Lee Sensenbrenner writes that Madison School Board President Bill Keys stated during a telephone interview Tuesday that golf and strings should be on the chopping block as the Board considers $9m reductions in the $310+ budget:

“Funding for the fourth-grade stringed music classes and varsity golf teams is being questioned by Madison School Board President Bill Keys as the school district struggles to find $10 million worth of cuts.
The district administration made its recommendations earlier this month for next year’s budget, and the board is in the process of its own review.
Although administrators did not propose cutting the popular strings class, Keys said in a telephone interview Tuesday it’s an option he’d like to consider.
“The strings class has always been brought up as a possibility, so I said let’s bring it up again,” Keys said.”

Interestingly, Barb Schrank sent a one page Madison Schools Budget update where she writes:

“To date, the School Board has not received the budget for next year. How can the School Board make cut decisions without a reference budget?”

[95K PDF] Great question…..

The Madison school district has, for a number of years, supported a Microsoft based monoculture of computing tools. This ill advised policy has placed far too much emphasis on one computing model (by the time today’s elementary & middle school students enter the work force, the technology at hand will be quite different).
Today, Microsoft, a convicted monopolist was fined over $600m by the European Union. A number of other legal cases are underway, including this one in Minnesota.

Among the documents introduced in court this week was a letter from June 1990 in which Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, told Andrew S. Grove, the chief executive of Intel at the time, that any support given to the Go Corporation, a Silicon Valley software company, would be considered an aggressive move against Microsoft.
Other evidence presented by the plaintiffs’ lawyers at trial yesterday gave an account of how Microsoft violated a signed secrecy agreement with Go and showed that Microsoft possessed technical documents from Go that it should not have had access to.

Madison’s financial support of this monoculture is absurd. We should take the cash we’re sending to Microsoft and fund our PE program instead…. (Note that the argument that business uses Microsoft therefore we should feed our children the same dog food does not hold water. Increasingly, business is using open source tools such as linux, apache, php, mysql and other products)

Samantha Ganey writes about child rearing strategies:

You’d better be a good parent. Because if you’re not, your kids will resent you, get tattoos, pierce their upper lip frenulums, drop out of school and maybe even join the circus. And believe me, you’ll be sorry, Mister.
So how’s that feel?

Kathy Walsh Nufer writes about Hilbert High School’s Grandparents Greeters Day:

Meet Rita Mathes and Jeanne Gast, who stationed themselves in the high school?s front hall on St. Patrick?s Day with a giant box of cookies.
?Top of the mornin? to you, help yourself,? Mathes wished students going her way.
?You, too, as soon as I can see,? responded a bleary-eyed boy as he shuffled in, fresh from the shower.
?They?re so polite,? said Gast, taking pride in their manners as if all the students were her own. This grandparent of 23 knows most kids in town. ?We grew them up from pups, most of ?em,? she said.

Very nice high school web site, btw, including panoramic Quicktime VR Tours…