Schools Feeling the Effects of the Great Recession

[Chris Malek]

The Stevens Point School District is one of many districts that may
need to make some touch decisions as revenue promises fail to
materialize. It is known that a lot of teachers and staff may get
laid off soon in Stevens Point. It has also been suggested that the
teachers union will sacrifice a few jobs to keep their above average-
wage levels.

Any insight is welcome.

Chris Malek

U.S. Teachers Fall Victim to Tidal Wave of Pink Slips

Press TV
February 22, 2010

US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan expresses concern as budget
deficits expose American teachers and educators to risk of imminent
layoff.

“I am very, very concerned about layoffs going into the next school
year starting in September. Good superintendents are going to start
sending out pink slips in March and April, as they start to plan for
their budgets,” said Duncan, referring to the slips of paper included
in some paychecks to notify a person of being fired.

The layoffs will come as plummeting tax revenues force states and
cities to cut costs, including education funds, in a bid to keep their
budgets balanced.

This could spell more than simply bad news for Americans who are
already angry with the government over the rate of unemployment,
despite a 0.3 percent drop from last year’s 10.0 percent.

Duncan further referred to the economic stimulus package pushed by the
Obama administration and approved by the Congress, saying the plan
saved at least 320,000 education jobs last year.

The plan created a stabilization fund of $48 billion that provided
cash directly to states, mostly for schools; but those funds will
likely run out before the end of the year.

This is while Obama warned last week of possible job cuts in state
governments when the stimulus ends.

In January, there were 8.03 million workers in local government
education, down from 8.09 million the previous year and 8.05 million
in January 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

[Solin, Jeremy]

Education funding is a huge issue with a variety of facets to it. The current funding mechanism in WI unfortunately pits communities against their schools in most situations (unless the school district is growing) through the need to continuously go to referendum to get full funding. That said, school district administration is generally a mess for many reasons, but the primary one being that we use an industrial model for the schooling of our students (top down administration, kids through the assembly line of grades, specialization of roles, etc.) and have come to rely solely on standardized tests as the basis for determining if students are learning. As with any organization (government, business, etc.), self-preservation plays into the quagmire that is a school district. The question about teacher pay is also complicated. What value do we place on someone who spends over 1,000 hours with our kids annually and is considered in many ways responsible for passing on the knowledge and ethics of a society? What's his/her wage relative to farmers and those in corporate America?
To give you a sense of the mess we're in, I would say in many ways that school districts are nearly completely broken, that fixing them is almost unimaginable by most, and that intentionally negatively impacting the learning of students by starving school districts is merely spiteful and nearly unethical. How do you re-create a system that is too big and important to fail when it deals with the education of students? Probably by realizing that maybe they are already failing?
JS

-----Original Message-----
From: sustain-cent...@googlegroups.com [mailto:sustain-cent...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Chris Malek
Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 2010 12:53 PM
To: Sustain Central Wisconsin
Subject: Schools Feeling the Effects of the Great Recession

The Stevens Point School District is one of many districts that may

need to make some tough decisions as revenue promises fail to

Any insight is welcome.

Chris Malek

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sustain Central Wisconsin" group.
To post to this group, send email to sustain-cent...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sustain-central-wi...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sustain-central-wisconsin?hl=en.

[BobbyG]

On Feb 23, 12:53 pm, Chris Malek <chrisjma...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The plan created a stabilization fund of $48 billion that provided
> cash directly to states, mostly for schools; but those funds will
> likely run out before the end of the year.
>
> This is while Obama warned last week of possible job cuts in state
> governments when the stimulus ends.

Yes, there's going to be a hard limit on how much the payrolls of
local govts, whether muni, county or state, can be "federalized" in
this way. We're probably approaching that hard limit now. Yet a short
report on "All Things Considered" earlier this week noted the total
amount of states' budget shortfalls stands now at $135 billion.

The problem is, almost all economic advisors to the governors are
using outdated models in which a recession has a short duration, then
people go back to work, then income tax and sales tax revenues rise
gradually to slowly eliminate any budget deficits.

Problem is, models no longer are working, because things really are
"different this time." We went over some sort of event horizon or
tripped over some tipping point back there in 2007, and the brittle
global economy didn't just crack, it started to shatter, and it's not
going to be easy to glue all that mess of tiny ceramic pieces back
together.

Just saw this "tweet" from TheAutomaticEarth, and it seems prophetic
for Wisconsin, since we're sometimes mentioned on top ten lists of
states with big budget deficits-per-capita:

@AutomaticEarth California is a greater risk than Greece, warns JP
Morgan chief,
http://bit.ly/aC6B5g
(Mama mia! Contagion threats everywhere)
2 minutes ago via TweetDeck ,

It should be noted that the very very wealthy are emerging from this
"Great Recession" with most of their wealth intact.

Since the process of training the workforce who enrich these very very
wealthy is generally paid by society, and publicly-funded socialistic
schools like SPASH, DC Everest, then the University of Wisconsin (and
the other land-grant universities) provide a steady stream of well-
educated, ready-to-go, innovative and highly creative new graduates,
it seems somehow just commonsensical that the very very wealthy should
pay an increasingly greater part of the cost of educating these future
workers who will continue to enrich these very very wealthy people
until the end of time. Or perhaps until the end-times.

In other words, get the schools off property taxes and make the
wealthy folk pay the full cost of getting their workforces trained-up,
via high personal and corporate income taxes, instead of externalizing
that cost onto the people least able to pay. There must be a few
people willing to step forward and stand for election who can stand up
to the withering fire directed at anyone who dares challenge the
arrangements imposed on us by the very very wealthy. I should hope, at
least.

Bobby G

[Solin, Jeremy]

One problem with the wealthy, i.e., employers, funding education is that it will very quickly become a job training program and schools will lose everything that is "non-essential work skills," i.e., history, arts, environmental education, ethics, etc.

Jeremy Solin
Director
LEAF K-12 Forestry Education Program
Wisconsin Center for Environmental Education
College of Natural Resources
UW-Stevens Point
800 Reserve St
Stevens Point, WI 54481
715-346-4907 (office)
715-340-0376 (cell)
jso...@uwsp.edu
www.uwsp.edu/cnr/leaf

-----Original Message-----
From: sustain-cent...@googlegroups.com [mailto:sustain-cent...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of BobbyG
Sent: Friday, February 26, 2010 3:01 PM
To: Sustain Central Wisconsin

Bobby G

--

[D Wright Esq & Ann H Wright]

At this juncture the discussion of education is most interesting. While one
would not think that it would necessarily be a flare point in the world of
the power-down, I am beginning to wonder if it may turn out to be a
bellwether of sorts. As an ex-school board member (8 years) I can tell you
there is nothing that will get parents more revved up than messing with
their children's education. It is one of those things that may be a trigger
to harsh reactions and an issue worth watching closely. Many states are now
laying off teachers and staff and it is getting noticed. One in my family
all ready. Once they start going after football then hell will break loose.

I went to K-12 in Montello Wis. and because the local will not support more
taxes it appears the high school will be closed and the students sent to
Princeton 15 miles away. It is a larger town than Amherst.

There was a riot in Berkley tonight over budget cuts. California is the
future. What can go wrong will go wrong there first. Others will follow. It
is an interesting time and how this unfolds will be a lesson worth watching.

California is our Greece as Bobby noted. Stay strong and think local. D
Wright

[BobbyG]

On Feb 26, 5:04 pm, "Solin, Jeremy" <Jeremy.So...@uwsp.edu> wrote:
> One problem with the wealthy, i.e., employers, funding education is that it will very quickly become a job training program and schools will lose everything that is "non-essential work skills," i.e., history, arts, environmental education, ethics, etc.
>

Agreed: academic content and academic freedom need to reside behind a
firewall separating them from the money flows.

There is an author who wrote a book on the thesis that education is a
socially-derived benefit that corporations seem to deny as such. Wish
I could name the author & title now.

Anyway, I think we've kind of hit the wall on how much property taxes
can rise, at least to the segment of the population who are now living
on fixed incomes, which means declining *real* incomes, and declining
flexibility on where their budget can be hacked.

And plenty of demagogues out there ready to take advantage of the
situation. Just listen to 550-AM on any given day, listen when the
topic of taxation for <anything> comes up...

bg