Monday night, in front of a packed crowd, the superintendent's staff reintroduced the proposed Anchorage School District budget, and for two hours parents, teachers, and even elementary students let the school board know what they thought of the new proposal.
"Many of our students would go hungry if not for the magnificence of our teachers," Dimond High School teacher Soren Wuerth said. "Everyone in the school creates a web of support for each student and when you start to pull strands out of that web, life becomes a lot tougher for the student."
The board allotted anyone to speak for three minutes at the hearing. Over 50 people stood up to share their opinion on the budget. A hot topic were the proposed changes in the gifted program--IGNITE. There's a push to have teachers travel to designated schools to teach gifted education. Haylie Cortez is a student at Baxter Elementary and she loves her gifted class.
"IGNITE is very important, not to just me, but a lot of other people," Cortez said.
Superintendent Dr. Jim Browder welcomed the public comments but he says there's still a $25 million deficit to deal with.
"We have to reduce 25 million dollars," Browder said. "We got to find it some place. We have to stay away as far from the classroom as possible. It's just very difficult with a budget this size to find 25 million dollars without affecting people."
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