Parents, teachers and community members said they did not like the district's $2.8 billion budget, which contains more than $629 million in cuts - including the total elimination of full-day kindergarten, slashing school discretionary funds by an average of 30 percent, and losing more than 3,000 jobs.
District chief financial officer Michael Masch told the crowd that unprecedented cuts in state funding, combined with the loss of federal stimulus money, forced Superintendent Arlene Ackerman and her staff to make painful trims.
No one wants to make these cuts, Masch said, "but we are legally bound to balance this budget."
Nicole Hagedorn, a parent whose son is enrolled in Meredith in the fall, was visibly upset.
"This makes me so angry," Hagedorn said. "I don't know what to do. How can you do this? How can this be going on?"
Hagedorn said she had other options, but believed in public school and wanted to send her child to Meredith, a K-8 school. "It's too late to enroll him elsewhere and that's frustrating, but the cuts will impact others even more," she said.
"I don't know how the working families of this city are going to function if their small kids are only in school for three hours," Hagedorn said.
Many in the crowd questioned the district's spending and its transparency, and said they were outraged that certain cuts are on the table at all.
Kristin Luebbert, who teaches at Bache-Martin Elementary in Fairmount, said she believed the district should reconsider its trims to kindergarten and to early childhood education, where about 1,000 spots would be lost and entire programs shut.
"If we can help our children when they come in at 4, 5, and 6 years old, we're not going to need so many placements in alternative schools down the line," Luebbert said.
