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Friday, December 25, 2009

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

2 comments:

  1. Thanks Bob Astrove for this great analysis of what has happened in the last decade, where if you have been paying attention you see that our once-famous 'world-class' education system has been transformed into this dysfunctional mess. Once again however, I would say, Weast has not 'pushed and bullied the board and the County Council.' I think you got it right when you said at the outset they followed him like lemmings over the cliff. Even today when you talk to members of the County Council they constantly will tell you they have no authority over the MCPS budget. Not true. Absolutely not true. What they don't have is authority over the curriculum and education. The rest is fair game and it should be Ms. Floreen's first task as new Council President to clean house at MCPS. The citizens have had enough. Thanks again for this analysis, it is a great help.
    Paula B.

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  2. Give me a break. As usual, a non-teacher wants to balance the budget on the backs of those that matter the most to our children. My daughter has taught for ten years. During that time she (and other teachers) continue to work long hours, has lost 10% in pay raises, while continuing to work on a (required) advance degree mostly at her own expense. Talks of less money, less benefits and more work - will that satisfy you?

    Perhaps if we kick out the illegal aliens (50,000 estimated in MC) and close down the work trailers and other "entitlements" for these non-tax payers while we educate their kids for free, the budget would balance.

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