Special Board of Aldermen Public Hearing Page 9
Fred Teeboom
I’m glad you brought that up. Not all of us and many of us are not enthused about the fact that we’re
not pushing full time kindergarten.
Mayor Donchess
Well there were people who weren't enthused when we went to half day kindergarten. To be in 21°
Century America to attract young families to be a community where jobs/employers want to locate,
you really need to have full day kindergarten.
Fred Teeboom
First of all, lm not so sure we want all these jobs to be located here. | don’t quite see the benefit in
that because the city is getting pretty filled up. Second of all, there are studies that | cited to the
School Board — there’s School Board members here that can attest to that — that cited full time
kindergarten is not of benefit to a lot of kids because they can’t be structured into full time classes for
6, 7 hours and no one has shown anything past the third grade ever that there’s a benefit past the
third grade. But we’re spending over $1 million more. More than a $1 million. | forgot the exact
number - $1.1 million or something like that for full time kindergarten. We're saving 10 teachers that
are switching from teaching elementary school to kindergarten. If you want to save money if it’s all so
terrible, why are we saving the jobs of 10 teachers? Now | feel for the 10 teachers but they can
maybe get a job in one of these higher paid districts. Why should we take elementary teachers and
put them into kindergarten to push this full time kindergarten agenda? I’ve maintained part of the
reason is to fill up this empty class space because Superintendent Brown is here. Why don’t you
have her answer that question?
Mayor Donchess
| don’t agree with your analysis regarding the benefits of full day kindergarten. | disagree even more
strongly with respect to your statement that we do not want to add jobs to this community. If we want
a declining, suffering, spiraling down community, yeah then we don’t want jobs. If we want a growing,
vibrant community which will be successful in the future, we need to add as many jobs as we possibly
can.
Fred Teeboom
It’s a theory the more jobs bring in the more vibrant a community? Is that the theory?
Mayor Donchess
If you want economic growth, you need jobs and we need to add certainly more than McDonald’s or
minimum wage. What we need are high skilled jobs value at a job that pay well with a pay families
that pay the employee sufficiently to support their family, provide a good education, and a college
education for their kids. VWe’ve made progress there but we should make more progress.
Fred Teeboom
Now you're talking about high paying jobs as opposed to jobs. It’s very likely that low paying job
people come in and want to (inaudible). | raised five kids. None of them went to kindergarten that
was paid for and they went full time. They didn’t go full time but part time. You can have
philosophical ideas but here we’re talking about budgets and trying to not keep adding more and
