The Democrat and Chronicle has a new editorial beseeching Maggie Brooks to consider bipartisan solutions to the budget problem now that her plan has failed miserably:
Brooks’ sales-tax plan is dead, but budget needs remain. || Democrat & Chronicle: Editorials
(June 13, 2007) — Now that County Executive Maggie Brooks’ sales tax/deficit reduction plan has sunk to the bottom — it was an agonizingly slow descent — she and the Legislature, working with the city and the towns, can devise an alternative plan to cut costs and balance the budget. And debate over direction and policy should be a centerpiece of the upcoming campaign for county executive.
It may even be possible to find a solution that at least improves the situation a bit, but really, until we can get a handle on the mandates from the state and federal level under control, we’re just spinning out wheels. And if you want to know about mandates, you should ask a teacher. More on the Dark Side of the Flip. . .
In a recent, highly illuminating school board meeting I attended, some of the effects of the No Child Left Behind law and it’s attendant wash thought the New York State system were revealed in stark relief. For example, since the state did not wish to bypass any of it’s existing criteria and requirements for students, they were tacked onto the requirements added by NCLB, leading to a laundry list of up to 25 separate benchmarks a kid needs to pass in order for the school to be compliant. Imagine the extra work, extra manpower, extra paper, extra cost! Imagine the failure rate we can expect going forward as the requirements race towards 100% compliance!
But it doesn’t stop there. Probably the most egregious overhead I heard about was that public school educators are required by the state to maintain the special education needs of private school students! The idea, which makes sense in a bubble but not in practice, is that the state wants state employees to verify that the educational needs of special-needs students are met so that NCLB requirements at the state level are met. However, since they don’t want to pay to hire more educators, this responsibility ultimately falls on the school system in which the private school resides.
Don’t miss the fine print on that last bit: a kid from Hamburg, NY attending a private school in Brighton, NY (about an hour and a half away) gets looked after by teachers from the Brighton Public School District. Not only does Brighton not get paid state tax money for the attendance of the student, but they have to waste resources on kids who aren’t from the district and whose parents don’t pay local property taxes. That means working up IEP’s (Individual Education Program, basically the documentation of special needs like extra time for tests or being seated in the front of the class, etc.) for each student, meeting with parents to evaluate performance and a host of other costly, time-consuming work for which the district is responsible.
And oh, yeah: the district is also responsible for figuring out a way to get paid back by the private entities that they do the work for.
All in a day’s work for the Commissioner of Schools, an unelected position most people don’t know exist. But there is increasing resistance to this regime throughout the state and even on the Regents Board. With luck, perhaps people in Albany will start to think about the need to streamline education and give our local budgets a break. Unfortunately, being “dedicated to education” is a bit like being “tough on crime,” in that, electorally, more is always more with such topics.
Technorati Tags: New York State, Monroe County, Budgets, Mandates, Education, Private Schools, Public Schools, No Child Left Behind
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