, $1.5 million.
3.5 locally funded librarians, $303,000.
46 interns in the principal training program would return to the classroom, $4 million.

Posted by emilcg on 04/23/08 - 4:46 pm • Report Abuse .

Are they relying on past attrition rates to save some of the teacher positions? Nichols wants to cut the state funded positions in special education too. I guess I’m missing something, why does he want to cut those positions if the state already funds them, where’s that money going? Isn’t MCPSS in this mess because of misappropriation of funds? I hope he does not intend to cut teachers who passed the praxis and bring federal funding to the schools. I’m curious to know how many of the administrators going back to the classroom are highly qualified to teach core classes, as per the no child left behind requirements for federal funding. I understand many of them left the classrooms because they will not take or can’t pass the praxis test. It looks as if he wants to rob Peter to pay Paul! It scares me to think how bad it will be when they return these people to the class rooms. They left for a reason! “HELLO McFLY”

Posted by emilcg on 04/23/08 - 4:45 pm • Report Abuse .

cmb1

Good idea. But unfortunately a Super to manage a school system this big is not cheep. Its not like you can replace him with a school board member or something. The job requires knowledge of managing schools not getting votes.

Whats needs to happen is that a potential candidate should meet certain education qualifications to run for the school board and pass a credit check to assure that the candidate can manage his/her own finances before trying to manage taxpayer dollars. That can be contolled by the taxpayer.

Posted by working4u on 04/23/08 - 3:41 pm • Report Abuse .

Hello eveyone! Cut the superintendent salary, not our teachers, I understand there is alot of waste at Barton?

Posted by cmb1 on 04/23/08 - 2:51 pm • Report Abuse .

Maybe they just need to shift some money out of the David Thomas Mardi Gras Bead Fund.

Posted by BamaBob on 04/23/08 - 2:40 pm • Report Abuse .

That property tax is a real pizzer. They keep jacking up the assessed value of every one’s property, but we keep hearing that property values are in reality dropping. Why don’t they ever adjust it downward? Grrrrrrrrr

Posted by BamaBob on 04/23/08 - 2:37 pm • Report Abuse .

What happened to the county property tax increase that was voted in last? That was the so high and mighty way to keep the schools out of this kind of pinch in the future.

This is what happenend.

The school system got so much revenue from that source that it went into a spending frinzy.

No excuses now. The money was there. The more tax money they get, the more laxed the spending is.

Posted by working4u on 04/23/08 - 2:19 pm • Report Abuse .

I have another idea for them—Take all the new Big screen flat panel TV’s they have at the Office and sell them - They waste all this money on junk they don’t need and then talk about cutting Teachers? And then they spoke about building new schools - (that comes from a different budget) Well it is great that you are going to build new schools but who are you going to get to work there? You are about to fire 300 teachers—What do you think these teachers are going to do? They are not going to sit around and say I hope they can hire me back next year. They are going to pack up and move to somewhere that will actually pay them and give them job stablity. Do these people on the Board have an education? What are the requirements to be on the Board?

Posted by asda on 04/23/08 - 11:09 am • Report Abuse .

Seems like i heard on the news within the past couple of days that escambia county florida would be making cuts as well…

Posted by SumOneILove on 04/23/08 - 10:41 am • Report Abuse .