Budget cuts - never fun

Even though the state of Minnesota has a $1.9 billion budget surplus this year, propose funding for K-12 schools will result in...

North St. Paul-Maplewood-Oakdale [school district] is looking at laying off 90 teachers and staff members next year. South Washington County must find more than 60 positions to cut by next fall, most of them teachers.

Burnsville-Eagan-Savage* will lay off 50, Bloomington almost 30 and Wayzata 25. Minneapolis has already shed 120 jobs from its central office — a move depicted as pushing resources out into schools.

Indeed the only metro-area districts that are not facing cutbacks are those that recently asked voters to raise property taxes to cover past rounds of cuts. Many of those districts now will be unable to fulfill promises to use the money to staff back up. School districts foresee yet another fiscal cliff, despite Dayton's ed plan. MinnPost, 4/9/15

After working 25+ years in Minnesota schools, this boom-bust funding cycle has become sadly familiar. If the legislature would simply tie school funding to inflation, might the histrionics accompanying each legislative session might involve something other than K-12 education?

My fiscally conservative side (never use two mules when one will do), sees budget cutting as an opportunity for districts to take a hard, critical look at its programs, staff, and services and determine which are worth keeping and which are not. To a large degree, this is a subjective task, but increasingly less so, with performance on state tests** being the defining measure of school (and administrative) success. 

Or do we really know what impacts student performance on tests? Might, just might, a happy child who gets a balanced educational diet of the arts, physical activity, vocational studies, and constructivist activities perform better that the child who is test-prepped at the expense of such balance.

Is any school courageous enough to experiment?

*My district - the numbers are a very rough, very early estimate, but the cuts will be felt.

** Education could save a lot of money buy reducing the amount of testing it does. Hmmmm.

Why you need a systems integrationist Ed Leadership column, April 2015

My April 2015 Power Up column "Navigating the Seas of Data" is available online. The column explores why schools need a systems integration specialist.

BFTP: Where do you keep your valuables?

From "Google Now Covers All Apps With Advanced Backup," PC World, March 4, 2010.

Google recently extended what it describes as highly advanced and sophisticated data backup and recovery to all components of its Apps communication and collaboration suite.

The level of protection, both in terms of the amount of data preserved and of service restoration time, is typically only affordable to very large companies and cloud computing vendors, according to Google.

At the core is real-time, synchronous replication in multiple servers and data centers of every morsel of data entered into or modified in any of the Apps components, like Gmail, the Docs office suite, Sites and Calendar.

"Anytime you change any data in Apps, whether writing a sentence in a document or changing a cell in a spreadsheet, in the background we go and write that data to multiple servers within one data center and also in other data centers," said Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager.

...

Some large companies have invested in synchronous replication of the sort Google is able to do, but at a cost that is prohibitive to most enterprises and smaller businesses. Google is able to provide this disaster recovery protection for free because it operates many data centers around the world that are connected via high-speed links, Sheth said.

What level of automated backup can we reasonably be expected to provide in K-12 schools? None that seems practical. And unless you know some secret formula that I do not, getting most staff to make manual back-ups is impossible. ("No, two copies of a file on the same device does not constitute a back up.")

I've written before about where one ought to keep things of value (Under the Mattress or in the Bank). For physical objects, one can keep them at home in a sock drawer, in a safe in the closet or in a bank vault downtown. I think most of us would agree that keeping all your diamonds and pearls in the bank's safe deposit box with large, mean-looking armed individuals just outside the door it feels much safer.

So where does one keep one's digital valuables - at home on your computer hard drive, on a server on the district WAN, or in the cloud where large, mean-looking geeks who know a lot about computer security stand virtual guard?

Yet, I hear district level IT people express concern about the "security" of information kept in the cloud. Could this be a territorial issue more than a technical one?

BTW, my colleague Jen Hegna at Byron has a terrific presentation on Slideshare about the whys and hows of why her district went with GoogleApps. Take a look here.

Original post March 9, 2010