Introduction
Dan Hoesing
Thanks for coming out on such a cold night. This is the first opportunity we’ve taken the opinions of our kids into the process. They understand that the education that you and I had was very different and that that style will guarantee them nothing. Some of the things we’ve done may make them successful in college but will it make them successful adults? We’ve brought them into the budget process and how we can make cuts as well as add revenue.
This is the most recent update of the kind of world that our kids live in. Watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8
I hope you understand the needs of your kids. We have to embrace the culture that they live in so they have the advantages they need. Part of the point and click is that it brings complex technology to us so that we can use it. On the other side is that we also have to deal with the culture we live in. How people communicate these days.
Right now we want to reduce our administration by another half by the fall. It’s important that we model the way we want our system to be. The first thing we need to base our change on is knowing that complex systems are unpredictable. The decision-making is decentralized. We want to be on the edge of chaos. This is where order meets chaos.
We need to look at distance education as incentives for cuts in our budget. This is the first time we're running our operating budget so that our expenses match our revenue. We need to generate more money than what is going out. We need to build our reserves. We've had the smallest increase in property values in about 8 or 9 years. We talked to our kids today at great length about how to solve this. They gave us a lot of answers.
We now have 250 more kids because we increase access to certain teachers. A lot of our kids couldn't take college focused classes because they needed to still complete their high school requirements.
You can see on the charts the levels of students for extracurricular activities. If there are only 6 girls going out for a team, you can't have a team that can play. If we combine some of our schools at certain points, our kids can benefit.
What kind of guidance support do our kids need? Laurel is a high-cost district. The good news is that there is probably better teachers. We need to consider the point of evolution. Darwin said: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
Florida in 2004 had 70,000 students in online education. We know that there is an 85% failure rate for online learning for adults. The blended systems have a much higher effective rate in college. It's the fastest growing education system here. The advantage of having our kids do this too is that they will be more prepared for college and life after.
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Michael Kaufman
Earlier today we had about 240 teenagers in this room from all 4 communities. Tomorrow we'll have the teachers and then the board in the afternoon.
We want you to give some input into these topics too so we can pass it along to the board. Part of what you're going to be asked to do is to think about the projects that are happening now and those that are happening soon.
How many of you noticed in the video that in 2010 the top jobs in the U.S. did not exist in 2004? (handful of hands). How many of you know what that means? That's only 5 years. When most of us went to high school we thought life would pretty much continue as it was. But our kids are not growing up in a world like that. There will be more information collected in the next year than has been collected in the last 5000 years. We have to design a school system that will attend to these differences.
I want you to move into a new activity now in which there are 12 groups. Count off. Now move into the group with your number.
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