Tales from the BudComm - Another Budcomm Member's Memories of Dealing with their School Board. It ain't pretty - Granite Grok

Tales from the BudComm – Another Budcomm Member’s Memories of Dealing with their School Board. It ain’t pretty

…from Steve’s ‘New Hampshire Needs an Income Tax” as it is SO true in my dealings with them and the same thing appears to be the same State wide. It’s almost, like, well, er…they’ve formed a group and they all collude together to screw the taxpayers (oh WAIT, there IS such a group!):

I served on my town’s Budget Committee for several years, and a couple of years as Chairman. While we struggled with individual departments in the town over their practices and requests, the town itself — even under some bad leadership — was still pretty even keeled, budget wise. But the struggles we had with the town were nothing compared to the annual struggle with the school district.

So true, so true.  And this is ONE big reason why the School District Governance Association (the conservative alternative to the uber-Progressive and “it’s OUR Fiefdom!” NHSBA) came into existence and I urge all present and existing conservative (and those just sick of seeing their fellow taxpayers get rolled) School Board members and BudComm members (and anyone else tired of the constant malarky masquerading as “it’s for the children”) to come to the meetings and join.  There’s a bunch of seminars coming up starting this month that will help you out tremendously. But I digress:

Aside from their bureaucratic manipulations and slow-walking information, they structure their budget so that even with a large budget, the Budget Committee only has a small number to work with, and they pull their “it’s for the children” crap for every dime.

That’s because they “game the system” and have exploited every possible loophole from a financial aspect.

Almost all their capital improvements are done with bonding, which becomes a fixed annual cost. When the 20 year bond runs out for a new school that was built, low and behold, they need to replace the roof, or do upgrades, and as soon as you do certain things, suddenly you need to bring everything up to the current code, including the current State DoE guidelines for sq feet of instructional space, green space, etc. That capital improvement is also done with bonding. It is a huge crock. Rinse and Repeat.

We got hit especially hard this past budget – they loaded up the “delayed maintenance” items to the tune of over a million dollars.

Almost all of their personnel costs are collective bargaining agreements, which also becomes a fixed annual cost. But it’s like bargaining with yourself – the school board wants to give the union just about everything, because they are “professionals” and we can’t pay the people that teach our children enough! Why, they barely make more than a McDonalds employee! (I heard that one once. Lunacy.) And the math for the collective bargaining is more complex than most people think. They play 3 Card Monty quite a bit with them. Add to that what happens to salaries when teachers who have been there 5+ years decide to move on, and they hire a teacher right out of college to replace them. That puts the new teacher at the beginning of the wage scale, but the budget never seems to reflect thatbecause they don’t have to give notice before the budget has to be voted on.

And every teacher gets their own contract and it is done before the deadline so 60-70% of the budget is already locked in.  Bryan is right – it’s never enough and there’s always something more.  They exploit the fact that parents want to give everything to their kids’ education.  The problem is that they demand everything from everyone else as well.  And the union and the “professionals” consistently reject they’re “hiding the boots” but smile as they believe “you’ve got to be joking – we pulled it off again!”.

Don’t get me started on “Default Budgets”

Those two make up most of a school district budget.

Then the games start with curriculum, non-union employees, maintenance & fuel costs, the stupid school buses every year are a problem – enrollment going down – check the bus routes. “We can’t have children riding to school for 40 minutes!” Why not? I did in 1st-6th grade, and it went to 55 minutes when I entered 7th. You can’t cut the fund for heating oil – for all the climate change “consensus,” they still can’t accurately predict in January what next winter will be like. Etc etc etc. More 3 Card Monty. We need to replace the 4th grade math curriculum. But you just replaced it 2 years ago. Well, it doesn’t meet the new State Frameworks. Rinse and Repeat.

Here the other dirty little secret that they won’t tell you about needing new curriculum – they DON’T have mechanisms in place to accurately measure if it is both quantitatively and qualitatively better than what they replaced.  Seriously!  I spent a lot of time trying to get them to admit this and in the end, they just don’t care.  After all, it’s THEIR school and not your’s. And Bryan agrees:

A large part of the problem with the Government Schools is that while people distrust Government from doing things right, they seem to have a blind spot when it comes to the schools. They meet with their teachers on Back-to-School night, and they seem like such nice people – but you aren’t there for the 8 hours/day that your kids are. Horror story after horror story – “but that’s not my town, my school – it’s *their* school!” Except it really is – with few exceptions, it either hasn’t been exposed or isn’t reported. Much of the “horror” is a result of Federal or State meddling where they have no business – no Constitutional mandate to be involved with or spend money on education.

Until we can get control of school spending, and I mean ALL school spending, at the local level, we will have high property taxes. And it isn’t just spending – it’s policy.

Why would a school district be interested in people who have rejected their model — even to the point of turning in homeschool kids for truancy in extreme cases? If it was about money, relieving the cost of one+ kids would be a good thing, yes? Because it’s more than the money – it’s about shaping the next generation into being good Socialists – at our expense.

And even when you try, you get the screams of “YOU’RE MICROMANAGING THEIR DECISIONS!”.

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