Where has all the money gone?

Where has all the money gone?

As I begin to look at Jerry Weast’s proposed FY2011 Operating Budget, I must ask where has all the money gone. For 11 budget cycles Jerry has preached to the Montgomery County community about our need to invest in our children’s education, and lectured our elected leaders that to do anything other then give ½ our budget to the schools was immoral.

And like the lemmings, our Montogmery County community has marched in step with Jerry for a decade. But today I asked myself, again, where has all the money gone?

For starters: I see that next year's budget proposal allocates just 54 cents of each dollar to Instruction. The other 46 cents are for Overhead. Not necessarily meaningful, until we roll back the clock. As recently as 2002, 60 cents out of every dollar went to instruction. In terms of what Jerry proposed for next year this represents an extra $132 Million dollars of overhead that could have actually been invested in Instruction. Think of it: without another nickel of tax revenue or government aid, we could have been looking at an extra $132 million dollars to the classroom.

Reflected in another way, Non-Instructional Costs Per Pupil have risen by 102%, or doubled, since Jerry arrived in FY2000. Yet our investment in Instructional Costs Per Pupil has only increased by 70%. For comparative purposes, the Consumer Price Index only rose a cumulative 26% between 2000 and today, or around 2.7% per year. In other words, the community has dug deep into its pockets. But when overhead grows faster then the base there is good reason to question what it was spent on.

We can’t have what our Board of Education likes to call a “Courageous Conversation” about the MCPS budget without talking about Wages & Benefits. But that never happens. They won’t allow it to happen. Why are Labor negotiations not open to the public, or at least the media? And why are the Labor negotiations never completed until after the School Board's Public Hearings on the Budget? Who is protecting the public’s interest and where is our belief in open government?

The result has been that in Jerry’s decade he pushed and bullied the Board and County Council into approving wage scales for teachers that have grown at a compound rate of 7.4% per year for a decade. That is 2 ¾ times the rate of inflation. And when it looked like our political leaders might not go along, he deployed his $10M media empire and his fleet of buses to pack the hearing room.

On the Employee Benefit front, the situation is even more unsustainable for the taxpayers. Back in 2000 we had a budget allocation of 16 cents of every dollar funding employee benefits. Further, that rate had been stable dating back to at least 1994. But under Jerry and his “helium hand” Boards of Education, this allocation has risen steadily. So much so that next year's budget proposal commits over 23 cents of every school system dollar to just pay for employee and retiree benefits. That is a shift of $154 Million that could have, but does not, go to Instruction.

This data strongly suggests that despite the millions spent on spin and rhetoric, during Jerry’s decade, the real investment has favored protecting the bloated bureaucracy, oversized wage increases, and maintaining an extremely generous, but outdated system of employee benefits. As much as my comments may tick some off, the data suggests that these priorities have come first in line, and well before instructional services for children.

Bob Astrove
MCPS Operating Budget by Category