Thursday, March 15, 2012

Saving me the trouble

The WSJ saves me the trouble of a long post explaining the situation regarding the Nuestro Mundo charter school and Maywood.

In brief: we are negotiating a 6 year lease and a joint operating agreement that will allow the Nuestro Mundo charter school to relocate in Maywood.  Our district would receive $165K in rent and space for up to 5 MG students per grade, starting with Kindergarten this fall.

The Nuestro Mundo Charter School is a successful K-5 elementary program that features dual language immersion to provide bi-lingual education to its students.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

how would this effect the $1.2 million budget shortfall? Could we save a few more line items with this income?

Anonymous said...

This is great news! Having a dual language school in our district is a real win for our school system and for Monona family attraction. Congratulations to the school board and superintendent on the excellent news!
-Jim Keck (can't get my google id to work this morning)

Peter Sobol said...

A lease will probably help ease the budget both because of the income and the reduced costs (MMSD would pay for the utilities). Exactly how much we don't know. We will have to reserve some of the rent for future maintenance and improvements on the building.

Anonymous said...

I've very supportive of this use of the building.

Does it only have to pass the school board, or does it have to wait until the annual meeting for citizen approval?

Peter Sobol said...

The board sought and received approval at the last annual meeting in October.

Anonymous said...

Those five spaces aren't going to be close to meeting the Monona demand. Like the idea, but wish you had negotiated a lot more spaces.

Anonymous said...

"Those five spaces aren't going to be close to meeting the Monona demand. Like the idea, but wish you had negotiated a lot more spaces."

Or maybe MG should create its own language immersion program, or start teaching a second language to students starting in kindergarten, as Madison has successfully done (and was proposed in MG a few years ago but was turned down largely for financial reasons).

It's Madison's program; I'd personally like to thank the Madison school district for their willingness to allocate spaces specifically for MG students, when those spaces could have been opened to any students in the Madison metro area via the state's open enrollment options.

Peter Sobol said...

There is potential to place additional students in the program at the open enrollment rate if the demand is there. Still a good deal. One of the problems will be finding the right balance of native and ELL students.