School Board Enthusiasts Blog: March 2 Community Budget Meeting

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The UnifiEd Student Voice Team's School Board Blog

The Signal Mountain Community Budget Meeting was nothing spectacular.  It was a nice opportunity to see feedback about what things that the community wants to see in the budget for...

this coming year.  The beginning of the meeting started out with a presentation of what the school board has done over the past year.  If you have been following along with the school board, then this part was not very interesting in all honesty. I think this served as a very helpful summary for anyone who has not seen these presentations in the past. In addition to the presentation, there were new pamphlets at this meeting that showcased each of the five focus areas of the board, what has been done in each area, and what the board hopes to do in the future for each area.  

After the presentation the board opened the meeting up for the community members that were present to give feedback.  This was done by allowing us to break up into groups to think of what we liked that HCDE had done in each focus area and what we wished to see done better.  After talking about this we wrote our thoughts down on sticky notes and stuck them on posters. I have attached the pictures of the final posters with our thoughts for all of the focus areas.  I thought it was very interesting that the ideas we identified were very closer aligned to each other. Many of the things that were highlighted by those running the meeting were things that everyone seemed to be nodding along to in agreement.

Overall, I can’t wait until the actual budget for next year is presented.  It seems that HCDE has lofty goals for what they want to accomplish in the future, but from the way that they talked about what was feasible at this meeting, it seemed that they do not have plans to request any large budget increase this year.  I think that change shall continue in Hamilton County, but I think that the rate of our change may be beginning to slow down. Hopefully, through community involvement in the school system, we can maintain the rate of positive change.