APS Board of Ed to review budget

The Aurora Public Schools District Board of Education is set to take another step Tuesday toward approving a final budget for the 2011-12 school year.

The board is scheduled to approve a draft copy of a proposed budget totaling more than $513 million for the coming school year during its meeting on May 24. The document is one of the final steps before a final vote in June. APS officials are planning to address a funding gap of about $25 million with measures like furlough days and reductions in non-school and non-labor budgets.

In March, Chief Financial Officer Casey Wardynski presented an updated list of possible budget cuts, an itemized roster steered partly by input from district staff, parents and administrators. The list culled items from an original group of 40 possible measures released by the district earlier this year. Implementing four furlough days for a savings of almost $4 million figured in the latest group of proposed cuts.

Q&A with Harlem Children's Campaign Founder Geoffrey Canada

Photo by Gabriel Christus / The Aurora Sentinel

It isn’t tough for Geoffrey Canada to see the parallels between the Cherry Creek School District and the educational system in New York. Canada, the founder the Harlem Children’s Campaign and one of the featured subjects of David Guggenheim’s 2010 documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman,” visited Overland High School during Cherry Creek's "Success for Every Student" conference on April 16, addressing larger shortfalls in the American public education system. He also praised the “zone” teaching model that’s taking hold at the campus shared between Overland and Prairie Middle School. The Aurora Sentinel caught up with Canada to get his take on the new STEM facility at Overland, the problems with teachers’ unions and commonalities between Aurora and Harlem.

Special APS board meeting could decide Hinkley teachers' fate

Photo by Heather L. Smith / The Aurora Sentinel

AURORA | A group of Hinkley High School teachers whose jobs are at risk could find out tonight whether they will keep their posts at the school next year.

The Aurora Public Schools District Board of Education will hold a special meeting tonight to vote on nonrenewal for more than 10 teachers from across the district. The agenda item is a holdover from last week’s board meeting, when the APS board voted 5-2 to reject the entire consent agenda and temporarily save the teachers.

Overland Scout free to publish on schedule for the rest of the school year, principal says

AURORA | Overland High School Principal Leon Lundie assured student journalists this week that they would be free to publish their newspaper without prior review for the rest of the school year.

In a meeting Monday with writers and editors from the Overland Scout, Lundie said the students would be free to run as many editions of the student paper as they could within their preapproved budget, and that the paper’s editorial content would not be reviewed or changed by school administrators. The meeting followed an earlier flap between the principal and the Scout staff, a conflict that stemmed from a specific story about the death of a student athlete.

APS to unveil community feedback during Feb. 28 Town Hall meeting

The Aurora Public Schools District is expected to unveil feedback next week from parents, staff and community members regarding millions of dollars worth of proposed cuts for the 2011-12 year.

A town hall meeting scheduled for Feb. 28 will include results from district-wide surveys distributed in the past weeks to K-12 teachers and staff, as well as parents and other community members. The surveys seek input on an wide-ranging set of proposed cuts for the coming school year, potential slashes designed to fill a total budget gap of about $25 million for the 2011-12 school year. The total budget for the coming year is about $500 million.

New graduation rate formula leaves out gains at Aurora schoools

Local gains in high school graduation rates aren’t easy to find in new data released by the Colorado Department of Education earlier this week.

Officials from the Aurora Public Schools and Cherry Creek School districts say graduation rates rose in the 2009-10 school year compared to 2008-09; both districts reported a rise of more than 3 percent. At APS, for example, overall graduation rates rose by 3.3 percent to more than 58 percent, a boost that reverses the downward trend from the past decade.

But district officials from both APS and Cherry Creek say the increases aren’t reflected in new statistics from the CDE, data that uses a new formula to define graduation rates according to “on-time” completion, or students who graduate from high school in four years. 

William Smith High School Open House rescheduled for Feb. 16

An open house event at William Smith High School designed to show how much progress the pilot school has made in the past two years has been rescheduled for Feb. 16.

The event, which was canceled last week due to snow, will take place at 6 p.m. next Wednesday at the William Smith campus at 400 Airport Blvd. The event will be open to parents, students and community members from the Aurora Public Schools District.