The cost of bad judgment
School board presidents and school superintendents all over the state spent much of last week bad-mouthing Gov. David Paterson's decision to delay aid payments to schools to keep the state from running out of money while the state Legislature screws around with a budgets whose revenues don't come close to meeting its expenditures. Hands were wrung. Suits were filed. Dire predictions were made. Visions of barefoot pupils trudging through the snow were called up.
Oddly enough, few if any of these school officials measured the delayed aid against the often large federal lagniappes they received as part of the economic stimulus package. Take Watertown City Schools, for example, which won't immediately see $252,000 of its 2009-10 aid package. It has received $3.3 million in stimulus money, however, leaving it a mere $3 million ahead of what it had budgeted back in June.
Since the federal boost to schools was designed to ease any drop in state aid because of fiscal crises at that level, you'd immediately think to yourself, "Good idea. That plan worked." In fact, the federal government presumed state aid to schools might suffer for more than just this year, so the added aid was meant to cover a couple of bad years. As a result, many districts might have been able to stem the problems of decreased state aid through a couple of budgets.
Doesn't look good for that, though. A fairly comprehensive survey of how districts are using the federal stimulus Monday that appeared in Sunday's Times indicates the primary use of the stimulus money has been to create jobs. Indian River Central School leads the "let's take one-shot aid and create long-term positions" pack, hiring 17 new people with its $2 million in stimulus aid.
What? Are you KIDDING ME? New York already leads the nation in dollar spent per pupil, and its property taxes are already almost at the top, in a ranking where number 1 is not a good thing. Despite this, New York has no more to show for its public education than many states that spend far, far less. And yet, many districts out there are adding employees with this one-time aid, even though they have been warned repeatedly that the state is in truly dire economic shape and will not immediately rebound.
While the Legislature has shown over the past 20 years that it is loath to cut education aid, the state has probably reached the end of its financial tether. Like the homeowner who has refinanced and refinanced and suddenly found the cupboard bare and the mortgage payment missing, the state has spent and borrowed and used-one shot budget Bandaids as long as it can. Now the reckoning is upon us. And school aid is part of that reckoning.
The STAR program, for example, may come under the knife. While this was a direct rebate to property owners to soften the blow of school tax payments, it has had the net effect of allowing school districts to sneak added costs and personnel into budgets because the full effect of those increases hasn't been felt. Homeowners should consider just where their taxes would be if that rebate program is ended. I'll give you an example: I paid $1,.878.41 in school taxes in 2009; without the STAR rebate, I would have paid $2,267.65. That would equate to a shocking increase in 2010 if STAR has to be dropped.
So, really, is this the time districts should be adding teachers? Outside of districts affected by Fort Drum, enrollments are in decline. Test scores are neither in decline nor ascendancy. Schools that have been put on the "in need of improvement" lists are not prevalent here. More graduates go on to college than the national average. The statewide student-teacher ratio is 13.3 to 1 – ranking the state in a tie for eighth with Wyoming, in a nation with an average ratio of 15.5 to 1.
Given all this, are students going to benefit with additional hiring in our schools? Is anyone sitting back and saying "Is this the kind of spending that we can really afford to sustain?" The problem with creating new positions in the public sector is that once created, these jobs become the very devil to eliminate. Think, if you will, of the budget turmoil the controversial COPS program brought; it resulted in the hiring of thousands of police officers nationwide, almost all of whom stayed on the payrolls when the grant funding ran out in two or three years.
For those who survive on state aid, times are tough and getting tougher. Retrenchment and reinvention should be the byword for agencies and municipalities and school districts. New hiring and "spend it if you've got it" are not appropriate decisions, especially now. Unfortunately, a lot of north country school districts are ignoring that reality – and it is the taxpayers who will end up paying for that bad judgment.
