Lee Sensenbrenner has a summary of the nearly $10m in proposed cuts to next years $308m Madison schools budget:
The chops fall hardest on custodians, teachers and support staff. But they also take a significant toll on high school athletics, including big fee hikes, fewer teams and coaching positions as well as the elimination of all high school athletic directors.
No upper level administrators would be affected by the proposed cuts.
Additional background here….
liu zen shares a stunning Quicktime VR Scene from China:
Situated in the northeast of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region,
Guilin has always been famous for its scenery and culture.Guilin is a
karst basin surrounded by mountains. The Li River flows through Guilin
from north to south.
Liu’s email: liuyz37@hotmail.com
Wisconsin Representative Terese Berceau emailed me last night that the Wisconsin Attorney General’s office decided to back out of this project.
Gina Barton writes:
Citing both financial and privacy concerns, Wisconsin law enforcement officials have changed their minds about becoming part of a computerized information-sharing network.
The network, funded by a $12 million federal grant, aims to create a clearinghouse of information authorities can use to track terrorists and criminal suspects. Advocates say it simply consolidates data already available to investigators, allowing them to access it more quickly. Detractors worry that it could be used to mine computer files for details about ordinary citizens.
The Madison Metropolitan School District announced their recommended budget cuts [265K PDF] today. (MMSD Budget site)
Barb Shrank passed along two budget documents from a March 1, 2004 presentation to the School Board.
Board of Education Agendas, Minutes & Schedule
There’s been much discussion recently regarding laptops in schools, including a recent chat I had with Madison Superintendant Art Rainwater (MP3 3.7MB – video on the way)
From District Administration:
For those who envision laptop computers in the hands of every student, this may be the best of times and the worst of times. While classrooms using this approach are churning out success stories, growing state budget deficits are threatening future funding, leaving educators to wonder whether laptops for everyone is a great idea that they simply can’t afford.
A four-year, $37-million initiative to provide laptops to all seventh and eighth graders in Maine has transformed middle school classrooms there and generated positive reviews. At the same time, the state’s budget crunch has left the program’s longer-term future up in the air. In Michigan, a plan to equip the state’s sixth graders with laptops recently lost more than half of its $39 million funding before it could get started, thanks to an almost $1 billion state budget shortfall.
Milwaukee goes after truant parents:
As part of an intensified effort to cope with the problem of truancy in Milwaukee, police will begin Monday to arrest parents of truant children. District Attorney E. Michael McCann called it “a new tactic” in the fight against truancy.
By John Diedrich, Sarah Carr and Derrick Nunnally
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Senators beat market by 12%
Corporate insiders beat the market by 5%
Typical US Household underperformed the market by 1.45%
“The results clearly support the notion that members of the Senate trade with a substantial informational advantage over ordinary investors,” says the author of the report, Professor Alan Ziobrowski of the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University.
From the Financial Times….
Ignacio Ferrando Margelm shares a stunning Quicktime VR scene from a recent ice climbing expedition (I don’t know where this was shot)
He shared this note: “The wheather was fine to do this (max temperature -8:C) but not for my foot fingers…. I wait 2 hours in place and lost some sensibility…”
“Say what you want about Bernie Sanders, but he?is using the Web correctly.? He has a great Web site dedicated to drug price reform.? Here is a comparison between US and Canadian prices on 50 commonly used drugs.? The upshot of a study his team put together is:”
… that the average prices that senior citizens in Vermont must pay are 81% higher than the average prices that Canadian consumers must pay and 112% higher than the average prices that Mexican consumers must pay.
From John Robb
Even as states retreat from participating in a controversial interstate antiterrorism database that holds billions of records of ordinary Americans’ activities, Wisconsin has decided to join the program.
The head of Wisconsin’s division of criminal investigation, James R. Warren, signed on to join the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, or Matrix, on Feb. 11, said Tom Berlinger, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which runs the program.
With access to the Matrix database, Wisconsin law enforcement officials can look up vast amounts of personal information culled from government and commercial databases. The information includes driver’s license pictures, addresses, professional licenses, names of neighbors and relatives, and even domain-name registration filings and hunting licenses.
Officers also get access to information derived from Seisint’s proprietary database, which includes voter rolls, property records, website registrations, civil and criminal court records, phone number directories and financial filings.
From Wired News…..
Learn more about Matrix: Google | Teoma | All the Web | Yahoo Search
Let Governor Doyle, your senators and representatives know how you feel about this initiative. You should also support the EFF.