School Funding Crisis Pits Local Taxpayers Against Neighbors

Last week I attended the second public meeting on the budget for my small, rural school district. The previous public meeting had produced a budget to send to referendum by the slim margin of four votes, and it failed to pass at the polls by three votes. So, we were back for round two.

My school board had labored mightily to juggle the effects of sharp reductions in the state subsidy for K-12 education, but not so mightily that they were willing to take a hard look at what they spend on sports -- about $800,000 out of $10 million by my reckoning.

The budget they sent to voters had hefty increases for the one affluent town in our district that centers on a scenic pond, and moderate increases for the rest of us. My husband figured our property tax bill will rise by about $100 if the current budget makes it.

The revised budget being presented at the meeting had been reduced by a mere $25,000 due to health insurance costs a little below projections thanks to the collective bargaining power of the teachers union versus Anthem.

Photo credit: Town of Chebeaugue (an island in Maine with similar participatory democracy in place).

Our three town selectmen -- really, all women -- were at the public meeting to try and reduce the impact of the school budget on town finances. We sat with them in a row of folding chairs as two of them are old friends of ours. One of their husbands used to be our school board chair during the years when their kids were still in school. He’s the only chair who’s ever had the cojones to propose cutting the sports budget to make ends meet for education.

He was angrily shouted down as most people run for school board for one of two reasons: making sure their children’s sports team receive adequate attention, or trying to keep taxes down. The former group tends to endorse the budget while the latter group always feels it is too high. Two of the current board members actually voted no on their own budget, a protest vote meant to send a message to local taxpayers in their town: don’t blame me.

Getting the little people fighting one another for crumbs from the rich people’s table has been a brilliantly successful strategy in the austerity era of 21^st century USA.

And there’s no relief on the horizon. The demagogue with bad hair appointed a billionaire Amway heiress with a record of destroying public education in a couple of big states as secretary of edu, and his proposed budget slashes public funding while funneling much of what is left to vouchers and other privatization schemes. Education for profit is about as big an oxymoron as for profit health care and will be a similar large scale disaster. Of course public education in our day is often more about free public babysitting -- the one public service that capitalism consistently provides for workers -- than about actual education.

Blackwater is the mercenary firm founded by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos' brother Erik Prince.
The corporation made billions off the Pentagon before changing its name.

The budget that failed at the polls had already achieved savings by cutting a literacy coach position and an ed tech position. Loss of the latter means the end of a program known as study skills at our high school which has been a highly supervised study hall for at risk students, a terrible cut in a district with high poverty and special needs.

As for the former cut, few people really understand what an instructional coach does: oversee professional development that helps teachers and ed techs be more effective at supporting student learning. Research shows that tailored professional development for instructors has a big effect on student learning, but bussing the golf team four hours round trip is seen as a priority in my district. Educators in Finland, France, Germany or Japan would be amazed that running sports programs is part of what our schools consider their mission. Also, strong national support for public education means their teachers spend about half the day with the students and half the day on professional work like collaboration, preparing lessons and evaluating student work. In the U.S., teachers are expected to do that on their own time.

So my husband and I had the odd experience of watching our town’s selectmen trying to cut the education budget via amendments from the floor, and voting no on each and every line of the proposed budget. A few board members glared at them. Our two old friends were apologetic, almost tearful, afterwards. They are the ones who meet with property taxpayers in default and in despair at the prospect of losing their homes because they cannot keep up with local tax increases. (Besides schools, road maintenance is the only other major expense in our town budgets.)

There have been no jobs and continue to be no jobs in our area as one mill after another closes down. And the lack of public transportation means those too poor to keep a car on the road cannot get to other towns where there are jobs.

After voting to pass various parts of the budget by raising the yellow cards that are distributed to registered voters in attendance, we sent the budget to a public meeting secret ballot. Clerks for each town were on hand to gather our slips of blue paper marked yes or no into wooden ballot boxes, and we waited while they counted them. My town’s voters were mostly for sending the budget on to referendum, but there were exactly three votes against. Once your numbers get small enough, there really aren’t many secrets.

Maine’s legislature voted decades ago to fund public education at the 55% level; they have yet to reach even 50%.

A state referendum last fall passed Question 2 which imposed a surtax on the top 3% income bracket and dedicated the funds to shoring up public education. According to the state teacher’s union, more people voted yes on Question 2 than voted for any candidate for president. But the legislature has thus far refused to implement the will of the voters, and if they do the governor has promised to veto the bill.

Will grandma still be able to eat next year while staying in her home? Will reductions in Social Security and Medicare force her to default on her property taxes in order to afford heating the family homestead? These are the tragedies unfolding in my neck of the woods. Stay tuned.

#Austerity is a sham. Tell Congress Dec 5: Jobs Not War!

Reposting below from the Jobs Not War campaign just as news came that the U.S. Senate authorized over $600 billion in military spending for fiscal year 2013.

Austerity is a sham. Let's make a big noise about it.

Call Congress December 5th to say NO to cuts for Medicare, Medicaid and vital services

Call your Members of Congress on Dec. 5th and tell them…We voted for JOBS, not CUTS – WORK not WAR

1-866-426-2631 or 1-800-998-0180

On December 5th, thousands of Americans will pick up the phone to call their Members of Congress and tell them not to sell out working class families by cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and vital services, destroying millions of jobs and hurting children, seniors and people with disabilities.

Tell them that the best way to reduce the deficit is to create jobs, end tax breaks for the rich, demand that they publicly agree to protect Medicaid, Medicare and vital services, and move funds from the runaway Pentagon budget to meet peoples’ needs.

Call 866-426-2631 to get more background information on the threat to Medicare and Medicaid and 800-998-0180 about Social Security, and either to be connected to the offices of your Members of Congress.

Call 1-866-426-2631 or 1-800-998-0180 on Dec. 5th to say NO to cuts for Medicare, Medicaid and vital services. 

Then sign the JOBS-NOT-WARS PETITION at www.jobs-not-wars.org

Propping Up A Rotten System Is The Liberal Curse

Image: Occupy NH Primary

One of the the greatest dangers of the thinking error I call "false dichotomy" is the misperception that a loss for one "side" is a win for the other. The multi-billion dollar professional sports industry exists partly to distract us from the killing and enslavement necessary to support our lavish, unsustainable lifestyle, but mostly as a strategy to enforce the notion that dichotomy is fundamental to understanding the modern world.

Potential thinkers fall prey to the error early in life, and are then severely handicapped when it comes to thinking about nuances, or analyzing situations where black vs. white thinking does not apply.

Public education in this country -- at most locations anyway -- reinforces the notion, teaching over and over again how the colonies rebelled and threw off the chains of tyranny imposed by monarchy and colonialism. Our side won!!!

Never mind that the U.S. is essentially the heir of what was at the time the most rapacious of global imperial powers. We're a white supremacist, genocidal, upstart colony riding on the (now subsiding) wave of immense material wealth got by stealing the continent from indigenous tribes. Treaties and other forms of law were used to trick and dispossess our land's former inhabitants, epidemic disease was willfully induced, and brute force relocation was used against the survivors. You can see it as the final act in the old play of Rule Britannia, or the first act in the new play of U.S. global hegemony.

These thoughts are in my mind as Thanksgiving approaches and I am digesting the news about CIA director and ex-general Petraeus resigning over the sort of martial infidelity that shocks no one in this day and age. Compared with acting like a teenager in the oval office with an intern, Petraeus' dalliance seems positively dignified; at least his paramour was an adult with a real job.

It just seems amazingly coincidental that a CIA outpost in Benghazi, Libya was recently overrun and several of its staff killed -- including the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, who was there for reasons we have not and likely will not hear honestly explained. If you've studied history much you know that competition is fierce at the highest levels of rich, predatory empires of any sort. And right now who's in control of military aid flowing from Libya to militants in Syria, which lies along the path to defeating Iran for control of the Persian Gulf?

The dichotomy I'm interested in is the one between spending tax revenues for corporate welfare (buying expensive weapons systems that are the biggest polluters on earth, for instance, or letting hugely profitable entities like oil companies operate virtually tax free at our expense) or spending tax revenues actually taking care of people. As we've seen from the aftermath of hurricane Sandy, which has been like Katrina but with cold weather, government no longer even makes a pretense of responding to people's basic needs. Ditto wealthy organizations like the Red Cross with their own powerful elites.

As the so-called "fiscal cliff" approaches and progressives make ready to cave on reducing the entitlements that are the last safety net for so many in the U.S., I want to go down fighting for economic justice. I respect the Occupy Sandy folks who are exhausting themselves delivering the disaster relief not forthcoming from government by billionaires, but I also know that getting drawn into propping up a rotten system can be a sinkhole for energy and morale.

It's like I heard an activist say in a video organizing students to promote Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions on Israel: Palestinians are not a downtrodden people in need of charity. They are a dispossessed people, in need of justice.

Charity is so much more polite and less challenging, generally. Timid types can participate without fear of being disruptive to the genteel veneer hiding violent repression. Fundraisers where everyone has a nice meal are so much more enjoyable than getting arrested and brutalized by police for exercising the right to speech and assembly, for example.

Coming together for mutual aid can be a powerful movement builder.

But a movement is only worth building if its ultimate aim is to remove the underpinnings of a venal and corrupt system.

Here are anti-austerity protesters in Spain early this autumn. Let's make our own government fear this kind of public rejection of government by and for the wealthy, and austerity for the rest of us.