March 2010

Dear ARHS Parents and Guardians:

On behalf of both ARHS and ARMS, I would like to express my gratitude to the Amherst community for its support of the override. In sober economic times, where cuts and compromises are the lot of communities everywhere, I am very mindful of the community’s sacrifices: in both time and energy to ensure the override’s passage, as well as people having to dig deeper into their own pockets. Thank you.

My immediate interest here is to update the community on the implications of the override.

The override changes the high school’s personnel outlook dramatically. We are now able to reassure many high school faculty that their positions are secure and, by extension, so are the courses they teach. The restored courses include Hurricane Singers, Jazz Ensemble and a sequence of courses in Family/Consumer Science and Technology Education departments. For the latter two departments, the specific courses we run will ultimately depend on course registration numbers. At the same time, the override was never constructed to restore all of the cuts. Outside the scope of the override were cuts amounting to about 265k for the high school. As a result, for all the good news associated with the override, it should not be thought of as a return of the status quo. Our on-going work, however, is not just to do without, but to continue to innovate and re-imagine how to maintain a quality school despite diminishing resources. That the economy will remain in a downturn for the foreseeable future is an additional incentive for us to do so.

A primary way we have tried to reconfigure ourselves over the last two years is to ensure that elective courses are able to enroll more than 20 students and that all seats are actually filled. Specifically, for many high demand courses that are capped at less than 20, we will ask that teachers reconfigure them to be able to take more than 20 students. There are also some courses whose under-enrollment has persisted for a sufficiently long period of time that it is difficult to imagine them attracting student enrollments that would make the FTE cost effective. In these few instances, I will recommend that these courses not be restored.

Information about which courses have been restored and are available for students to request for next year will be included on the course verification forms that all students will receive in their A period classes on Monday, April 5. This form lists all the courses students selected in February for next year. Included here will be a list of those additional courses, due to the override, that we are now in a position to offer to students. Parents and guardians are asked to review their child’s course selections for next year, especially in light of the new options available. These forms are due back to A period teachers by Friday, April 9th.

Importantly, the lifting of the cap on the number of seats in elective courses enables us to increase the number of elective seats overall. As a result, we will be able to minimize the impact of the second study hall requirement on at least some of our students. Since the second study hall continues to be a source of debate, I want to be clear that the override does significantly increase our ability to address this issue.

The final piece to the budget puzzle is state revenue. I will write to you when we have a clearer sense of this and its impact on the FY 11 budget.

Thank you.

Mark Jackson
Principal