Are instruction costs excessive?

On Feb. 28, in front of sizable crowd of teachers, parents and students in the School 4 auditorium, Oceanside School District officials presented their second workshop on the 2011-12 budget, and the meeting’s underlying theme — instruction costs — sparked a great deal of discussion.

Assistant Superintendent of Business Louis Frontario started the discussions with a look at proposed salaries for administrators at the Oceanside Middle School. Frontario explained that the district would eliminate supervisors’ positions next year. One of them, Damian Trum, a technology supervisor and team leader, would be promoted to assistant principal, and another supervisor/team leader, Ina Leventhal, would return to a middle school classroom as a speech teacher. This change, Superintendent Dr. Herb Brown said, would make operations at the middle school more efficient, since it would have two assistant principals rather than an assistant principal and two supervisors.

Robert Fenter, assistant superintendent of curriculum, introduced the spending plan for Inservice Training Instruction for teachers, which will increase by over 7 percent next year, to roughly $610,000. “These are programs that have an important role in our district,” Fenter said. “We’d like to continue them.”

The training for teachers includes a program called Social Emotional Literacy, a series of guidelines for teacher-student interaction as well as interaction among students. The program was initiated in first through sixth grades this year, and Fenter said that it would be expanded to kindergarten and seventh and eighth grades next year. “It’s had a powerful effect,” Fenter said.

When the subject turned to spending on textbooks, some parents — and school board members — questioned the $800,000-plus that was reserved for next year, a 14 percent increase. Fenter explained that the district plans to buy books to replace older texts, and others will be purchased for the district’s new EnVision Math program.