Dear Friends of Orono Schools,
Please attend the RSU 26 annual budget meeting this Tuesday night, May
16th, at 6:00PM in the Orono High School cafeteria. Babysitting will be
provided. Each year the school board prepares a budget for our
schools which is then presented to a public town-hall style meeting. This
is one of the great examples of New England democracy at work. The
attendees at this meeting have the power, if they wish, to modify the
budget up or down. So by this same token it is important for this
democracy to function that it is well attended. Several years back, there
were less than 10 people who attended. Those handful of people could have
completely changed the budget anyway they wished and that would have been
the budget going forward. More recently we have attendance of around 70
people. For democracy to work it is important that there is robust
representative attendance, so please come!
The meeting is fairly short (60-90 minutes usually) and friendly and
informal. You are encouraged to ask questions. A moderator is there to
help guide you in the process. And it is mostly your friends and
neighbors in attendance - people often even say they had fun
attending!
After this meeting the adopted budget will go to an up-or-down ballot
vote on Tuesday June 13th (at the Orono Town Hall). So please put that on
your calendar and vote. Or vote early the week before.
An additional (and final for this school year) chance for input to the
district is our annual goal setting exercise. Each year, the board adopts
a set of goals (last year we had 7 goals) for the district for the coming
year. We will be setting the district goals for the 2017-2018 school year
at our June 6 and June 20th board meetings. You can provide input into
what should be our goals for the schools for the coming year through
three methods:
1) fill out a paper questionnaire at the annual budget meeting
2) attend a workshop from 5-6 PM on June 6th in the town council chambers
(we always have a good discussion and hope you will come)
3) fill out this online survey by June 6th:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=17KvILzCc9ZtkezumMGL5TC9oQfXHq7MQrt9U8-X-B8U
As always thank you for your time and input to our schools. We highly
value the community's engagement with the schools and your opinions are
really important in guiding the board. We hope to see you
Tuesday!
Sincerely,
Brian McGill, RSU 26 board chair on behalf of the entire school board
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