Catskill Central School District officials are holding the second of two community budget forums on potentially drastic cuts including the end of kindergarten and pre-K classes tonight on Monday, March 14, and have expressed hope that people will attend and present their ideas about what should or should not be included for funding in the next school year. Before a previous hearing on March 1, Jim Planck of the Daily Mail wrote that, “Community participation is perhaps especially essential this year, as the Board of Education has come at the budget from a ‘bottom up’ approach, meaning that the existing draft budget has had everything and anything that can be removed from it accordingly taken from it” All optionals have been excluded, so tonight’s forum is the opportunity for the community to suggest to the board which of those excluded items or programs should be put back in and restored with funding. The school board has invited Catskill residents, business owners, and taxpayers to the forum, which will be held in the Middle School auditorium starting at 6:00 p.m. for a stated length of no more than two hours. An earlier meeting on the same subject, on March 1, saw teachers and parents addressing issues related to the need for early education, advanced placement classes, sports, arts and music as integral to the local school experience, with several speakers noting that the local community has never NOT passed a budget. The board later noted that the discussion was purely “for discussion purposes,” and they were not planning to cut their budgets to the bone, but see what their constituency cared about regarding Catskill education. The accompanying video was from our earlier coverage of the CCSD March 1 budget hearing.