Before students once again fill the hallways, teachers from across the district gathered for lunch, chatter and a pep talk from Oxford Superintendent Tim Throne on Aug. 20 in the high school’s auditorium.
Throne celebrated the achievements of the district and its teachers, and talked candidly about the state of Oxford Schools with the employees.
Throne’s speech circled around the district’s growth and financial situation. He said in recent years, Oxford’s rate of traditional students, meaning students who are sitting in a classroom, has remained stagnant. But, he said in the last three or four years, that stagnancy has been met by large growth in Oxford Virtual Academy.
“Our traditional seated student, that growth, has been exceedingly flat,” Throne said.”All of that growth the last few years, it’s been from our virtual academy.”
Aside from having students full-time both in the classroom and online, Oxford Schools also offers a service called shared time, in which other schools can enroll students in online classes offered by the virtual academy. Most of these schools are private institutions.
Throne said from this alone, Oxford has reached well over 800 students in the last year through these shared classes.
Shared-time students bring in money and state funding for Oxford. But, in recent years, Throne said the state Legislature has interpreted the limits to which districts can offer shared time services rather conservatively and have capped how much schools are allowed to grow. For districts of Oxford’s size and what they offer, Michigan prohibits shared time programs to grow by no more than 10 percent.
For Oxford, this means only about 80 more students than those already enrolled can participate in shared time classes this year.
Due to this more conservative approach to shared time, funding per student for these services has also been cut.
Throne said, for Oxford, this will result in between $2 and $3 million less coming in.
But, Throne was adamant that this will not hinder the success of the schools and what the students are doing.
“I went to our board and I said, ‘Listen, we’re pretty down to the wire,’” Throne said. “I was really encouraged that our board basically said, ‘Tim we understand where you’re at and that at the end of the day, if we needed to take money out of our fund balance in order to cover what we’ve been doing, than that’s what we’ll do.’”
Throne added that his passion won’t be dying out, and he’ll be counting on the teachers to be just as diligent.
And, perhaps as a reminder to everyone present why they must stay diligent, choir and marching band students came into the meeting, alongside a few music teachers, to perform “We Are Family” for the staff.
Students filled the remaining empty space in the walkways of the auditorium and brought their teachers to their feet. Leaving their meeting on a literal high note, it looks like Oxford’s teachers are more than ready for another school year.