In light of test scores and the emphasis on academics, it had to be done. No Child Left Behind changed everything.

They have to do something serious about property-tax reform. Otherwise, what are you going to do? They?re going to tax people out of their homes.

We're moving toward a standards-based instruction system, the idea being that the state has established instructional standards, and we need to make sure kids are competent in those standards.

What we've been doing is using data to make instructional decisions. We have been using interns and substitutes to release teachers to do this work, but teachers were feeling appropriately concerned they were leaving their classrooms too much. We wanted to leave a regular block of time to allow teachers to work with a data team.

This represents a modest increase. Again, we have our long-term projects that we have been working on since 2003 but, realizing that fuel and utility costs have increased, the finance committee has been very restrained with whatever it could.