JAMESTOWN – The President of the Jamestown School Board says he was pleased with the first ever community forum designed to let residents offer their input into the districts annual spending. On Tuesday night, more than 20 people attended the community forum, which allowed residents to prioritize various items of the spending plan.
Jamestown school board president Joe DiMaio said that although school officials would have liked to see more of a turnout, the forum still went well.
“We didn’t get quite as much community as we would have liked to see but it’s a start. We did have some people there and we were really happy with the outcome,” DiMaio told WRFA following the meeting. “It does a couple of things for us. It helps us prioritize and as we looked at it last night with the suggestions, it kind of validates what we feel are the priorities of the community. So it was nice to see that.”
During the forum, participants were split into four categories: Instruction, Extracurricular, Operational and Other. They spent about 25 minutes in each group, that rotated into the next one, allowing all participants to offer input on all aspects of the budget.
DiMaio says the information collected from the forum will be used by School Superintendent Tim Mains to help craft the 2014-15 budget, and will also be available to school board members as they work on finalizing the spending plan. The results of the seminar can also be found on the Jamestown Public Schools website at jamestownpublicschools.org.
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