Afternoon read: Do you know where your children are?
When I drive past a lot where lots of school buses are parked, I always think, “oh, a bus nest!” In a way, that’s an apt way to look at the argument over education issues in New York state: It’s like a wasp nest, but with school buses. Complicated, loud, scary.
A bus nest in Coney Island, NY. Photo: manyhighways CC some rights reseved
Anyway, a couple stories in the news today that caught my eye.
We cover education a lot here at North Country Public Radio, and the big story over the last year or so (and much longer, really) has been that a lot of New York’s schools, including many in our area, are under tremendous strain. Gov. Cuomo suggested yesterday in a speech at Clarkson University in Potsdam that schools should look for ways to save money, “and if consolidation is an option that works for a school district, God bless.”
Some schools in our area are exploring consolidation; others are fighting for more funding, but approaching what’s called “educational insolvency.”
Meanwhile, Gov. Cuomo’s education commission has recommended more time in school for children, including extending the school day and school year and expanding all-day pre-kindergarten.
So all these pronouncements are great, but on the “where are your kids right now” front, I’ll direct your attention to two stories from this week. First, from WWNY-TV, Ogdensburg City School District has decided, in the face of what the station calls a “looming budget crisis,” to close its Sherman Elementary School a year earlier than planned. The district has a $2.5 million budget gap this year, WWNY reports, and although closing Sherman will only save it $150,000, that’s not an insubstantial amount of money.
The school’s 116 students will go to school next year at one of the three other elementary schools in the district. And in two years, another school in the district, Lincoln Elementary, will also close.
On the upside (and of interest to people with children below school age), Fort Drum will be keeping a child care center open that it seemed it might have to close (via Watertown Daily Times). A civilian hiring freeze by the Department of Defense was making it tough for the Memorial Child Development Center to keep staffed, but after some clever reassignment of employees from other programs, it’ll stay open, albeit with reduced capacity.
The center cares for kids between six weeks and five years of age.
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The bus nest reminds me that we do far far too much busing, which is another cost area.
I think the really interesting thing will be that a couple of these districts are not only saying that they are facing educational insolvency, basically that they can’t provide a good education that meets minimum standards, but they are also saying we literally will not be able to pay our bills next year, we will be fiscally insolvent. So what happens then?
Merging or consolidating is one of those ideas that sounds good until you consider how far apart the schools up here are. And it’s not just town center to town center.
Example – If a student lives at the end of Big Brook Road, it is 8 miles to the town center. If Indian Lake Central were to close and be consolidated with Long Lake Central, the one way trip would be about 30 miles.
It would have been nice if Cuomo had some idea on how to help, like cutting some of the state mandates. Instead he comes up with the truly brilliant remark, “Find ways to cut costs.” Well gee Andj, us bumpkins never thought of that!
And he’s the best of the best?
I think his silence is sending a message that we should listen to. I think he is saying; consolidate because you are not getting any more state aid and we are not changing the mandates. Pete is right however, consolidation is very hard and complex for a number of reasons.
I hope I am wrong, but he had his chance to at least bring it up and he comes up with cut costs?
For many of our districts, the only way left to cut costs is to cut teacher positions. That means more kids packed into classes and more kids sitting in study halls, regardless of whether there is consolidation or not. Once you factor in all of the state and federal mandates, districts in the North Country simply are not getting enough money to pay for enough teachers per student. Consolidation can’t change that simple mathematical fact.
Teleconferencing on some higher level electives might help. Cutting all sports and extra-curriculars might save a few teaching positions for a year or two in some districts. Some districts that merge or consolidate may get a state kickback that will float them for a few extra years but what then? And longer school days? More days per year in school? What good will that do when there’s nothing at school to do, no teachers to teach, no sports to play, no music to sing? I don’t think that I want to live in a community where school is worse than prison. What kind of children will we be producing? And what will our economy look like when the teachers, paraprofessionals and support staff are all on unemployment?
I’ll keep saying it – Come spend a week in my kids’ district, Mr Cuomo. Ride the bus, walk through the hallways, sit in the classrooms, eat the lunches, hang out in the office, review the budget with our board & Superintendent, spend an afternoon with the Union president. While you’re at it, try to notice how many kids come through the door with ragged clothes or looking tired and hungry. Bring a few experienced teachers (none of these so called “educational experts” you’ve got in Albany – bring your old 6th grade teacher and some of her friends.) with you and have them report to you how well our teachers do with what they’ve got to work with.
Once you’ve done that, then you can start telling my school board that they need to look for more ways to cut costs.
internet connections and laptops at home instead of busses?
Maybe if you live within 1 or 2 miles of the school you don’t bus. Just maybe you could walk or your parents could take you?
1 or 2 miles is a LONG way to walk at 30 below and many districts have kids who either don’t have a parent at home when it’s time to head to school or who don’t have an extra car to transport kids to school with. Many kids whose parents do have a transportation option would need early drop off or late pick up without busing which would require more or longer early morning or late afternoon programs which are certainly more expensive than some gas and a bus driver.
Busing isn’t the big budget issue, it is providing fair and reasonable compensation to the people who work in the schools. Northern NY does a pretty good job at keeping those costs low as compared to the rest of NYS. There’s a good report here:
http://www.cbcny.org/cbc-blogs/blogs/how-spending-pupil-new-york-state-varies-among-districts-interactive-map
Has anyone ever considered the option all our schools and local gov’ts have of banding together and just telling Albany and Washington “NO!”? None of our northern counties can afford the mandated requirements. Some can hardly afford to heat the buildings. We know what the problems are- mandated program costs, teacher salaries and insurance, bussing, etc. The landowners can not carry this load alone any longer. IMO it’s time the schools said “No” to the State and Feds. It’s time the Towns and Counties did the sme thing. Tell the Cuomo “No”. Tell the unions “No”. Teachers are going to have to start paying for their health insurance just like the rest of us. My wife is a teacher, she agrees even though it will hurt us a bit. The mandates have to cease. The gravy train days are over.
the downstate school districts drain the system. tooo many students, very big retirement pensions…
I heard eliminating the amount of individual districts, shrinking the administration redundancy for each individual district and combining what they could to a centralized administration district was a good start at controlling education costs without taking from the teachers, or the students, or, cirricular
Consolidation will cut costs in a major way, but it would have to be done intentionally.
The key is keeping and protecting classroom teachers and reducing the amount of support staff. You don’t need a counselor and a school psychologist, several janitors, a principle an assistant principle and a superintendent for 300 kids. The key is class size and classroom teachers, EVERYTHING else should be on the table.
But Coumo told us an answer, begging to the state for more money is not going to work at some point we are going to have to have another plan. Yes it is unfair but we need another plan we need to make this work ourselves. This might mean more property tax increases for those districts that choose not to consolidate, but pretty large scale consolidation is the future and probably the near future.
There is no immediate relief coming from Albany I think this was clear from the Gov.
Busing should be on the table children are being bused who live one block from some of these village schools, its nuts schools are not a day care they are not a social service agency, they are there to educate children, thus we should be focusing on one thing, the classroom, paying classroom teachers more and hiring more, you would pay for this by substantially reducing all non-classroom teaching positions from administration on down. One Superintendent covering all school districts in St. Lawrence county would STILL be managing one of the smaller districts in the state for example.
I don’t think we have the ability or will to tackle this locally I understand the politics and the dynamics of all of these jobs at stake, thus it will probably be forced from the state level as schools are unable to pay their bills. It would be better if we could come up with a plan, but I just don’t see any will to really think outside of traditional ways.
Meanwhile, Gov. Cuomo’s education commission has recommended more time in school for children, including extending the school day and school year and expanding all-day pre-kindergarten.
What a crazy idea. Kids can’t be kids anymore. And 4 year olds need their mother.
Rancid, it makes me wonder when we all start saying no about alot of things that are being imposed. We’re taking alot of things lying down and I wonder why.
Well here is the deal about saying no to the mandates, which I would like to do; the majority of the money still comes from the state. They could simply pull the plug and let us fund our own schools, which would truly mean massive and unrealistic tax increases or closing the schools. We are totally dependent on state aid, even with these crazy high tax rates, the bulk of our school funding still comes from the state not the local district.
Also these mandates have a lot of supporters. It is one thing to talk about them in the abstract, quite another to say well we are not going to do as much special education, we are not going to pay into the mandated teacher pension system, we are not going to do any variety of things. Well each one of those has a local interest group that would be up in arms.
I think crazily the one interest group that seems to take the hit from all of this is classroom teachers, the one thing schools really DO need. Schools could get by without counselors, without school psychologists, without special ed teachers, without nurses, without a variety of administrative positions, without busing everyone wherever they desire; but they can’t get by without real classroom teachers and those are the people that seem to be losing their jobs.
Kathy, we take it because all these problems are so much larger than us. How do you and I fight the system? We’d need 100K people to get anyones attention. It’s like Mervel says, we’re at the mercy of the State. They extort the money from us! They can put us in prison.
We could do it Mervel. It would take all the northern counties getting together. Some of the poorer western counties too. The Feds hand down mandates and the State passes it to us. Maybe what we need to do is to go through with it. Take our lumps and start over. School would be a lot different, true, but it might be better.
I think a good portion of the Mandates we have Rancid are New York mandates not federal mandates.
Either way Mervel, as long as we keep silent nothing will change.
I basically agree with your sentiment.
The thing that surprised me however was how much control the NYS Department of Education has over pretty much everything that is going on in our schools. For example if we did simply reject the mandates, I think they have the power of law to simply shut down the school or take over the school, and indeed may have the power to legally punish the administrators who intentionally defied them. I don’t know if they could arrest them or not, I think they could certainly fire them all however and possibly do more.
I don’t think the option of intentional rejection of the mandates would work we have to come up with something politically at the Albany level to remove them.
One option may be to simply quite paying the bills and throw up our hands and say we are out of money and let the state take over the school and let them pay the bills.
That’s not an option in my opinion.
I think if all the schools across the North Country got together and started threatening to simply stop abiding by the mandates it would create the attention needed. And if some administrators had the backbone to stand fast against the state I’m quite sure the union would back them if the alternative was closed schools and lost union jobs.
Never underestimate the squeaky wheel, especially if the press was on our side.
Maybe but it would be quite the revolution and probably be against the law. How many administrators are willing to go to jail over this?
I think simply going bankrupt is a much more likely option than some sort of civil disobedience style revolt against state mandates. You realize of course what that sort of revolt means? It means telling parents who have kids with disabilities we are not going to provide extra services for your children, pay for it yourself, I mean is that something as an administrator you want to make a stand on?
I think the unions are a toss up as far as support for that. If a school system goes bankrupt, well the state would take it over and would not have to honor union contracts, although they would for political reasons, they would of course pay into the mandated pension system (a state mandate). I would think given a choice between local cost cutters and the state, I may take a chance going with the state. The danger of that is I think the state would likely force what should happen anyway and that is consolidation, which may mean a loss of jobs, but if done correctly does not have to mean a loss of any teaching jobs.
“…It means telling parents who have kids with disabilities we are not going to provide extra services for your children, pay for it yourself, …”.
No, it means telling the State that since it’s the law that these programs exist, and since the local districts have no say in the matter, and since the districts have tapped out all reasonable revenue sources, it’s the States responsibility to address the funding issue. Mevel, my wife is a Spec Ed teacher. The program she works in through BOCES is being shut down already. Why? Because it’s based on a mid 90’s revenue/cost paradigm. Her supervisors have no choice but to shut down the program because it’s unaffordable. A different program will take it’s place eventually, but it will be geared towards meeting the paperwork requirements set by the State and Feds to cover the Medicare end of things. IOW, she’ll be spending far, far more time doing paper work than teaching. Medicare does not want to pay for any services. The State does not want to pay for any services. The County surely doesn’t want to pay for any educational services and the landowners are already footing the bill for everything under the sun!
It’s a joke. Cuomo says he wants longer school days and a longer school year, but he doesn’t want to pay for it. Its just gov’t funded babysitting- incredibly expensive babysitting.
Yes I agree. But I don’t see any options. I think Coumo just told us he is not giving us mandate relief nor should we expect more aid to pay for it. So as far as a solution it looks as if the state government is not going to help. But maybe someone will try it, simply ignoring the mandates and moving forward with lower costs?
In the meantime what do you tell the family of the ADHD or autistic child? Do you say that no we are not going to offer any of these programs for them or aides for them and so forth and you need to wait for the state to stand up for that while we make our big stand? Do you honestly see anybody in education in your community that is saying, OH yes I am getting on that bandwagon? Or how about them saying we are not going to pay into his mandated state pension system, we are making a stand? How would that go over?
Come on Rancid, its not going to happen. A much more likely future is that some of these schools that are in very bad straights will simply become fiscally insolvent. At that point the state would have to step in.
There is an almost criminal lack of local leadership on these very serious issues, they are all just scrambling to save their jobs, so instead of consolidation they will just fire another 25 or 30 classroom teachers.
Mervel I’m just offering an option to try. If I had my way we’d toss sports right out the window to pay for spec ed, early childhood intervention, etc. We toss a lot of elective programs too and stop the practice of never ending building projects and multiple administrative layers. Those teachers or administrators not paying for any health insurance costs would start and I’d end the mandate for a Masters so teachers could avoid the debt.