The Kent School Board has approved cuts to 110 employees in the 2011-12 district budget because of a loss of federal and state funding.
The music and games will play on next school year at 28 Kent elementary schools.
After a community uproar over proposed 2011-12 budget cuts to eliminate elementary music and physical education programs, the Kent School Board voted Wednesday night to keep each program and its specialized teachers from the chopping block.
Kent School District parents and teachers told the Kent School Board Tuesday night to save elementary music and physical education programs and find somewhere else to cut the 2011-2012 budget by $6 million.
Speaker after speaker at the Community Budget Session and Public Hearing at the Kentwood High School gym objected to district proposals to cut the elementary school physical education program for a savings of $2.48 million and the elimination of elementary school music programs for a savings of about $3.8 million.
King County Executive Dow Constantine says reforms to make government more efficient and improved infrastructure will put the county in position to rebound as the economy recovers.
Constantine unfurled his plan Monday during his State of the County address at a special Committee of the Whole meeting of the Metropolitan King County Council on the third-floor rotunda at the Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent.
A former teacher in the Kent and Renton school districts pleaded not guilty Wednesday to a charge of first-degree sexual misconduct with a minor for reportedly having sex with a 17-year-old male student last month when she was a teacher at Garfield High School in Seattle.
King County prosecutors on Feb. 23 charged a 35-year-old Auburn man with second-degree rape for allegedly assaulting a 71-year-woman at a Kent dementia-care and assisted-living facility where he worked as a certified nursing assistant.
Incumbent Mike Miller and challenger Aaron Heide are locked in a tight race for Commissioner Position No. 4 on the Valley Medical Center Public Hospital District 1 board.
The nearly 30,000 residents of the Green River Valley need to buy flood insurance and make plans to evacuate their homes or businesses this winter, because of the potential from floods, due to seepage problems at an abutment next to the Howard Hanson Dam.
