Editorial: $1 million should be real money, even to APS

For more than a decade, through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, Albuquerque Public Schools has continued to put around $1 million a year into its retirees’ pockets to buy life insurance.

That’s $1 million a year that could have gone into teacher or educational assistant or support staff salaries. It’s $1 million that could have gone into classroom supplies. Or $1 million that could have been used to hire additional reading coaches.

And APS hasn’t been shelling out the money because it is required to do so by the contracts that governed those 1,800-or-so former employees.

But just because.

APS spokeswoman Monica Armenta says “we are not contractually bound to do this. In 2000 this group was grandfathered in by the Board of Education.”

It’s likely that we can all agree it would be nice if a former employer out of the goodness of his or her heart gave each of us $500 a year in perpetuity to buy life insurance after we’ve moved on. It’s a really nice thing to do. But the likelihood of that happening is pretty low in the real world. Yet that’s the world in which a previous board of education simply “gifted” a million bucks a year to retirees who already collect pensions and have a retiree health plan.

Circa 2013, APS is debating whether it can afford this kind of largesse, perhaps having come to the realization that even with a $600 million budget a million here and a million there adds up to real money.

To be clear, the estimated $13 million APS has spent on this program over the years didn’t go toward life insurance for current employees, or even health insurance for retirees. It is going toward life insurance for employees who left the district before 2005, who under contract could retire by their mid 50s.

As funding discussions continue and the district awaits the governor’s decision on mandating smaller class sizes — which could have a $6 million effect on APS — Superintendent Winston Brooks says “we’re out of Band-Aids, to be honest, and this is the last year, in our opinion, that we can do a Band-Aid. Beyond this, we really do have to look at a five-year strategic financial plan, because we do not think it’s going to get a lot better.”

That “out of Band-Aids” statement would resonate better if we hadn’t gotten to this point before this million-dollar-a-year payout was put on the table. How many more of these kinds of deals lurk in the APS budget?

The board has shown all signs of ending the practice when it approves the budget in the coming weeks. Parents who constantly hear school officials complain about the lack of resources should demand nothing less.

This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.