Earth to Leah Lutheran...

The RCJ (coming this morning with a ad sticker from a payday lender, sweet) reports this comment from School Board member Leah Lutheran's last night. I heard her say it too, but I'm hoping she misspoke:

"Sports, music, drama, anything that doesn't give a credit for graduation, you have to pay for participation," Lutheran said. "I want to keep it all, but I don't want to cut academics."

My kid's report cards have academic credit for music and drama. All the colleges my oldest is looking at have music and drama academic degrees. Not so for track, tennis and football ... hello, hello?

A few thoughts on some other proposed cuts...

I was convinced that the childcare at Jefferson must NOT be cut. We need to do all we can to help young moms graduate, and also provide them family health education and mom-mentoring. Every dollar spent on that will come back to us ten: these babies of high school students will grow up and have very expensive needs if we don't help. It's a very good investment our community can make.

I'm a little less sympathetic about the virtual high school. The people running it said yesterday they have to build economies of scale to make it more viable--I don't see why we have to do it ourselves when there are so many accredited options available out on the web. Perhaps we could contract these services too at far less than the current reported $9600 per participating student. The VHS folks would need to give me some good reasons we have to do it ourselves. Some better evidence is needed other than counting course enrollments instead of students participating. We are still talking about a very small population served.