The Cost of Defining "Adequate" In Merrimack NH

A funny thing happened on the way to the 'off-hand comment' on the Merrimack TEA facebook page.  I was accused of not using "real and accurate data" and that my "rhetoric was not doing anyone any good."

Nothing surprising there I suppose but to stay on point--what was it I said that earned me such a response?

I announced that if you took the total Merrimack School budget and divided it by the total student enrollment that it cost more than  sending your kid to UNH.  This appears to have riled some people up.  In fact someone sent me a nice itemized list of the "costs" of sending your kid to UNH for a year just to prove I was wrong, and to justify how Merrimack's cost per child wasn't as much.

So here we have the "costs" to go to UNH.  Keep in mind that this is (I suppose) meant to be relevant to the comparison I made.

Tuition: 10,730

Mandatory Fees: 2,942

Room and Board: up to 6,198

Meal Plan: up to 4,324

Then add thousands of dollars for books a supplies -

you are over $25k a year.

 

These prices are HIGHER if you are not a NH resident

Fascinating.  And yes, I suppose it could cost this much for one year at UNH, but is that relevant to the point I was trying to make?

The Merrimack school budget for 2011-2012 (if passed) is $65,340,419.00.  The town projects that 4227 students will be 'educated' that year, down from 4354 this year and 4665 the year before that. This works out to $15,457.87/per student for one year of k-12 education in the Town of Merrimack.

How does that compare?

Well, my detractor includes room and board, the meal plan, and books to arrive at a sum of over $25,000.00 per year and hey! non residents pay even more. (even when they vote as residents, by the way).

My response?  How much more would it cost to send a kid to school in Merrimack if the School board included, a dormitory, room and board, and an additional meal plan.  If the law of averages applies, more than 25,000.00 per year.  But let's just go the other way with this.

First, we don't have out of state or probably even out of town residents attending class in Merrimack.  If we do, I'd suggest we charge them $10,000 more per year for that 'quality' education and we can then use that to offset town residents school taxes.  Maybe we could have a contest.  Everyone in town can recruit from outside the district and whomever gets to ten kids first wins a new Mercedes.

Room and Board?  Seriously?  Room and Board? I've only lived in town for twenty years but if there is a public school dormitory somewhere I'll have my kids dropped off in an hour.  I have some excellent ideas for re-purposing their bedrooms during the school year.  I'm also rather keen on all the money I'll save on room and board, meal plans, and electricity at home, since I appear to paying for it in my tax rate already.

The Meal plan.  I have one of those.  It's called a bag lunch and change from my pocket for milk.  If they want a hot lunch, I need special paper with dead presidents on it or a check to charge up the lunch card.  So again, I appear to be paying twice for something that is already "built in" to the cost of a public school education.  And correct me if I am wrong but even the kids who get a free or reduced lunch could not possibly cost that much and that may well be offset in part or whole by some state or federal funds.

Books and supplies?  Every year the list of supplies I must provide gets longer. And the stories of teachers buying their own supplies are legendary.  So should we count those as additional expenses or back those costs out?  And the text books?  If you mean to compare the ones in public school to those used at the college level--even a crappy college-- there's no comparison.  Public school texts are like big picture books on 50 pound paper, double spaced and light on depth for easy delivery and consumption.  We could save a few million by going back to books where the real estate on the page was more words than pictures and written in type below thirty points.

So what are we left with?  Tuition and fees which amounts to $13,672.00 the exact figure posted on the UNH web site, and the one I used to make my claim that it costs more per student to send a kid to Merrimack Public school  than it does to UNH.

To be fair, I was not specific.  And there are other costs like transportation that we have not addressed.  But this comes down to the people of Merrimack accepting that their K-12 per student costs on a truly comparative basis are not much unlike having them live and eat at home while attending UNH.  Is that a good deal or should we be trying to do better?

There is clearly a seismic rift between the institutional-acceptance mentality of a level funded contract, or what might be considered a good deal on the cost of a public education, or the need for an expensive and expansive (excessive) curriculum and reality.  We are not in reality here.  At $15,000.00 per student plenty of people would opt to keep one parent at home and educate their own kid, or even all of their kids.  Yet the amount most frequently used when talking about a voucher or a credit to parents who consider home schooling or a private school is only $3500.00 to $5000.00 per year?  Where did the other 10-grand per kid just go?  Administrative costs?  There's a conversation worth having.

Public education has far exceeded its mandate and in doing so its costs.  We need to get back to basics, focus on real education, and the goal of teaching kids how to think, not what to think.  Because at 15Kper kid per year, UNH comparison or not, someone is getting screwed.

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Two Congressman And A Free Throw

The US House just finished it's work on HR1, cleaning up after democrats who in 2010 abrogated yet another  obligation when they found themselves incapable of writing the budget they really wanted right before an election.

The liberal-progressives wanted more spending but that was not politically advantageous.  And since the single driving-force behind all Democrat decisions is politics the budget got relegated to the back of the bus, where the electorate's short attention spans were meant to forget that democrats were never fiscally conscious representatives--they just tried to play them on the campaign trail. 

But avoiding the high profile budget battle was more evidence that they had something to hide. The Democrat House majority was appropriately sedated and placed under observation, while the Senate saw minor adjustments but no change in leadership.  So the process of changing our spending ways would still have to go through a Democrat controlled Senate and across the desk of a President who thinks the words "spending cuts" are just a rhetorical flourish used to provide cover for more spending.

Obama's budget is proof enough of that.

But Obama only proposes a budget.  The House is in charge of spending.  So the new Republican congress went to the back seat of the Hopey-changey bus and picked up the budget obligations abandoned by the 111th congress.  This wwas a free shot at changing the fiscal direction of the country before writing their own first official budget, which was not due until later in 2011.  It was a gimme, a free throw, but one that had to survive the democrat Senate and the Spender in Chief.

So how did it turn out?

The House Republicans took their free throw and settled on $61,000,000,000.00 (billion) dollars in cuts which included votes on 21 amendments to reduce or eliminate some non-security spending. Not bad for a budget that should have been written by a democrat majority House, and a respectable down-payment on the 100 billion promised for their first official budget--though plenty of folks will still be unhappy about it.

To add to that unhappiness,(or not) we have the results of the 21 proposed amendments to cut non-security funding.  Heritage.org (thank you very much) filtered those votes and created both a table you can filter and a pdf.   The table show us how each member voted on the 21 cuts as a percentage of the total number of votes and the pdf lists how they voted on each of the individual amendments.

Looking at New Hampshire we can see that congressman Charlie Bass supported 33% of the proposed budget cutting amendments while congressman Guinta supported 76% of them.  That's a rather wide margin, a tale of two congressman perhaps, worthy of your individual attention should it interest you.

Also worth noting; according to Heritage 95 House Democrats voted against every single non-security cut, while another 45 opposed all of the cuts but one.  That certainly puts a fresh coat of "something" on the face of the Democrat party when it comes to their "belt tightening rhetoric."  (That something is brown, by the way, and it smells "offal.")

So feel free to follow the links, print the report and sift the data at your leisure.  I have provided below the list of 21 amendments referenced courtesy of Heritage.

The spending cuts include the following 21 amendments:

1)    Eliminate $34 million for the National Drug Intelligence Center (Flake);
2)    Cut $10 million from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (Latta);
3)    Eliminate the Legal Services Corporation, saving $324.4 million (Duncan-SC);
4)    Cut $50 million for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Biggert);
5)    Cut $70 million in energy efficiency programs at the Energy Department (Latta);
6)    Eliminate $35 million in funding for land acquisition at various agencies (Lummis);
7)    Cut $64 million from EPA science and technology programs (Flake);
8)    Cut $8 million from EPA environmental programs and management (Pompeo);
9)    Cut $10 million from EPA state and tribal assistance grants (Reed);
10) Cut $7.4 million for forestry programs at the U.S. Forest Service (Pompeo);
11) Cut $20.6 million from the National Endowment for the Arts (Walberg);
12) Eliminate $4.5 million in funding for the National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs Program (Canseco);
13) Eliminate $15 million in funding for the Presidio Trust Fund (Reed);
14) Cut $100 million from Community Development Block Grants (Flake);
15) Eliminate $233.4 million in funding for the National Labor Relations Board (Price-GA);
16) Eliminate $42.7 million in funding for the U.S. Institute of Peace (Weiner);
17) Eliminate $10.7 million in funding for the East-West Center (Canseco);
18) Cut $211.2 million in funding from multilateral assistance through international financial institutions (Heller);
19) Cut $446.9 million in Amtrak funding (Sessions);
20) Cut all funding by 5.5% and legislative branch spending by 11%, with certain exemptions, saving $22
billion (Blackburn);
21) Cut all funding down to fiscal year 2006 levels, with certain exemptions, saving $34 billion (Mulvaney).

H/T Heritage.org, Hot Air

Cross Posted

Don't Say There Is No Place To Cut.

Privatize the public school system and shift the educators, staff, maintenance, and transportation and facility costs off the books, along with converting public benefits and pensions into the same kind of programs the rest of the private markets have, and you would see property tax rates plummet.

Towns would be unshackled from the responsibility of dealing with it.

And what better reason than this?  The Town of Merrimack's School operating budget is over 64 million, which works out to over $15,000.00 dollars per student per year.

You can send kids to college for that.

Are we suggesting that the Merrimack School district is delivering university level education to it's K-12 enrollment?

I think we need to ask ourselves what $15,000.00 per student is buying the town and if we can continue to insist that it is in the public interest to invest that much money given the results.

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A Modest (Budget Cutting) Proposal

There are plenty of towns like mine trying to figure out where they can cut costs.  But every conversation seems to end at cutting education or safety services.  While I find it hard to believe that there is nothing else in a budget you can trim, I think I have come up with a reasonable compromise (if not just for the sake of our own rhetorical amusement) that can cut at least a little bit of money from the budget without affecting staffing or resources.

Any teacher, support staff, officer, firefighter or public employee who currently pays union dues will have the total amount of dues paid calculated and that amount removed from their respective department budgets (aka:paychecks).  This will do the one thing no one ever seems willing to do; include the unions in the burden of cost cutting.

The Unions are always in a "partnership" with the town and the residents when it comes to increasing labor and administrative costs but seem to avoid bearing any of that burden when the economy reduces the values of residents homes, eliminates taxpayer jobs, or cuts their wages.  These things make it harder for them to meet current or rising town budgets bloated by unions and things like Evergreen laws, which give Labor groups no incentive to bargain at all.

In fact, the only way to get at the union at all is to fire people.  But we don't want to fire people, that would hurt services or put the children's future at risk.  Isn't that right?  So instead we should just cut everyone's pay, knowing that the hard working, dedicated and caring public Union employees can and will take one for the team because this is not about the capitalsit pursuit of wealth before all things, it is about the quality services they provide to the community.

It's about the children.

And consider the value.  Public employees pay taxes (with our taxes) so they too share in the burden but with this altruistic leap that value goes further. When someone on the public payroll takes a pay cut it reduces that employees tax burden while reducing their taxes, the town budget, and frees up much needed capital that goes back into the community or can be allocated for other important projects or purchases.  It's a win-win for everyone.

And rather than force the taxpayers and their elected officials to bargain with the bargaining group about budgets and wages and benefits, oh my! let the employees bargain with their unions over the burden of paying union dues to the unions, who are really just a big, greedy, selfish business getting rich on the backs of their members.

Yes, their are legislative hurdles but let me dream.  Because it is time to engage the relationship where taxpayers fund unions through their town employees only to have the union mug them in a dark alley to get even more money.  So pay-cut time.  If they don't like it they can quit.  In this economy, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people across the country to replace them. Qualified people who will do their job for less than we are paying now.  They'd be happy just to have a job. 

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Brunelle's Road To Damascus Moment?

After four years of defending the democrat budgeting strategy of spend first tax later (during what any democrat worth his donkeys-ass referred to endlessly as the 'worst recession in history'), NHDP executive director and NH House rep from Manchester Mike Brunelle shows us his new conservative streak.

“No matter who you are, Republican or Democrat, you were elected to work on the economy and jobs. I don’t think the people of Manchester want them to be dealing with these social issues,” said Brunelle. “We need to be focused on the working families in this state. ... Anything other than that is beyond frivolous.”

It is all part of their new strategy, as I pointed out here yesterday...

These are the same people who in 2006 and 2008 were the social/political nihilists bent on remaking the landscape in their own image, but who upon relegation to a dark and meaningless corner of the political attic in 2010, have suddenly embraced...conservatism?  We are to believe they are now keepers of the status quo, defenders of a new 'ancient' tradition whose ink is not even dry.  And they are running from "change" as if the sound of the word burns their ears with a fire in desperate need of a pool of water to put it out.

From bathroom bill, ballooning budgets and balloon fines all the way to economy and jobs in one little election, and we are meant to wonder if Mr Brunelle has had a road to Damascus moment?  Not to worry.  He is no Paul of Tarsus.  He has the same laser like focus on "jobs and the economy" as the democrat majority before the Republican's took over--destroy jobs and ruin the state economy.

Take 2011-H-0239-R for example.  Mr. Brunelle would like to raise the minimum wage.  But this is a hollow populist act with a real world consequence.  It reduces opportunities for unskilled or under-skilled workers seeking or trying to retain entry level positions.  It adds to the cost of goods and services.  And it increases joblessness, which is a cost borne by taxpayers through unemployment benefits and the loss of economic activity.

What does work is creating an environment where there are more jobs than people to fill them.  By attracting business you create the need for labor whose value increases as employers barter using increased wages to fill positions.  The result is a value for labor set by growth and need instead of an arbitrary mandate by some fool up in Concord.

And pay attention, because this is not just some bad idea proposed by another off-the-rack progressive.  It is also a calculated political ploy.  A poison pill.  Anyone who votes against an increase in the minimum wage on the floor of the House should expect that vote to show up on democrat mailers attacking them in 2012.

My suggestion is that if you can't just table it, a subcommittee should spend some legitimate time studying the larger economic impact of meddling with the market driven cost of labor in our state.  Determine if the risk of job losses and fewer opportunities, or scaring off new business could ever be compensated for by any slight uptick in the minimum wage?  Then advertise that risk.

So Brunelle's road to Damascus is paved with vapid populism and a political roadside bomb for good measure.  No conversions to sound economic principles is imminent, or even likley.  Just more of the same.

Quote Source: Beth LaMontagne Hall/ Union Leader 

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