Dave Stafford, Herald Bulletin
dave.stafford@heraldbulletin
NDERSON - Anderson Community Schools will use more than $5 million in federal stimulus funding to create 33 positions, less than a month after the district laid off 36 teachers due to a budget shortfall.
The new positions - 11 who will concentrate on special education students and 22 teachers focusing primarily on elementary education - could be filled by some of the teachers who were laid off, said ACS Title I director Nancy Farley.
The ACS board on Tuesday heard a presentation on the new stimulus-funded positions from Farley and special education director Rosetta Cummings.
The impact includes:
• Hiring teachers for expanded full-day, every day kindergarten at Anderson, Erskine, 10th Street, 29th Street, Forest Hills and Edgewood elementaries.
• Additional reading specialists at Anderson and Erskine elementaries.
• Peer-assist review teachers, literacy data coaches, and others who will help boost literacy proficiency in early elementary grades.
• Counselors and positive behavior support coaches who will assist special education students.
"We created positions where we had the greatest need," Farley said in an interview.
Cummings told the board that "African-American special education students are five times as likely to be suspended and/or expelled compared to other students in ACS." The new positions will help address that disproportion.
The stimulus funding will only last for two years, so it's unclear whether those positions created can be sustained after the money runs out.
Separately, the board Tuesday heard Superintendent Mikella Lowe produce an estimate that the budget proposed by Gov. Mitch Daniels would leave ACS with a budget shortfall of more than $11 million in the 2010-2011 school year.
ACS closed schools and laid off 36 teachers in the face of a $5 million deficit this year. "What we've done to date is not going to take care of the shortfall," she said.