Budget Cutters Remorse
Thursday, February 18, 2010 at 07:21AM
Not long ago the Merrimack School board made an unprecedented move. In the shrinking shadow of declining enrollment, they decided to cut staff. That’s right teachers. But in the intervening weeks since the plan was submitted there has been a change of heart. Call it “Budget Cutter’s Remorse.” Or more likely, the union and the towns’ grow government first lobby applied enough local pressure to convince the weak links on the school board to put the teachers back in the budget.
It doesn’t end there. The school budget committee I am told was rife with hi-jinks designed to work the money back into the budget and get the teachers back on the payroll for next year. But by a vote of 7-6 that effort failed. I’m still looking for more specifics, but it demonstrates a full court press to avoid any reductions in dues payers.
The Merrimack school budget is already bursting compared to similar towns. The per pupil cost against the total budget was up over 14k the last time I looked. Comparable towns spend thousands less per student with similar results. So with an expected decline in student population, news of a staff cut was sweet music to my ears. But that’s changed.
The union and administration will be at the March Second School Board deliberative session with a mission to get those cuts erased, and keep the staff where it was, despite declining numbers of students. Proof that it’s not about enrollment numbers, or class size, or the quality of education, it’s about protecting union jobs taxpayers have to pay for, and leaning on the public’s representatives to protect those jobs even in a declining economy.
It is imperative that the residents of Merrimack get to the March 2nd meeting and make their voices heard.
Budgets, Merrimack, School Board in Budgets, Education, NH, Spending, Taxes, Thugocracy, Unions
Reader Comments (7)
A golden opportunity for "Informed NO Voters" to weigh in.
If the schools can not down-size then everyone else must. Its the new law of the budget busting jungle.
Btw--the big money people like to say its not that high. But I have a simple formula. Total cost to have a public school system divided by total enrollment. That's over 14K per student.
One other point. In 2009 it cost just over 14K for a year at UNH.
UNH v. Merrimack Public school....hmmmm?
Why there is no revolt yet is beyond me.
As for UNH, there are a little over 14,000 students and the operating budget is almost $500 million. By my reckoning, that's about $34,000 per student. Roughly $8600 of this is room and board, leaving a little over $25,000 as tuition costs- a little more than the cost of high school education. Hope this clears up your confusion.
This process you compain about where people ask their representatives to vote in a certain way- that's representative democracy in action, no? In any case, best of luck in keeping school costs down- with the current economy every little bit helps. My town's situation is not as dire, but that's because our budget committee has held the line for years and actively worked to keep taxpayers involved. This year the teacher's proposed no raise, because oif the economy.
Calculating the real cost is not complex at all. But it requires some simple assumptions. First, you have a total school budget . Then you have the number of students who are serviced by it. Simple division.
64,978,804 / 4324 = 15,027.48 This s the estimated 2010 per student cost for Merrimack Taxpayers.
Now I have been told my method is not proper or accurate in the past, to which I respond, then please explain to me what part of my total public school budget is not relevant to the cost of educating the students enrolled in it?
I am still waiting for a response that does not include stammering and obfuscation.
As to your UNH figures, isn't in-State tuition by itself just over 10K/year. Add books and call it 12K. Room and board is not part of the public school equation so it need not apply. So again, we see a hugh difference. And for local comparisons by enrollment and town size, look at Rochester or Hudson. They spend a lot less.
And of course voting is democratic, but you probably know as well as I that deliberative sessions give all the authority to those who can show up and do. That excludes shut ins, old folks, the handicapped, people who work second or third shift, people who don't realize they are paying 15K/student. Hardly democratic. If the few leave us with two bad options when we all get to into the voting booth, what do we call that?
First you can't do apples to apples against other school districts unless you want to do lot of figuring on your own as the data isn't calculated that way.
Second, the stuff that goes into the reported budget is not necessarily related to operating the school. In my town, we spent a stupid amount of money to turn the school into an emergency shelter- that's part of the operating budget. Also, towns that have the luxury of building a new physical plant get that subsidized by the state. Towns that cannot do this will suffer with out-moded furnaces, under-insulated building, energy inefficient systems, and these costs are not subsidized.
Your assumption that in-state UNH students pay the full freight of a college education is not accurate. Every state subsidizes in-state students, NH less than most. A better way to see the cost is check what an out-of-state student (who generally isn't subsidized) has to pay. At UNH, the tuition vost for non-residents is $25,300. If you use your method and divide UNH's operating budget by the number of students and subtract room and board you get almost exactly the number, which I think confirms thw cost per student. . In-state kids pay a little under $12000, and books will be another $800-1200 per kid. (Or more, text books are a racket).
To answer your last question, what I call our system is the least bad way of making political decisions. Pretty much everyone who really cares about attending does so. When I hear my fellow townspeople grouse that "the result would be different if more seniors turned out to vote" I respond that if they were really upset by the situation, they would turn out and vote. For example, I fought against what I considered an unreasonable teachers contract a few years back, explained what the contract said, got about triple the number of people to the meeting, and defeated the contract. Since then, the teachers and school boatrd have been much more reasonable.
As for your points on the school budget numbers, of course there are things in there that make it harder to do the apples to apples, but there are always things in there. There is no juncture (it seems) at which the budget declines measurably regardless of 'other expenses' so to the taxpayer the line trends forever upwards regardless of who, what, or how many we are teaching. And I think we both agree that balanced against the ability of the taxpayer to finance it, something has to give. For that something to give, people need to look at the numbers as simply as they can. Year on year, cost/student, where are we headed, and what has the history of such fiscal management based its need.
I'm not sure who said it first, but it takes a school to bankrupt a village. Declining enrollment relates to real costs, and the town was making strides to offset that change. But someone's been putting the screws to them to jack the spending back up, and the union will have a herd at the meeting to protect the dues payers.