Spending it Down

What is a poor school district to do?

Flush with stimulus money and an increase of per/student funding from the state, the KPBSD has managed to accumulate a healthy surplus.  As we all know, the school district initially received $4 million less than it requested from the borough assembly.  The assembly later added $2 million of funding, but the district knows that as long as their bank account is awash in black ink, the odds are good that the borough will fund under the cap.

The solution?

Spend, Baby, Spend.

Quite a bit of the surplus money is designated for the district's several charter schools, so these schools have been ordered to make the money go away. This summer, these school have hired teachers and administrators at per diem (from $250-$500 a day) to come work an additional 20 days.

That's 20 days without kids.  Doing what you might wonder?  Work that teachers in traditional school are expected to do on their own time: planning lessons, cleaning up the classrooms, placing orders for next year and etc.

Teachers in these charter schools are already given extra contact days without students (and thus more money) than teachers at traditional schools and this latest boon seems like ploy that has just one purpose - to get more money from the borough.