In a front page article in Friday’s Eagle Tribune the headline reads “Governor Patrick Promises Full School Funding.” In reading the article you soon discover that is wishful thinking.
What the Governor has said is that Chapter 70 Funding will be left uncut, this round, at the $4 billion dollar mark. Sounds great right? He hasn’t promised anything and the house and senate could still make cuts. Too bad they couldn’t tap into some of that un-budgeted cash the State spends every year. Thank you Kamal Jain for giving me new directions to look in to follow the money trails.
If only Chapter 70 funding were the only funding stream for education. The cuts to Circuit Breaker funding are anticipated to be deep and painful and will leave many School Systems struggling even with level funding of Chapter 70 monies.
Level funding is a joke anyway because level funding does not mean you will have level services from year to year. If you fund the teachers at say $10 million in 2009 – their contractual raises and the ever increasing costs in health care and pensions will guarantee that same $10 million in 2010 will not buy as many teachers. So the Governor gets to look good by saying he’s level funding a system when in fact that system still needs to make cuts because those same dollars don’t buy as much. If I just level funded my grocery budget from week to week since 2005 for example – well we would only be able to feed our family for a fraction of the days each week here in 2010.
The paper sums up some of my issues with level funding in this article about the impact of the Governor’s “Promises” and there’s a notation about how the cuts in circuit breaker funding have hurt North Andover. If these cuts are hurting an affluent town like North Andover – imagine how they are decimating an urban district like Haverhill.
Then there is the Stimulus Money that really wasn’t. For Haverhill, once you factored in the cuts made to education funding from all sources, the net stimulus gain for the town was about 10% of the dollars the State meted out. This stimulus funding is a short term burst of cash meant to boost local economies and instead the state used the money to replace funding streams – hardly a stimulus! The stimulus money also came with strings attached as to how it needed to be spent. If those strings kept the towns from spending the money to cover needs created when the cuts happened… no one at the state level cared. They could report that dollars went to your district and that’s where their concern ended.
So thank you Mr Patrick for telling us we’re still not going to get the funding needed to run our towns and schools but hide those facts behind terms like “Level Funding” and “Full Funding” and “Stimulus Money” when in reality its politics as usual. I can only hope Massachusetts’ voting proclivities include ousting our current Governor in November!
