The Board of Education has tentatively approved its 2010-11 general fund budget, which has no withdrawals from its reserves built in.

The $99.9 million budget is $4.6 million lower than the 2009-10 budget due to a $6.2 million decrease in state funding.

The school system is waiting to verify the county tax digest for incoming Kia Motors funds and see projections for state revenues. It’s not a final budget, but school officials are remaining realistic about it, Superintendent Ed Smith said Thursday.

“This is a preliminary budget,” he said. “As you know, the landscape changes weekly. The situation could get better or worse.”

Because state funding cuts could continue, system officials are looking to protect their capacity for teaching by not laying off workers and their sustainability.

“We’ve been compelled to question everything,” Smith said. “Even in the light of this preliminary budget, it could be much, much, much worse.

The board is expected to have a final vote on the budget in June.

Also Thursday, the board heard an update on the Georgia Performance Standards in math and learned how much more vigorous they are from their previous curriculum.

As Troup County gets ready to roll out the final math phase for the standards, the math coaches praise what students are learning at earlier and earlier ages.

The standards have caused school systems around the state to work harder in getting students ready to graduate. Subjects have gotten more difficult, Georgia’s academic intensity has grown and the previously used Quality Core Curriculum is getting left behind, officials said.

Elementary math coaches Heather Meacham and Katie Brown, middle school coach Gail Sherman, and high school math coach Paula Thurman presented the new standard to the board Thursday, with math questions are wireless voting systems at the helm.

Sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders are learning material high school students were just scratching in their early days, officials said.

“In the 1985 Quality Basic Education Act, Georgia was given the charge that they must maintain a curriculum that specified what students were expected to know in each subject and each grade,” said Troup County mathematics coordinator Natalie Meiguez.

Teachers soon began getting confused on what they should teach, not fully sure what students would be tested on. An external audit in 2002 by Phi Delta Kappa said the Quality Core Curriculum had too many topics, too little depth and didn’t meet national standards.

To teach the QCC completely, teachers would have needed 23 years, rather than 12, to teach the material to students.

“The curriculum was shallow and it forced the teachers to guess what they should teach and hope that they were teaching what would be tested,” Meiguez said.

Now, middle school students are being prepared completely for high school by learning all the core concepts of geometry, algebra and statistics. And all high school students are receiving more advanced algebra and trigonometry.

The new curriculum is now more rigorous, “more than an inch deep,” and more focused, “less than a mile wide,” Meiguez said.

The school system will phase in math IV for 12th-grade students 2011-12.

Trey Wood can be reached at twood @ lagrangenews. com or (706) 884-7311, Ext. 228.