Dear Ann Arbor Public Schools Community,
At Wednesday evening’s Board of Education meeting, I shared a comprehensive district plan developed to address the $25 million shortfall we face. As I have said before, while I did not create this situation, I have remained committed to addressing it, and to do that, I needed to hear from our school community. I want to thank the thousands of staff members, community members, students and our Board for your feedback. We truly appreciate all of the input we received. That feedback we received helped in crafting the comprehensive district plan. You can view the proposed plan in full here.
Some core elements:
· The district will continue to offer robust programming, including our performing arts, music, environmental education, STEAM, and International Baccalaureate programs.
· We will maintain effective class sizes at AAPS as even with proposed staff reductions, there will be no drastic increases in class sizes. Class size will remain within contractual maximums.
· We will ensure we have continued resources for students with 504 and Individual Education Plans.
· In total, the plan calls for the reduction of 141 AAPS employees, which is six percent of our total workforce.
· The reductions in this plan total $20.4 million. I felt that going any farther at this time would begin to cut too deep and I want to keep classroom impacts to a minimum.
· One additional piece of the plan is a voluntary severance agreement we agreed to with our teacher’s union this week that we hope will reduce the overall number of teachers laid off.
While there is no requirement for the board to vote on this plan, I recommended that our school board do so. The board of education will hold a special meeting on Monday, May 20 at 7 p.m. at Pioneer High School with the purpose of addressing the comprehensive budget plan.
As I have said from the beginning, my focus when making reductions has been to do them in a way that minimizes impacts on our students, programs and the classroom. I know that doesn’t make any of the recommendations less painful. This has been a challenging time and none of us wish we were here. Our current challenges provide us an opportunity to become a more focused, efficient and effective district operationally and I remain confident we can and will emerge a stronger Ann Arbor Public Schools together.
Jazz Parks
Interim Superintendent
