EDAD 614: What In The Budget?

EDAD 614: Working Diverse Populations 

The Teacher

The teacher for this course is George Sziraki. He has loads of experience he brings to teaching this class. He is super helpful and willing to work with his busiest of students. He has spent time in all levels of education from being a teacher, all the way to Superintendent. I even learned he was once an Athletic Director. So he knows how hard the educational system can be. It was a pleasure working with him.

The Applied Theory Paper: Systems Thinking and Management
I think this was one of the hardest assignments I have ever had to do. I had to cut jobs, programs and other things from the school budget. When you start this assignment you think it will be easy because it is fake money but once you get into it and really have to cutting you start to think about things. The questions that came to mind was, what do I have to take from the kids or who do I have to send home without a job. This assignment was very real to me.

CP#1: Managing Teacher Vacancies 

This interview was eye opening. I got to interview someone from a big school district in the High Desert. Currently, the High Desert has a high teacher turn over rate, no pun intended. If you don't  me talk to my classmate Roger at Rogerconard.com. He just got a big bonus for coming out to my area to teach. Talking to this person put the difficulty of retention in perspective. I realized why it is so hard to keep teachers and what can be done to retain good staff. I talked to this person today and they were taking long-term-subs to see their classrooms.

CP#2: Resource Identification and Allocation

This assignment got me elbows deep in the LCAP. I had to see how my School Growth Plan was aligned to the LCAP or State Rules. People don't like to say State Regulation when they are talking about the LCAP, but that is what the LCAP is. Oh yea, LCAP is Local Control Accountability Plan. I had to make sure the Growth plan was inline with the LCAP. Luckily, when we made our growth plan we stuck to the LCAP guidelines and what the school stakeholders wanted.

CP#3: School Budget Development

God bless this assignment and all of the people who have had to do it before me. I had a lot of difficulty with this one. I don't really know why. I guess I am not good at making up numbers. I have done budgets a lot of times but this did not really work out for me. I did like delving into some school budgeting history but the budget itself was tough. When I talked to people about it they told me it was the easiest part...

The Videos

This is the first class I did not try to break myself over the videos. They were still fun and I think I got my point across in most of them. I also believe that, even though I did not spend hours and hours on a video, the videos still turned out pretty good. I am happy with my videos this class. I am actually most proud of the video where I walked around my new campus and talked about it. I like doing voice over videos. 

Overall

Overall I enjoyed this class. I really like the way the assignments push me to be a better educational leader. I really want to see what I can do in real life. I like perusing ideas about keeping good staff, budgeting, and seeing what you can do with the money you have. This class has pushed me like no other class has and I hope it is the last class that does this. Just kidding. I love learning.