Syracuse Superintendent Announces Budget

By next week, I will be completely caught up with all my journal entries. Until then, here's another entry about my internship with News 10 Now.

In an entry dated 2-10-10:

Syracuse Superintendent Announces Budget

I knew that based on last Wednesday's date mix-up, tonight I would be going with Kat to the hydrofracking meeting at Nottingham High School. But instead we were sent out on two stories: one was the Syracuse City Board of Ed meeting, and the other was the hydrofracking meeting.

But when we got to the Board of Education meeting and learned that it would be the meeting in which superintendent Dan Lowengard would propose his 2010-2011 budget, we stayed and had someone else cover the fracking meeting.

Lowengard proposed a budget that called for using half of the district's "rainy day fund" and cutting at least 150 teachers and aids. Even after all this, there would still be an $18 million gap in the budget, and Lowengard hoped to close that by cutting an addition 270 teachers and/or lobbying for more money in Albany and Washington.

There was some heat coming from other board members who thought that lobbying does not necessarily mean receiving more money. Anne Marie Voutsinas, the president of the Syracuse Teachers Association, was also really disappointed over talks about all the teacher job cuts.

Kat and I interviewed both Lowengard and Voutsinas before and after the meeting alongside reporters from Channels 3 and 9. The budget was pretty confusing to us, so we all worked together to understand what it said.

In the end, Kat and I figured it all out and took our time shooting standups until we got back to the studio. I stayed an hour later than normal Wednesday night to finish writing my story and have Kat copyedit it. I pulled a few bites, but other than that, I didn't complete the package.

I left it, hoping I would have time to finish it Friday. After all, I did have enought time before we left for the Board meeting to finish my "Beat 'Nova" T-shirt package from teh previous Friday!

*Sidenote: Kat and I wrote the same stories from two different angles. She focused on Lowengard's plans to lobby, and I focused on teacher cuts and how they would affect Syracuse education.

For a more simplified summary of the budget, click here.

Stay tuned for more News 10 Now internship updates.