Full-Day Kindergarten, School Cops May Come Back

The administration of the Bethlehem Area School District recommended to school directors Wednesday night that it take more than $600,000 in apparently restored state funding and invest it in school resource police officers and full-day kindergarten classes.

According to Bethlehem Area School Superintendent Joseph J. Roy, the state Legislatures apparently seems poised to restore “accountability block grant” money that Gov. Tom Corbett had eliminated in his proposed budget – a potential windfall of about $665,000 in unexpected state subsidies.

The administration also advocated using about $171,000 to invest in new computers for a literacy intervention program that is aimed chiefly at middle school students.

The session at East Hills Middle School was scheduled to be the last budget workshop before the board plans to vote on its final spending plan for the 2011-12 school year. That meeting is scheduled for Monday evening.

The board still appears poised to adopt a budget that raises taxes by 1.7 percent, or three-quarters of a mill -- $57 to the average taxpayer in the district.

However, the budget would also eliminate some 57 teachers and a large number of support personnel. It also takes away a significant amount of district-sponsored programming, both academic and extracurricular, including middle school athletics, high school extracurricular activities and a pre-kindergarten school for at-risk children.

The board did not give a read on how it felt about the administration’s plan to spend the unexpected $665,000 in state funding.

Jack Silva, the assistant superintendent for education and chief academic officer, told the board that the administration wanted to concentrate on either one-time expenses or “scalable” expenses that could easily be eliminated if the funding were to disappear or be eliminated in future years.

Full-day kindergarten classes and school resource police officers are among the things that the board had previously agreed to cut.

Restoring full-day kindergarten would cost $313,000, Silva said. If the funding is cut, the district would return to a half-day model.

One of the reasons that was chosen by administrators is that it is believed that restoring a full-day model may blunt some of the impact of the apparent loss of SPARK pre-school program, Silva said.

School resource officers are a $180,000 line item, which could also be eliminated again if the source funding is cut.

New computers would be an example of a one-time expense that would enable the district to re-energize its READ 180 literacy program, Silva said. Many of the computers currently in use are eight years old and are not even capable of supporting the newest software.

The program utilizes computer technology to provide students with individualized reading instruction and has been scientifically proven to boost reading scores for struggling students, Silva said.