Case Studies

In class on Monday, we split into groups to discuss five different case studies. My group was in charge of deciding how to cut our school's budget. It was very hard for all four of us to agree on what to cut, and in the end, I don't think that all of us were in agreement anyway.

While discussing what to cut, it was interesting how much our individual school backgrounds affected our opinions. I, coming from a small school district, did not want to increase class sizes. And I must admit, besides not wanting to sacrifice individual attention with each student, I was thinking selfishly in the fact that I would not be able to teach thirty students in each class period to play the recorder. I don't think that my ears could handle that. Each of us in the group grew up with different "normals" in our schools, which greatly affected how we would handle the budget cut. For example, I paid $30 per extracurricular activity, while another girl paid $250 per activity, and yet another paid nothing at all. As you can imagine, I did not want to help our budget by having the students pay $300 per activity, while the second girl was perfectly fine with that.

I can only imagine what the real process of budget cuts would be like, with more than four differing opinions and versions of "normal" to try to reconcile in a way that will make everyone happy.