Although there has already been one Guilderland Board of Education meeting in the fall where the district asked for input on the school budget, I am unsure what was the extent of public input. I actually am not sure if anyone spoke.

There is a budget discussion planned next week, Feb. 15, for an hour, from 6 to 7 p.m. I am hoping that the hour will be devoted to discussion, rather than spending a lot of time on process, background, and results of surveys. Please make every attempt to attend and participate fully to exact the best decisions for your schools.

I hope that the dialogue continues and the board listens, and actively interacts with citizens who attend. I do understand that meetings should not spend hours engaging in repetitive conversation, but I have learned that it’s better to come down on the side of allowing as much conversation between elected officials and the public as possible. At school board meetings, oftentimes there appears to be little actual discussion, questions are often not answered, but rather dealt with as information that will be considered later.

As you may have learned, a new online survey just came out this week, asking people to rate certain priority areas. I am unsure of its effectiveness for interaction with and input from the public.

Survey strategy is a science, and sometimes can be constructed in such a manner as to result in unintended bias. Rather than have results allow for more permutations of choices, the survey as constructed describes the world of budget choices in too simplistic a fashion, in my opinion, rather than educating the public of the difficult task the board and staff have balancing many considerations to come to final decisions.

I admit that I am biased and concerned that funds for some of the disciplines would be on the chopping block in the first place. Survey questions posed pitting one discipline against others (including sports programs) can result in a popularity contest, with no room for those of us who see them as both essential.

When one seeks further information on an area, one sees a budget item to hire staff, etc. It’s difficult to ascertain whether one is rating each area based on district priorities, or rating the area based on the reasonableness of newly proposed budget items in each. If a respondent doesn't look further, the person may be just prioritizing a program area, and not know there is a proposed budget items connected to it.

Finally,  I am concerned that it seems one could take the survey multiple times. I took it twice myself, and wonder how valid the results can be if any one or any group of people can take the survey multiple times.

Even if the district has some control over the number of times one can take the survey and the results give some added value to the decision-making process, the basic communication challenge remains. I would welcome more discussion about curriculum design that integrates all the disciplines in some manner and creates a cross-disciplinary approach to the design for program as part of the budget process.

For example, the district recently partnered with the Board of Cooperative Educational Services to bring STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) to the middle school, and may be considering it in some elementary schools. Wouldn’t it be a terrific program implementation to expand the initiative by including the arts in the program paradigm?

As the survey stands currently, it is hard to get a big-picture view of what is going on in the district. The questions on spending for “inclusion of all students” also needs more explanation to taxpayers, so they have a better idea of how money is spent in this area, rather than pose “either spend or not spend,” especially if it is so essential to the district’s mission, which I am not sure is clear enough to taxpayers at this point.

The good news is that the school board indicated at its last meeting that the district would be able to go over 2 percent for an increase for spending, allowing as much as 2.7-percent increase in spending. It is fortunate because it allows for more flexibility in determining how money is spent.

However, since the calculations would allow for a larger tax for residents than last year, I would like to hear why the district would choose to raise taxes without looking at reserve funds to ameliorate the tax impact.

As far as I can see, in the fall the district split the funds into different reserve funds. I am eager to get a sense of the bigger picture with these funds and how they will be included in the conversations about choices for expenditures and program improvements, rather than depending solely on taxpayers to sustain the additional budget items proposed.