PEIRCE PANTHER POST
April 2018
FIESTA DE ARTE IS THURSDAY, APRIL 26th from 5:00-7:00PM!
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PARENT-STAFF-STUDENT KICKBALL GAME! FRIDAY MAY 4TH AT 3:00PM
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FRIENDS OF PEIRCE: MATTRESS SALE ON SATURDAY MAY 5th!
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SCHOOL BUDGET!
Dear Principals, Today, we are pleased to provide you with school budgets for FY19, which include an additional $60 million in new investments to help drive the remarkable academic progress your schools are making. Thanks to your hard work to help finalize historic education funding reform, CPS is on stronger financial ground and we are pleased to answer your call to roll out school budgets far earlier in the year and with additional resources to foster continued academic growth. These budgets also align with the development of your school’s Continuous Improvement Work Plan, and we hope that you use this opportunity to coordinate your budgets with your approach for academic success. We want to take this opportunity to highlight a few of the changes to the budgets this year, which we believe will improve schools’ academic programming throughout the district: We are increasing the student based budgeting rate by 2.5 percent, from $4,290 to $4,397. We are establishing a new Small Schools Support fund to assist schools that are experiencing enrollment drops. We want them to be able to continue to provide appealing academic programming. This fund will be established with $10 million, which will be distributed among 129 schools. We are providing $14 million in additional funding for low income students by raising the rate for Supplemental Aid (formerly Supplemental General State Aid) from $857 per student to $910 per student, a 6 percent increase. We are increasing our investments in STEM, IB and magnet programs by $5 million to neighborhoods throughout the city, and we anticipate serving an additional 5,000 students with these high quality programs. In coming months, please stay in touch about a formal application process to offer these programs at your school. For schools with significant enrollment drops, we are creating a rule that no school will lose more than 3 percent of SBB funding – even if the decrease in student population from the fall of 2016 to the fall of 2017 would create a higher drop. In addition to the targeted resource allocations we are rolling out today, CPS will be adding a team of 10 new post-secondary counselors to support an additional 7,000 students in high needs schools throughout the district to meet our ambitious post-secondary goals from Learn.Plan.Succeed. On top of these new investments, there are two key changes to the budgeting process —first announced last month — to make it more reliable and transparent. First, your FY19 budgets are based on your FY18 20th day enrollment, which means your funding will not be cut in the fall and you can plan and hire with confidence about the resources that will be available to you throughout next school year. Of course, if your enrollment in FY19 exceeds your FY18 enrollment, you will receive supplemental funding to educate your students. Second, we are returning to the practice of providing you with position allocations for special education. This will provide you and your school community with greater clarity on the number of positions you need to serve all diverse learners in your school. Our goal is to ensure you have the resources you need to be successful, and we hope that your new budgets will continue to foster the remarkable academic growth and high-quality learning we are all so proud of. Thank you, as always, for your unyielding commitment to our students. We are excited to begin planning for a successful year ahead. Sincerely, Janice K. Jackson, EdD LaTanya D. McDade Chief Executive Officer Chief Education Officer Chicago Public Schools Chicago Public Schools