School administrators across the state are crafting bleak budgets for the next school year and warning of steep cutbacks, including teacher layoffs, to cope with a probable sharp drop in funding from Beacon Hill and dwindling federal stimulus money.
Though schools grappled with thinned-down budgets last year, they got relief from a massive infusion of federal education dollars that is now all but spent, and officials are bracing for cuts that go deep into the classroom.
We got a "Letter from the Superintendent" about this issue in our hometown school (actually a regional school, because G.-land is too small to support its own school system, but I digress). It was full of the standard doom-and-gloom - approve Prop 2½ overrides or we're going to be forced to cut Art and Music out of the budget, kids will have to eat out of trash cans, we'll be replacing the school nurse with a Kevorkian Death Bot 2000, etc. Why, it's almost like they expected to be insulated from the poor economy, even as folks lost their jobs, moved out of our pricey town, and kept property tax just as high even with plummeting property values.
It's a shame that the children will suffer. What bothers me more is that my kids are being as pawns in a game of "pass the buck" resulting from poor planning on the school district's part. A year ago, when the stimulus money was being flung about far and wide, there should have been a deep, concerted effort to streamline things and pare down costs in anticipation of exactly what happened - the feds and the state turned off the "Free Money" tap and said, "oopsie, you're on your own".
Instead, they partied like it was 1999 and hired more administrative assistants, bought more flatscreen TVs for the central office, and pretended that the good times would never end. And now it's the kids being thrown into a tug of war between the school system that's allegedly in charge of "educating" them (and I live in a pretty good district with a decent school) and the parents who are being asked to, yet again, dig deeper into their wallets for more tax money to fund the schools despite no apparent attempts to lower expenses.
At some point, the taxpayers throw up their hands and walk away, and you wind up looking like a third world country. Or Detroit. Perhaps I repeat myself. It's time for the schools to realize that the taxpayer is not an endless well of money you can dip into any time you want, no matter how much you'd like to think that. With the advent of Proposition 2½, the property taxes that fund the schools can only be raised a certain percentage (2½%, natch) over the previous years - and I cannot recall a year where they didn't raise the taxes 2½%... We are forced to attend town meetings 2-3-4 times a year asking for Prop 2½ overrides - that are almost always shot down. And yet they keep putting them on the agenda...
Obviously, it's Bush's fault.
That is all.
8 comments:
I notice that the article doesn't say anything about the school administrators contemplating layoffs of administrative positions...only teachers.
Hmmm.
Sort of like when city governments are spending millions of dollars on feel good things like light rail, office buildings and renovations at city hall, but when the time comes for budget cuts, the things that are always on the block are Schools, Fire departments and Police.
That's because if you threaten to lay off administrators, people say, "Good! Cut the fat".
Whereas if you threaten to lay off teachers, people tend more to say "ZOMG! WHO WILL TEACH TEH CHILLENS!?!??!?!111"
....... (actually a regional school, because G.-land is too small to support its own school system, but I digress)......
Not so. I know Homeschoolers that manage to come up with a system to educate their children on 1 poverty level income (yet still pay the confiscatory level of property taxes to pay for the local Public Skrewel their kids don't even attend!). G-land is just not large enough to support the kind of bloated, Admin-heavy, inefficient Public Skrewel System mandated by the Powers That Be (becuase such a system fosters sheep that will keep them in power, and creates cover for the sinecures that they use to reward the cogs of their their political machine.
Amen, Curt. What exactly are they administrating? Anyone wants to go to Dorchester, they can see BC High school, which is administered by a couple of Jesuit brothers, a double handful of teachers, a pair of janitors, a secretary and a half-dozen lunch ladies... for about the same money per student that a suburban town pays, it's obviously possible to give a superb education to kids without 90% of the 'administrators' and their assistants.
You're also dead on, Jay. No one cares about public administration budget cuts, so if you threaten to let go your core personnel first, the money gets found.
BTB, wouldn't it be nice if your household budget increased by a guaranteed 2 1/2% a year? To them I say 'Quit yer bitchin'.
Here in GA we've approached it from a different angle: tax increases are not an option because that would kill the economy even more. So, there have been cuts. 10% cut in education, to begin with (including one of my wife's jobs with the school). Some schools HAVE done away with nurses and a lot of teachers have been let go.
My wife was feeling down back in the fall (she still works part time) and I just said "it was nothing you did, it's just that there's no money to pay, what with all the foreclosures and the like with people out of work. No tax money inlays means nothing to pay you". My company cut 200 jobs on Friday (I'm safe, for now), so apparently hope & change still hasn't made its way to the economy or jobs, yet.
I can't imagine some fool raising taxes in this climate. Oh, wait, The One ran on just that....and won.
Wake me when it's over.
Oh, and the administrative staff on the county level: still in place. Two years ago, the Superintendent's assistant...had an assistant. Not a misprint or typo.
One of my friends is a superintendent in NH. One caveat of that stimulus money was that it had to be used to fund new programs for the students, with no guarantee of funding next year from the fedgov. No capital improvements allowed. Using that money would have meant that school costs would have gone up even more. The real culprit is the guaranteed wage and health insurance increases for those same teachers.
Post a Comment