Mayors Year of Excellence for the schools, how is it really from inside

Saw Mayor Treat proclaimed a Year of Excellence for Bryant schools at the council meeting. 737 graduates, 52 with the Seal of Biliteracy, Hornets got football and boys basketball state titles. District is also the biggest employer in Saline County, over 1,200 people.

Thats a lot to be proud of. When my youngest graduated the class was maybe a third that size.

Smoked a few butts for a grad party last weekend and the parents were all talking schools, some happy some not so much. So yall with kids in there now, how does it actualy feel? Not the proclamation, the real thing. And whats the one thing youd fix first. Im just a taxpayer these days so I wanna hear from the parents

kids are doing good, teachers are great honestly. biggest thing for me is the growth, classes are packed and pickup lines at the elementarys are a mess every day. also the hornets winning is awsome but youth sports cant get gym time anywhere 😅 thats what id fix first. Thanks!

Yes to the pickup lines!! I swear you can tell what time it is by how far back the line is down the road 😂 Those teachers deserve a medal for directing traffic before they even start the school day.

The gym time thing is real too. A few of us were trading notes on that, and everybody ends up begging church gyms or whoever has a open Tuesday night. The Hornets winning is great, but the little league and rec teams are the ones who end up squeezed out.

What I keep thinking about is the jobs side of it. 1,200+ employees means the district is a big deal for families here, and it's not just teachers. It's bus drivers, cafeteria staff, paras, custodians, subs. If the growth keeps coming the way it is, I'd want to see the district hiring and paying enough to keep those folks, because those are the people who actually make pickup and lunch and the bus routes work. Good teachers are only part of it. Packed classrooms get easier when there's enough support staff to go around.

Anyway, kids seem to be doing well from what I see, and I'm glad to hear it from another parent. Hope this helps 🙂

Good point on the support staff Amanda, I hadnt thought about it that way. When my youngest was in school the lunch ladies knew every kid by name and who was gonna skip breakfast. Hard to do that now with the numbers they got.

Church gyms for rec ball is a shame tho. Somebody at the district or the city oughta be working on that before it gets worse, growth aint slowing down any.

Ronald, the lunch lady thing is still true at my kids' school, at least with the ones who've been there a while. Ours knows which of mine will skip breakfast and quietly hands him a yogurt, and that kind of thing never makes it into a proclamation. Where it gets thin is when somebody leaves mid-year and the spot sits open for months. The rest of the crew just absorbs it and nobody says anything.

On the gyms, our church fellowship hall has a half court and we get asked about it all the time. It's not a real gym though. The ceiling is low, and we have to work around Wednesday night and the food pantry days. It works, but it's a band-aid. I'd like to see the city and the district sit down and set up some kind of shared use for the school gyms after hours, instead of every team scrambling church by church. Maybe there's a reason it can't be done, insurance or custodian hours or whatever, but I haven't heard anyone actually explain it.

Out here by the Benton line you also feel the growth in the drop-off traffic more than anything else. But overall my kids are happy and learning, so I can't complain much. Now I need to go stake my tomatoes before the storms Thursday.