While the Burlington School District is facing budget cuts due to a lower student population and the possibility of state assessment costs rising significantly, the school district presented the Burlington School Board with an ambitious plan to add a building and trades course to the high school.
Curriculum Director, Sharon Dentlinger says a number of students would benefit from this program, including students from other districts.
Burlington High School Principal, Dave Keane, who ran such a program in Webster City, before coming to Burlington, says that school board would only need to consider finding a way to fund the salary of a full-time instructor for the program.
Mr Keane explains that there is funding potential in this program, “There are several other districts that are interested in sending a couple of kids to us, they would generate ‘weighted dollars’ because there are supplemental ‘weighted dollars’ for any kind of share program. We will also go ahead and be working with Southeastern Community College and getting our capstone to get some college credits, so there’s supplemental weighting [additional funding] that will go there too, so if a student is in that class (7/10 of a student, in terms of state weighting) so there is a lot of ways that you can kind of work the money.”
Keane says that Professional trade associations such as Southeast Iowa Planning Commission and Southeast Iowa Builders Association have expressed high interest in partnering with the Burlington High School building and trades program because skilled trades man and women are in demand.
Burlington School Superintendent, Pat Coen has an even more ambitious plan for this program, who says that 75 percent of single mothers in Burlington live in poverty and that homeless children attend Burlington schools everyday, and a program like this can benefit them tremendously.
Coen says, “We renovate a home, the home then goes into the possession of the church, the church then allows a homeless single mother in poverty to live in the home under certain conditions like receive training from SCC, work on employment skills, those type of skills, that help lift that single mother out of poverty, you can stay in that home for up to six months or to a year, if these things happen and then we have taken chaos out of children’s lives that are in our schools.”
The homes that the building and trades students would be renovating would be donated by the city, these would be homes that the city has taken possession of due to unpaid taxes. The materials for the home renovations would also be donated by various businesses and associations from within the community.
Keane says that the building and trades program in Webster City built a $250,000 home that did not cost the district a penny.
Coen agreed that this program would benefit not only the students in the program but also the community.
Other school board members agreed that this program fits into the school board’s mission statement which is to ‘inspire and challenge students through diverse opportunities.’
Dentlinger and Keane will prepare a more detailed plan of this proposed program to be discussed further during December’s school board meeting.
