Hard News: Making the Cuts

Are free T-shirts enough?
I learned today that our assistant principal is leaving to take a position as a principal at another school.

I don't know if we'll be getting a new AP. At nearly $4 billion, the proposed budget cuts for public education in California are so Draconian that an answer may be as difficult to come by as paper and pencils.

One of the many duties of the assistant principal is to organize the school's volunteer force. My first foray into public education volunteering was as a Wonder of Reading participant. An excellent non-profit with the mission of rebuilding public school libraries and training volunteers as reading tutors. There are other volunteer reading programs and I'm always running into those happy souls in our restocked library.

Now what? Who will schedule and monitor that helpful league?

Summer school has been cut, teachers have been fired and class sizes are swelling. More than ever, schools depend on volunteers to help keep children from slipping through the cracks because — guess what? — a child, or two, or three, has been left behind despite the bell-ringing of that particular legislation.

photo by Stephan Savoia/AP