Looking Beyond the End of Our Collective Budgeting Noses

We all know how difficult, even in historical terms, the American economy is for anyone without assured income with assured yearly increases, or without inflation-indexed pensions, or without any concern about what happens to the stock market and bond market effects upon pension assets.

For most Americans those kinds of assurances and protections can only be dreamed about. But, when those Americans without those assurances and protections also end up as the ones subsidizing other Americans who benefit from them, well that is a structure which needs to be changed.

Each year New York school budgets present one bit of reality which some cannot seem to understand. Those who continually seek to have radical cuts, “next year,” are not being realistic, since the cost structure for any school district includes personnel cost elements (roughly 70 to 75% of a typical budget) which are generally set years in advance, because of collective bargaining agreements.

There are other major cost elements, such as transportation and heating and electricity expenses, which are priced outside the control of a school district. But, these also have much less of an effect upon the cost of running any school district.

Therefore, when we perpetually look at “next year’s school budget,” we are myopically focusing upon cost elements largely out of the control of any school district, unless, that is, they choose to slash head count among teachers, administrators, and service personnel.

All school districts, including Elwood, need to take a long-range or strategic approach to budgeting. That means current analysis and advance planning has to be done by boards of education, and any financial advisory committees within districts, so that the costs of labor agreements, and benefit packages, can be better planned and more soundly negotiated.

But we also have a systemic problem related to the abysmal ignorance displayed by some sectors of the education bureaucracy, when it comes to imagining that all we need to do is to spend more money, and to find a way for either the local taxpayers, or the state taxpayers, or the federal taxpayers, to fund that.

Efficiency is never given much weight.

Accountability is, if anything, a curse to be avoided.

The extraordinary qualities of some teachers, and the relative failure of some others, is never to be recognized, much less differentiated in compensation.

In other words, enforced mediocrity and stifled innovation are the hallowed traits by which too many teachers unions and complicit district administrations and some boards constrain our educational system.

This is the time to not only think outside-the-box, but to put that thought process into action.

You may recall the disturbing Long Island statistic that was quoted in Newsday nearly two months ago:

"From 1998 to 2006, the Consumer Price Index went up 27 percent, and the real property tax levy for schools went up 72 percent."

In other words, friends, while the national economic crisis may have only emerged over the past year or so, the property tax crisis for Long Island homeowners has been emerging for over a decade.

Now is the time to not only address the short to medium term national and state fiscal crisis, but to also begin to address the long term affordability crisis for school districts and property taxpayers on Long Island.

Strategic planning for the major cost factors in school district budgets is the necessary first step in that process.

Jerry Hannon