Nearly 200 people showed up to voice their input at the two community forums hosted by the WW-P school district this month.
Moderated by Princeton University graduate student Dan Myers, the event provided the public with opportunities to weigh in on areas in the budgeting process that the district should prioritize.
The forum focused on 13 areas of the budget: class sizes; shared services; restructuring school programs; curriculum changes; corporate sponsorship; sports teams; online courses; staffing; transportation; world languages; facilities use; teachers/staff; and creation of fee-based programs.
While participants were asked to rank priorities to be used for budgetary decisions, school officials emphasized that no decisions had been made to cut from any of those areas or any of the scenarios suggested in the forum.
“These are for discussion purposes,” to solicit ideas from the community, said Superintendent Victoria Kniewel during the February 15 forum at High School South. “Those have not been decided.”
Originally scheduled to be a one-day event in January, Myers held two forums — one on February 12 which yielded around 60 people and one on February 15, which yielded about 125 people, including many students.
Participants in the forums were given a survey to fill out as well as a packet with discussion points used to guide the conversation and give their input as they discussed their ideas with other members of the community.
Myers and a group of organizers from Princeton University handed out the packets to participants as they entered the forum, which also specified a random table number and seat. This was to create a diversity at each discussion table. Myers said the forum was a chance for participants to “talk to people you may not know in the community.”
Before participants began developing input, Myers and Superintendent Victoria Kniewel made presentations about the process. Although Myers did not live in West Windsor when he was in high school, his family later moved to the area, and his parents still live in West Windsor. His sister graduated from South in 2004, he told the participants.
While the school district will gain input for the budgeting process from the event, Myers was also conducting research about group decision-making. “How do groups use information to reach decisions?” is one of the questions he is studying.
Kniewel pointed out that the most common forum for public input is during school board meetings, but the forums provided the atmosphere created by neighbors simply discussing their views as they would in “conversation over the picket fence” or “at the coffee shop.” The district does not want the “loudest and strongest” voices to be the only ones heard, she added.
“It’s my hope that that kind of conversation continues” as the process moves forward, Kniewel said. While budgetary decisions usually drum up controversy within the community, Kniewel said that “arguing with each other is not going to get us as far” as working through the problems together.
Participants developed input through a survey, where they were asked to rank a list of seven areas in the district where changes should be made first. The list included sports teams, staffing, transportation, facilities use, world languages, creating fee-based programs, and teacher and staff stipends.
Kniewel then presented data showing how each idea generated by members of the community would be analyzed by school officials, based on the impact to students and the ease of implementing those changes. She also highlighted the cuts and decisions the school board had to make to stay within the cap in last year’s budget.
Myers also presented instructions for the community discussions. At each table, five participants were given a packet that contained seven of the 13 main areas school district officials were evaluating. Participants were asked to rank those seven areas based on what they felt the district should prioritize in the case of any cuts.
Participants discussed each of the seven categories at their respective tables, each of which had tape recorders to tape the responses.
They were also given a blank sheet to offer more suggestions to the district aside from the categories discussed.
“A lot of what we’re hearing is what we already knew,” said Kniewel, who said the raw data from the February 12 forum had already been submitted to school officials.
With such tight deadlines looming for the districts budget process — the district must submit its preliminary 2011-’12 budget to the county superintendent by Friday, March 4, and the school board must approve the budget for the ballot by Tuesday, March 29 — will the data be available by the time the budget is finalized?
Kniewel said that while some of the budgetary numbers will have had to be worked out before all the data from the forum is vetted, “this will help us make some of those numbers real,” she said.
“It will mostly inform future years,” she added.
School Board President Hemant Marathe, who also attended both forums, said that because the preliminary budget has to be submitted by March 4, officials aren’t expecting the data to have a large effect on the 2011-’12 budget, but will be used long-term. When it comes to the budget school officials submit on March 4, or the final budget on the ballot, “all people vote on is the plan, so we can always modify the plan” to accommodate the input, Marathe said.
“This process has been very useful,” said Marathe. “I spoke with several people at the end of the forums. First, everybody was appreciative for the opportunity to discuss the issues that are important to them.”
Some told him that at the end of their discussions, they changed their minds on some of the priorities. “So a lot of good things have already come out of this forum, although we haven’t seen the results yet.”
