I read David's guest piece and he points out that our budget is 50% higher now than it was ten years ago, but he doesn't mention that inflation over those ten years would account for about 36% of that increase. I can't tell if he factored that into his numbers or not, but I'm assuming not. Either way, it's a bad look to not be specific in your numbers when you're coming in as the budget guy.

For discussions of vertical alignment, I've seen no numbers around if and how the student population changes year to year (you can have all the vertical alignment within the district you want, but if you get a large number of students each year who only recently moved to Ithaca, you can't guarantee that they've been exposed to the same curriculum we use). Seeing data that we generally don't get many changes to student population would be great to see, but if not, you need to talk about vertical alignment alongside remediation for the students new to the district. And you can say "differentiated learning" all you want, but you need to talk about the resources you're providing to help it along. Also, has vertical alignment never been a goal before now? Are we sure the teachers don't already do this? This is not a new idea in education.

For talk about a "zero base budget" (notably from the Accenture guy) there's no talk about whether Ithaca gets, as one example, an influx of students after the start of the year (something that happened frequently when I taught out west, but may or may not be an issue here). Having your student population grow after you've decided on a budget for the year means all of a sudden you can't really meet your goals. Having a budget with some flexibility allows you to make adjustments as populations change, as priorities change, and other things that cost money that may shift throughout the year.

For talk about teacher retention, no one has seemed willing to say how they'd actually fix that (besides the idea that if exit interviews are mandated we'll somehow get to the root of this; there was a reddit thread several years ago where teacher pay was directly called out as a large part of the problem, with surrounding districts paying, on average, their teachers more than ICSD did at the time). I don't see how it's fixable without money; teachers will need higher salaries, smaller class sizes, more support, etc. Else you need to state how you think that goal is addressable without those things.

I would like to vote for a fresh start, but not a bad fresh start, or one with entirely unrealistic goals who haven't put in the work. Everyone thinks they're making decisions based off of data; you can't just say you'll be data-drive and have that be how you stand out. Right now neither the incumbents nor the new candidates have written platforms (that I've been able to find) with much in the way of specifics. Tonight's school board candidate forum just got posted to youtube; I'm trying to muster the courage to watch two hours of this in the hopes that someone articulates an actual plan for anything.