Dr. Sue Woltanski, Monroe County School Board member for District 5, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s happening in the district.
The Key Largo Unified Special Olympics team won the state title for soccer.
Woltanski said, “Key Largo School has had Unified Special Olympics teams for many years now and Unified Special Olympics means that there are children with special needs, and then peers and they play on sports together. So it’s both doing sports, but it’s also including those kids into all aspects of the school. It’s a tremendous benefit to the kids on the sport, but to the school in general, because it makes the whole school more unified, not just the sports team. They took their soccer team up to the ESPN Sports Center and won the state title for soccer for middle school. That’s super exciting for them. Then part of the other big news about Special Olympics Unified is that Connor Dixon, who is a Coral Shore’s senior getting ready to graduate. He was a student at Key Largo School. He participated in the unified teams. He continued those efforts and became a coach in high school. He coached the unified teams, and he put together an effort in the school to make sure that none of those kids were ever sitting alone and for all his efforts, and for him just being an overall great guy, I think he played, I don’t know all the sports he played. I know football is his love. He played football. He was an athlete himself, and then he did the unified thing, and he became last week, a Monroe County’s first winner of the Miami Herald Silver Knight Award, which is a huge, huge competition with the South Florida counties and Monroe had not been included in the past, and really, thanks to some of the efforts of people like Dennis Ward and some others, they noticed that Monroe was not in there, and we got a lot of kids in as finalists, and Connor was a winner. So that’s the first time for Monroe, and a great accolade for him, and he’s heading off to do sports business, I think, at the University of Oklahoma.”
The unified teams are very vast in the district.
Woltanski said, “Now, every school in the district has unified teams, as far as I know, and in all different sports, it’s not just it’s soccer. They have track teams. They have cheer teams and the Key Largo cheer team also did very well at the state championship, the unified cheer team. So the program is really successful in all ways.”
The last day of school is May 30th.
Woltanski said, “It’s an early Memorial Day, it will feel like a very crowded graduation week, because the last week of school, because it’s only four days, and the ceremonies up here start with the senior night scholarship awards on Tuesday for Coral Shores, and then the graduation on Wednesday, Marathon graduates on Thursday, Key West graduates on Friday, and then the following week, we have what’s maybe one of the most heartwarming graduations, the Adult Education Center graduates those students, and that’s really a demonstration of persistence.”
Is the school district concerned about the legislative session and the budget impasse?
Woltanski said, “I think everyone is concerned. There’s multiple things with the budget. One is that the budget this year that’s proposed for education does not keep up with inflation and with the rising costs of our contributions to the retirement system and state mandated teacher salary allocations, which, of course, we’re in favor of the teacher salary raises, but we know we’re going to be in the hole to begin with. We put money away for a rainy day, so it’s not going to really threaten too much, but we already know it’s going to be a very, very tight budget, and not having it nailed down while we’re trying to develop our budget is really a challenge. The state has a $2 billion surplus this year, and the schools are not getting funded, and we have to go into our reserves and what’s going on right now in Tallahassee is a fight over tax cuts, and if this was my family budget, I wouldn’t be cutting revenue at a time where I couldn’t pay my bills. That’s just my own frustration.”