After a long few months of looking at district budget data interspersed with an even longer few months of discovering that the district vision of excellence is all talk and no walk for my kids and their friends, I made the following remarks to the school board last night. I hope they listened and took to heart to establish a budget process that accurately reflects expenses in the district.
Board Meeting Remarks November 13, 2013
Today I come before the
board to address my concern about the loss of excellence at EHS and tie it in
with conflicting budget data. I was told
by EHS teachers at the recent parent-teacher conferences that prerequisites at
the high school have been relaxed and outright removed for certain classes at
the high school “because we don’t have anywhere else to put students. We’ve cut
staff and increased class size to the point that they either go where they
aren’t prepared or into a study hall.” How are teachers supposed to teach a
class while bringing a student lacking prerequisite content up to speed? I’m a
strong proponent of differentiated instruction in the classroom, but only when
students have had prior instruction or experience that will maximize their
chance for success. The removal of prerequisites sets both students and
teachers up for failure and certainly does not prepare kids for college and
career. It simply creates frustration on both sides and further disenfranchises
those students who already believe they cannot succeed in school. I do not
believe that setting children and teachers up for failure aligns with the
district vision of excellence.
Two simultaneous events
are taking place to make this even more burdensome for teachers. Tonight you
vote on the Senior graduation project requirement for students beginning with
the class of 2015. The 37 High School teachers identified as such on the school
web site will then have to advise those 139 students as Mr. Everson noted each
student would have a teacher advisor. This adds advisory responsibilities for
four student projects to most instructors, if equally distributed. Furthermore,
at this juncture, when evaluation processes are being created that hold teachers
accountable for a student’s success or failure, it promises to become a serious
issue in terms of human resources.
I understand that the
combination of dire economic indicators and the Walker administration has
placed unprecedented pressure on public school funding since 2007. I would like
to demonstrate to the board that the ECSD has perhaps not suffered quite as
much financially as its miserly approach would lead one to believe. I reviewed
the data comparing planned spending vs. actual spending for the district since
2007. These data are available in each annual meeting packet and the “budget
101” retreats with the board every January.
Before I go any further, I
want to emphasize that what I’m highlighting here is not meant to be criticism
but a critical observation from an eagle’s eye view. After review of the data, I
have to question the continued decimation of the district staff. I’ve provided
copies for all the board members of recent planned deficit/surplus vs. actual deficit/surplus
results for the years 2007-2013 with projections for 2014 included on the
spreadsheet but not on the graph. I
would like to point out that the district tax levy approved by the board every
year is based on the planned spending, not the actual spending. The data show
that, on average, the district has under-spent the budget by nearly $200,000 each
year for the last six years. This amount goes directly into the fund balance.
The cumulative sum that has been added to that fund balance in the intervening
years exceeds a million dollars. That is
over a million dollars of levied tax dollars that have not supported the
education of our children, but rather gone directly into the district’s “rainy
day fund.” Examination of the
accompanying graph suggests that the trend for this fund balance deposit is on
the increase. I recognize the existence
of a policy goal for fund balance of 15% by 2020. If the average under-spending
of the budget continues this year, the fund balance will be 15.6% on June 30,
2014, meeting its goal a full six years early.
In the same time frame the district has been growing its bank account, it
has lost the equivalent of 12 teachers, many of whom retired and took with them
amazing skills. It’s very hard for me to reconcile this state of affairs. The
teachers at the high school pulling double duty are likely of the same mind and
I’m pretty certain that the teachers who were laid off in that time frame have
an even more difficult time embracing these facts.
My question for the board
is: Why has the district posted a surplus for five of the last 6 years,
especially since those six years encompass the worst economic downturn since
the great depression? I am in complete agreement with Ms. Treuden when she says
“when actual spending is within 2% of planned spending, that is a good result.”
My concern is that the word “within” should designate an equivalent statistical
variance around zero. Three years should
have posted deficits and three surpluses. Instead, the district has seen five
of six years post, in some cases, significant surpluses. Despite my tenure on
the board, it is unclear to me as to who is responsible for making sure each
cost center spends their budget. My plea to them is: Spend your budgets. I’d
rather my tax dollars go toward supporting the district vision of excellence
than toward increasing the fund balance. It is unconscionable to me that
classroom budgets were underspent by $20,000 last year while kids are being issued
broken and mildewed textbooks, some even missing pages, because there is no money
in the budget to replace the damaged merchandise. I contend that money does exist, just in the
wrong area.
I have an inkling that the
many changes that have been introduced into the budget process since 2007 has
rendered obsolete the base budget on which all subsequent budgets have been
built. Instead of continuing to build the next budget on an erroneous baseline
budget, it seems to be time to smash the old budget paradigm and build a new
budget process from square one, one that more accurately represents actual
spending in the district. Ms. Treuden is an outstanding business manager and
would do a great job given accurate input for her model. Return staff to
sustainable levels that give kids opportunities to follow their dreams, buy
textbooks that support increasing curriculum rigor to the Common Core,
implement state of the art safety measures, upgrade technology to support Twenty-First century learning
models, implement programs to meet the educational model of all students and
create a strategic plan to prioritize these items. Support your Vision. The time is now and the money could be there.
Thank you for your time.
