MDIRSS / AOS 91 Reorganization - A Focus on Kids
AOS 91’s effort is to reorganize its current structure from a collection of individual schools into a coherent and more equitable model to better serve our students and educators. It makes sense to look at how we can provide the best education for everyone with our collective resources.
Why?
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● To provide equitable access to the best educational programs and opportunities to all the students we serve, for example:
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○ Stronger, better-coordinated curriculum experiences across schools
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○ More efficiently designed and delivered Special Education Programming
and Services
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○ Greater access to Extra & Co-curricular activities
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○ More opportunities for students to form successful peer groups and be
grouped for teaching in a manner that best meets their needs
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○ More efficient use of physical resources
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● To develop a system that would make excellence much more attainable and accessible to students no matter where in the district they live.
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● Provide an opportunity for staff movement between schools without the loss of seniority and other earned benefits.
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● Schools in which the administration can better focus its full attention on improving the quality of education rather than attending to a governance structure that is cumbersome, duplicative, and increasingly difficult to provide.
Why Now?
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● The current organization creates separate and unequal budgets that lead to disparities in educational programming and opportunities and is redundant and costly to taxpayers.
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● Downward population pressures have slowly created smaller and smaller schools, which in turn need to provide an ever-expanding range of services while at the same time experiencing chronic staffing shortages, which all create greater school-by-school challenges.
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● We have reached the outer limits of our capacity for efficiency and effectiveness within our model.
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● Optimal to address these issues, proactively rather than wait for a bigger crisis or legislative mandate.
Goals:
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● Form one school system in which every child, no matter where they come from, has equitable access to opportunity and resources to thrive and grow to become positive, contributing members of our community.
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● Create schools that can successfully respond to the changing demographics of our communities and the chronic staffing challenges that exist.
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● Become a single employer to better support the needs of staff professionally, economically, and educationally.
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● Create one budget that is shared equally so that no matter in which community you live, the value of your property means that you pay the same amount toward education
If we do nothing:
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● Changing demographics will put increasing pressure on our schools, with limited resources to address them
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● Student access to resources will be driven by the economic factors of the town in which they live rather than what they need to be successful.
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● Staffing and programming constraints will significantly curtail student opportunity.
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● Taxpayers will continue to pay unnecessarily for redundant and duplicative
services.