Clayton District’s New Year’s resolution: Save $257,326.71.  As of 2012, the District will be in its second year of deficit spending. Thus, the Board of Education (BOE) is currently looking to develop a robust resource allocation process that will improve the allocation of the District’s staff and monetary resources. As a result, BOE has made some significant changes to what will be offered in the summer to Clayton students, K-12.

Clayton receives more than 80 percent of its funding from local property taxes, and thus, as a district, it is not as affected by fluctuations in state funding. According to the District’s preliminary budget framework, “Except for a tax increase, new construction is the primary means to increase our tax revenue. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much new construction in Clayton lately. This leaves us with a situation where our revenues are essentially flat yet our expenses are constantly increasing, a situation that isn’t sustainable long term.”

The new plan has classified its goals into three priorities: credit recovery, required courses, and enrichment/recreation.  With the new guidelines in place, the District is looking to cut its expenses by nearly 50 percent.

At the high school level, the District is looking to offer academic support, credit recovery and required course options for its students. Courses such as Conferenced English and credit recovery math will be in place to assist struggling students in need of course remediation.

Likewise, required course options will be available to address student/community interest in summer option for state required semester-length courses.  Such courses would include Personal Finance, American Government, and Physical Education.

“We have a lot of kids who use the summer program to get ahead and free up their regular schedules during the year for APs and other courses,”  principal of the Summer Program at Clayton Paul Hoelscher said. “This makes sense, and it’s something where there is a high interest level. We hear the voices of students and parents who say this is the way they want to use summer school. We want summer school to serve the needs of all people in the community.”

As for enrichment activity courses, the District is hoping to offer such options as non-credit fee based possibilities. The District has already determined that it will offer ACT Prep and Field Research under such guidelines. Other courses such as computer programming, film making, shadowing healthcare is currently under review.

“What we’re currently playing with is the possibility of offering an enrichment class but on a tuition basis,” Hoelscher said. “This way we are able to offer a cool service that will be pretty minimal-cost to the District as well as to the community.”

Changes to that of middle school level options look to be very similar to those implemented on the high school summer curriculum. SummerQuest will be offering an opportunity to pair academic support with enrichment and recreation for 6^th grade students. In addition, SummerQuest is also looking at the possibility of offering a two-week academic camp for 7^th and 8^th graders.

As for the Elementary Summer Experience, the District is looking to offer academic support paired with enrichment/recreation through SummerQuest. The District is hoping that these options will address struggling students in need of intensive reading and math support as well as student/community interest in academic remediation, increasing motivation and attendance.

“Even though our funding tends to be more stable than others, there is a certain level of uncertainty with funding for public schools. We will be in a much better place if we start preparing now instead of waiting until we are in the midst of an all-out financial crisis.”