Winter Driving: I hope all of you had the opportunity to rest and enjoy time with family. We saw our first snow over the weekend and with it came about a dozen accidents in the Camillus area. Please know that our buses will not have issues in the snow as we have experienced drivers and heavy buses with new brakes. Inexperienced student drivers, and people like us trying to hustle to work in the morning, will have more of a challenge. Therefore, please leave for work and school a few minutes earlier and use extra caution on the roads so that this winter will be as accident free as possible.
Legislation to Add Degree Paths: We are keeping an eye on a few things happening outside of our District. First, Senator Charles Schumer has introduced legislation to add some degree paths to High School diplomas that target students who want to enter careers in the technical and engineering fields. These degree paths might allow students to eliminate some traditional courses that you and I took when we were in school, but still earn a New York State High School diploma. His ideas are set to hit the Board of Regents shortly, and I will keep you posted.
State Aid Concerns: The other thing that we are keeping a close eye on is how the Governor will handle paying for Hurricane Sandy damage. We know that FEMA will cover some or maybe even the majority of the damages, but the Governor will have to decide how to handle any gap that might remain. I am cautiously optimistic that the Governor will not take state aid from schools to help fill these gaps. If he does choose to impact our aid, we may have to alter our financial plans. This would be a big bummer because we have worked very hard as a community to work through a solid financial plan. So far we have kept tax increases below the cap, and can now begin to plan to restore some of the things that we have reduced over the past few years. Hopefully we will get some clarity on this situation in the coming weeks, and we can finish our budget preparation for 2013-2014. Stay tuned.
Check out our website for our events this week, and I hope to see you out and about.
Chris
