Budget Time

Whew! It was quite a wild budget process the past few weeks. I thank all of you who took the time to call or write their Legislators. The good news is that the voices of parents were heard on this issue through Michigan PTA. The bad news is that although we were able to mitigate what could have been a $218 per student cut, we still will be cut $168 per student. In addition, if the sales tax revenues continue to come in at the lower rate than the budget originally estimated, we could be faced with additional cuts later in the year. (There is no reason to believe that sales tax revenues will improve-they have come in at least $40 million under budget every month this year!)

How does this affect your district? Click here for the total amount of cuts. Click here for a detailed analysis of the categories that were changed in the budget.

As to how it will affect your district directly-well your boards of education will soon be making decisions that will reconcile the current cuts with the cuts that they projected. If they projected a $200 cut, they have more money to spend as it currently stands (remember, this could change-and probably will as we move through the year). If they projected less than the current cut, they will have to make it up somehow.

Fifteen years ago (March 15, 1994 to be exact, my birthday, but I can’t say which), the citizens off Michigan made a radical decision to fund schools statewide through an increase in sales tax and other methods and reduced property taxes. This measure passed by a vote of 1,684,541 to 750,952 (69% to 31%, or slightly better than 2 to 1). Yes, the people had spoken, but what really did this mean? What it meant was that the state-and by that I mean the people of the state, with the elected officials working on their behalf, made a commitment to fund education. In the good years that immediately followed, to arise the money needed for schools was not an issue, money could be easily generated by big-ticket items in a good economy. But by the time we reached the early part of this decade, several factors worked against us, most notably the decline in auto sales.

However, the commitment remains.

We, the people, and our elected officials acting as our agents, must live up to that commitment to the children of this state! A $168 per student cut is outrageous! How can we possibly move forward with the people of this state failing to live up to their commitment? Keep asking this question. Keep your voices loud, and keep working on the relationships that you are developing with elected officials and let them know that this cut and further cuts are unacceptable.

But it’s only three percent!

Or so says Howell Public Schools Trustee Wendy Day. But what does three percent actually mean to you, your schools, and most importantly, your kids?

Schools are required to have kids in school 1,098 hours per school year. (With a 180-day school year, that’s about 6 hours and 6 minutes.) Let’s cut 3% of that. That’s 5 days of school, or a week of school. What kind of impact does that have on our students?

Special education did not escape budget cuts. The budget impasse prevented the state from dispersing federal funds to districts. Some very interesting information on how disproportional representation of racial and ethnic groups can be found here.

This past Monday I had the opportunity to address two PTA groups. First was the Detroit PTA Council (the representatives of the local PTA units in Detroit) and the Oakridge Elementary PTA in Royal Oak. The hot topic was of course the budget and the cuts to education, but while all of the first group and most of the second group understood the gravity of the situation, there was a group of parents that wanted to know if we would expand All-day Kindergarten to their school. When I explained that this was a very costly program (it literally doubles the cost and space requirements) and that the board would do what it could to maintain the existing program at the two schools where it is programmed, in my humble opinion, there was no way that the board (that would not include me after 12/31/09) could afford it, as they would be struggling to maintain the existing programs. (In addition, there is not enough space in their building.) The disconnect between these two items-budget cuts and expanded programs, disturbed me. How is it possible that so much misunderstanding can exist? Gerd Gigerenzer, in his book Calculated Risks and John Allen Paulos in his 1989 book, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences, posits that there exists such a large incidence of innumeracy in the US today, that the impact on public policy is sufficient enough to cause poor decision to be made, risks are assessed poorly and the decision made by the electorate are led by poor conceptual knowledge of complex issues. Or these parents were just angry or apathetic-or both.

The lesson here, for me and other advocacy leaders, is that our work is nowhere near done. We need to get out there and make sure that our friends, neighbors, family members, and co-workers are aware of what is happening, how it impact them, and that they need to care about it!

One person at this meeting told me that she really didn’t care about how we got here, just what the school board was going to do about it. Sad. Really sad.

So let’s get to work.

To help you advocate, I will be updating the Legislative Page (http://capwiz.com/npta2/mi/home/ )on a regular basis-please go there and check out the action alerts under the Issues and Legislation tab.

You can also follow me on facebook and twitter-these pages are updated often.

Kevin McLogan

https://twitter.com/bigkkm

http://www.facebook.com/kmclogan

(An abbreviated version of this article appears in Michigan PTA’s October Bulletin)