Portage schools can’t afford full-day kindergarten

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Berta

Updated: February 23, 2012 8:09AM

PORTAGE — Full-day kindergarten is not coming to Portage in the immediate future based on the acceptance of recommendations offered by Superintendent Michael Berta to the Portage Township School Board at the Wednesday night meeting.

In his statement to the board, Berta discussed two difficulties with offering full-day kindergarten — funding and school capacity.

An estimated minimum of $668,000 would be required to fully fund a full-day kindergarten program, “money that would have to come from somewhere,” according to Berta. Additional costs to the school district, with classroom aides and materials as examples, would further add to costs.

“Is the district willing to assess a fee to families desiring to participate in a FTK program?” Berta asked board members.

The second hurdle to face is that some Portage schools, Central and Crisman, are already at capacity, so to address the crowding issues, either complete redistricting would be required or busing surplus students to facilities with excess capacity would be required.

Berta does not favor redistricting nor does he like assessing fees to families, noting that 53 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced lunch and so those families would be unable to afford the fees.

Department may
be outsourced

It came at the end of the Portage Township School Board Discussion Meeting Wednesday night and the board was caught by surprise when Associate Superintendent Ric Frataccia mentioned a Request for Proposal to outsource the Instructional Media Department. In a mix-up, Frataccia apparently thought the board had received materials for discussion of the RFP prior to an expected vote on the issue at the next board meeting later this month.

After the meeting, Berta said the administration has recommended eliminating the department and the RFP is seeking a firm that can perform the functions at reduced costs.

Berta said five employees would be affected. The department is responsible for the electronic infrastructure of the school district and includes operating and maintaining the local area network, file servers, computers and other computer related equipment and peripherals.

The RFP requires that the successful bidder must guarantee employment to the displaced school employees for a period of time sufficient to establish the skills and expertise of those employees, and ideally, retain them.

The discussion of the RFP has been postponed until the February meeting.