A word regarding PPS budget cuts

I disapprove of the lack of funding toward public schools in Michigan. This, however, is not the format to express that opinion in a constructive way. Michigan legislature can figure out that they fucked up soon enough.

The problem is that my home school district is now faced with the challenge of making cuts - cuts that extend far beyond the usual, "Oh, let's just let the retirees retire and then not worry about filling in their positions." There are several small actions that could be done to accommodate for the mandatory changes in the budget, but again, I'm not very interested in this. What I am interested in is, unsurprisingly, the preservation of a program that I am involved in. This program would be the Kalamazoo Area Mathematics and Science Center.

Something that I did not know prior to this whole budget crisis storm was that PPS pays significantly more toward KAMSC students than the typical student, and yet they don't receive any extra funding from the state to pay for us. I can see where this would be a problem for funding, and it could be used as an argument toward the cessation of the KAMSC program within PPS.

Then I remembered that KAMSC students are annually offered around $7,000,000 in scholarship money, and a conservative estimate of Portage's participation in the KAMSC program is probably around 1/5 of that. Six of Portage's Seven National Merit Semifinalists this year were KAMSC students, and 22 of the 25 AP Scholars this year were also KAMSC students. The reason for this is not because the Center is just a roundup of some of the smarter kids in the district - it is because we are members of a program that allows us to score that well on tests and get that much money in scholarships. If the reality were the former, there would theoretically actually be more strictly PPS kids receiving these awards and scholarships than KAMSC students. The very idea of ending such a powerhouse program to save money is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. The goal of making mandatory budget cuts is to remain as progressive as possible while relying on minimal resources. The fact that some people in this world favor ending intellectualism in favor of maintaining an influx of new textbooks and having TVs and other fancy equipment in every room is, frankly, an example of why we need programs like this more than anything.