Grand Rapids, Mich. (WZZM) -- The Grand Rapids Public School District is calling its recent Futures Summit a huge success.
The district held a summit Saturday to gather community input on budget cuts and education reform efforts. More than 300 students, parents, community and staff members showed up to support the effort.
"To be here today it does kind of hit home," said Vickie Smith, who has two sons in the district. "I learned that it is somewhat drastic, our situation. Starting in fall of next year cuts are going to have to be made and they came to us and said what do you think these cuts should be. What should we do. They gave us some literature to go by so we can have an educated opinion on that. And I thought we did."
Superintendent Dr. Bernard Taylor says he was impressed with how engaged and involve the community was. He says it reinforces district leaders in their effort to "not look at our immediate budget needs as a challenge but as an opportunity to really re-imagine, re-position and reconfigure our school system."
However, Taylor says, undoubtedly budget cuts will have to be made.
"We can't support the status quo with the resources we have so we know we need to do things differently," he said. "It really is this notion of how children go to school today is going to have to change. We want to manage the change rather than let the change manage us."
Over the last decade the district has cut more than $65 million out of its operating budget, closed or consolidated 20 schools and cut hundreds of jobs. But, now GRPS is facing perhaps the worst challenge yet.
The district is facing a mid-year cuts of $292 per student in state aid for a loss of $5.5 million. Next year, the funding shortfall is projected to be even worse with per-student state-aid cuts of, perhaps, between $300 and $1,000 according to GRPS spokesman, John Helmholdt.
During the summit, participants broke off into 4 groups to compile a list of possible suggestions to the deal with ongoing challenges.
Helmholdt says "the results revealed common solutions and ideas through each of the four cross-sections of attendees."
Those solutions included ideas such as closing schools with low enrollment, reconfiguring school days and time, eliminating some electives and non-core courses; consolidating or sharing services by school, school district, ISD and going green by being more efficient with resources, supplies, facilities, and energy.
Helmholdt says the school board members will work on how to best use many of those ideas in conjunction with budget parameters that the Board is using to guide its decision making.
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