| SUBSCRIBE | | Why we charge |
|
|
|
Front Page
opinion guest_columns
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Schools Can't Take More Cuts
By Tom Sullivan
Executive Director, NMSSA/ NMCSA
For the last two years the New Mexico School Superintendents' Association and the New Mexico Coalition of School Administrators' primary legislative priority has been to advocate for and to explain the design of a new public school funding formula. We also have actively pursued sufficient resources to fund this initiative.
The long-term future of New Mexico's public schools and an overwhelming majority of school improvement initiatives — increased overall student proficiency and significantly higher graduation rates requiring instructional coaches, dropout intervention specialists, extended school day/year and credit recovery program, etc. — are still very much dependent on that long-term plan.
However, today there is an even more urgent and imminent funding crisis facing our schools that requires even more aggressive and immediate attention. Before we can continue to move forward we must preserve what is currently in place.
New Mexico's budget, like that of other states and the country at large, is reeling within a difficult economy. Our schools have already felt the pain! There have been reductions to the basic “unit value” for daily operational funding — which drives all instructional programming — coupled with extra payments by staff to their retirement fund and significant increases within their health insurance programs. Much more importantly, this year's budget reduced the state's commitment to public education by $165 million and supplanted that amount with non-recurring federal stimulus money, which was exclusively earmarked for education anyway. Now it is generally understood that an additional $91 million of federal funds (also earmarked for education, but also reducing the state's commitment to education by that amount) will be utilized in the same manner either immediately during an impending special legislative session or in building next year's state budget.
While that legislative decision was both easily understood and justifiable under the circumstances, it nonetheless created a $250-plus million school budget hole that will require prompt backfilling or result in devastating consequences to New Mexico students.
The $250 million represents approximately 12 percent of school districts' annual operating budgets!
Yet there has been no discussion to date of attempting to identify the necessary new revenue streams needed to address this funding cliff for our schools. All we have heard about thus far are warnings of additional midyear cuts to education — anywhere from three to 10 percent more depending on the source. So we could be talking about an aggregate 15 to 20 percent funding reduction during an 18-month period in an environment when a state-sponsored study of public school funding recently had concluded that the schools were currently being underfunded by about 15 percent on a statewide average!
Since the recent inception of minimum salary requirements for various staff categories, local district budgets typically have 85 to 90 percent of their totals dedicated to salaries and benefits, and another significant amount of budgets is driven by “fixed costs” — utilities, insurance, maintenance, etc. Thus, there is a negligible amount of discretionary money left for districts to even begin absorbing such draconian reductions. The only logical conclusion is that there will have to be major layoffs and reductions-in-force in virtually every district around the state to balance reduced budgets. In addition, all non-mandated programs will have be cut. These cuts likely would include alternative schools, credit recovery programs, night schools and all extra- and co-curricular programs ranging from athletics, band, chorus, FFA, student council, etc. The negative impact on students and student achievement is potentially devastating and one from which recovery will at best be slow and at worst impossible.
And with school districts typically among the largest employers in their communities — often the largest, in fact — such staffing reductions also can have a devastating impact on local economies, one that can only continue in a downward spiral if not addressed promptly. It is, therefore, incumbent upon each of us to work with our parents, staff and community leaders to influence their elected officials and tell them that education funding needs to be protected at all costs. We cannot abide any further reductions in funding education! Sufficient education funding is not a luxury; it is a New Mexico constitutional mandate, and our kids deserve it. It remains the responsibility of the Legislature to identify and implement the necessary funding sources to ensure that sufficiency.
You also can send comments via our comment form
E-mail Story
Print Friendly
