Your household income dropped 20% over the past few years. You want to do everything you can to spare your family from absorbing the pain, so you try your damndest to save money elsewhere.
How about lowering home or rent payments? Sorry, those letters you sent asking to cut your payments 20% gave everyone in the office a good laugh. Cut back on car payments? Same hilarity when the loan company received your letter. Utility bills? Maybe you can shave off a few dollars by keeping the house colder in winter and warmer in summer and by flushing less often, but it’s not going to amount to a 20% savings.
The only sure places to cut back are on expenses for food, clothing, family enrichment and entertainment. You don’t want to deny your family, especially your children, but what choice do you have? And so the percentage of your overall budget you spend on your family decreases along with your income.
Schools are faced with the same problems. K-12 education funding has gone down 20% per student over the past few years — that’s in real dollars — courtesy of the Republican budget cutters in Phoenix. Yet districts have fixed costs that don’t budge when the money gets tight — buildings to operate, utilities to pay, buses to run. You can cut back a bit on some of those expenses, but 20%? That’s not possible. Arizona already spends a lower percentage on administrative costs than all but a few other states, so there’s not much room for savings there either.
But you can always cut a teacher or two from a school if you have to and cram a few more kids in each classroom. You can put off that textbook purchase and have students use those ratty, outdated books another year. You can make teachers buy paper and other supplies for their classrooms. Teachers, caring fools that they are, will dig into their modest salaries rather than denying their kids materials they need for their educations.
Ironically, the classroom, which is what education is all about, is one of the few areas in a school district’s budget where spending is flexible. So the percentage of the school budget making it to the classroom goes down as the total dollar amount decreases.
And the Republican legislators who starve the schools say self-righteously, if administrators really cared about the children, they wouldn’t cut the money going to the classroom. They’d find savings elsewhere.
This article appears in Feb 27 – Mar 5, 2014.
I’ve said since my child first went to school in Arizona that every state ledge should have to spend a week in an oversized classroom of primary school kids. Except that I wouldn’t want one of those Republican budget cutters at the head of my son’s classroom, even for a week, I’m sure it would be the greatest lesson that ledge would ever get about the conditions they impose on our schools. The more I know about weekly testing and showing kindergardeners how to fill the bubbles in right, etc. the better an idea I think it is. And at the end of the week, if the kids haven’t progressed the way some bureaucrat somewhere who runs a testing company says they should have, the ledge should have his or her salary cut. Just sayin’….
Too bad, Mr. Safier, that you did not exclude TUSD from this scenario. Due to the forced generosity of TUSD taxpayers, the funding for TUSD has not gone down except through the loss of state funding due to massive enrollment declines. In fact, TUSD’s revenues increased even as other local districts were losing funds caused by the legislative attack on public schools. Since when does a a school district’s bureaucracy become a fixed cost that increases even as enrollment shrinks? Administration in TUSD is now more than 10% of its budget even as classroom spending dropped below 50%. Perhaps when you attended TUSD’s “wonderful” strategic planning session you could have brought up the fact that families continue to leave TUSD in droves, and that one major reason for this is the failure to prioritize student learning.
By the way, all this data comes from the recently released annual report on school district spending done by the Arizona Auditor General. You can read it yourself…and it includes the data for all Arizona districts, not just TUSD. The report can be found at: http://www.azauditor.gov/Reports/School_Di…
i have just returned from a visit to the midwestern city where I will soon move and continue my teaching career….and the difference in the schools and what they offer is appalling. I visited three separate districts and a total of 6 different schools, in every type of neighborhood. the AZ state legislature should be ASHAMED. In every school I visited, EVERY child receives instruction in art, music, PE, and library/media lessons. Every classroom is equipped with mounted whiteboards, projectors, and document cameras, in addition to laptops for every, or at least, every other child. The buildings are updated and beautiful, not to mention secure. Arizona students are not receiving the benefits of their peers in other parts of the US….and that is CRIMINAL. It makes me unbelievably sad for our students.
In the 8 years I’ve been teaching, I’ve watched principals try to adjust what is in their “bucket” (this is really what they call the school budget), by cutting everything from monitor and custodial hours, to needed classroom supplies and enrichment programs. Now the cuts go deeper: Classroom teachers with enrollments below 20 students (para-professionals (such as counselors and teacher coaches), monitors, aides for classrooms with students needing interventions, after school programs and tutoring, and summer school: GONE. I too have been part of these cuts, felt more deeply in the poorest neighborhoods and schools. Teachers are volunteering personal time to tutor after school, when they used to receive some stipend to provide this valuable service; Teachers and paraprofessionals volunteering to provide “enrichment” programs free of charge after school, such as art, track, and choir. All three of these activities used to be part of the everyday activities when I was in grade school. Meanwhile, state monies are filtered only into programs that increase student performance on state tests, and only if the schools and the teachers make the students perform above average every Spring…the worst time of year to expect this, as the students are exhausted by the nearly endless testing, from February to April. Parents spending less and less time in the schools volunteering, donating supplies, or supporting Math, Science or Literacy nights (mostly because they are working two jobs or do not have the time or money to help). PTOs getting smaller and smaller, only able to donate enough to maybe cover the cost of one field trip per class per year. The state of Arizona is failing our kids…not the other way around. Our so-called government should be ASHAMED of themselves.