It’s a sad sight when adults sulk like 4-year-olds. When the adults are members of a school board, it’s disturbing.
Yet there sat Bobbie Regan this week as the Portland Public Schools Board of Directors voted unanimously to approve a budget that nobody liked.
“I want us to remain UPSET so we can take this fight where it belongs,” she said.
Added board member Pam Knowles: “We need to talk to our legislators about … making school funding a priority.”
Suggested board member Ruth Adkins: “Google ‘Contact John Kitzhaber’ … share your thoughts with him.”
Adkins read from a letter she wrote to Gov. Kitzhaber urging him to “become a champion for funding reform.”
Based on their comments you would never guess that if you looked at the state’s budget, the schools get a hefty chunk. Education is already a priority.
There is a persistent myth in Oregon that public safety/cops/prisons – choose one or all – are stealing from the children/the poor/the homeless – choose one or all.
“More Teachers Fewer Cops” said a sign at this week’s school board meeting.
The state Legislative Office has some easy-to-read, color pie charts on its Website. Perhaps the Portland Public Schools board could glance at pages 9, 10, 12, 21 and 23. In every case, Education Funds exceed Public Safety Funds. Yes, school funding is already a priority.
For example on Page 9, out of the $58.8 billion in the total funds budget, Education takes 23.1 percent (or $13.6 billion). Of that, 9.8 percent (or $5.8 billion) goes to K-12, while 13.3 percent (or $7.8 billion) goes to Other Education. By comparison, Public Safety/Judicial receives 6.2 percent (or $3.6 billion).
If the school board wants to raid another agency’s funds, maybe board members should go after Human Services, which comprises 35 percent (or $20.6 billion) of the state budget. That would make sense considering that schools are now de facto parents in some cases. Human Services spends money trying to “reunify families” that never existed and trying to teach parenting skills to males and females who have procreated but are incapable of being parents.
This is not a subject that school board members want to address, probably for fear of being judgmental. Some parents have flunked parenting – repeatedly – and no amount of money is going to get them off drugs or change their behavior.
School board members, instead, vent their frustration on voter-approved tax revolt measures and mandatory minimum sentencing laws.
“I don’t believe in Measure 5 and Measure 11,” board member Adkins freely admitted.
Measure 5, passed in 1990, limited the amount of property taxes that could be dedicated to school funding. The measure was prompted by homeowners who were being priced out of their houses and was one of many such laws passed in various states, probably the first and most famous being California’s Proposition 13 approved in 1978.
Likewise, Measure 11, passed by Oregon voters in 1994, was prompted by increasing crime rates and the lack of honest sentencing; in some cases, repeat criminals – even violent offenders – served little time. Voters in many states approved similar laws.
I would like to show Adkins a list of the felonies that qualify under Oregon’s mandatory minimum sentences and ask her which ones she doesn’t think belong there. Robbery? Rape? Sodomy? Kidnapping? Assault? Arson? Manslaughter? Adkins would probably scan the list looking for “smoking marijuana,” not realizing that it’s not on there and never has been. That’s probably how uninformed she is about Measure 11.
The lesson from Measures 5 and 11 is: If elected representatives can’t fix a problem, the voters may come up with their own solution.
Portland school administrators and board members have settled on a solution that may not improve education: new and renovated school buildings. They are putting together a school bond, which they will claim has the input of a 30-plus member citizens committee. That claim would be questionable. During the nine public hearings of that committee, school administrators guided the group to arrive at a fill-in-the-blanks conclusion.
Further, school administrators’ credibility has not been helped by their last-minute embrace of a $5 million offer from the Portland City Council to help pay for 110 teaching jobs, which Superintendent Carole Smith claimed the district could no longer afford.
Meanwhile, school officials have been agreeable to a proposal by the city council to approve a new urban renewal district for projects at Portland State University and Lincoln High School. Even though this district would take millions of dollars in property taxes away from schools and other public services, there were no objections from the same school board members who demanded more money be spent on education.
Even more revealing, was the attitude of David Williams, government relations director for Portland Public Schools. In an interview with the Daily Journal of Commerce, he was asked about the $60 million in property taxes that the Oregon Department of Education would lose with the PSU urban renewal district.
He noted that over a 30-year period, $60 million would be “a fairly modest amount” compared to the state’s annual budget.
“It’s not chump change, but you’re starting to get into pretty small amounts,” Williams said.
This is the world school administrators live in: plead poverty while dismissing $60 million as a “pretty small amount.”
More teachers, fewer cops?
No.
More teachers, more cops. But fewer – and smarter – school administrators.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
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Well put. But I am a member of the choir.
I guess I’m a member of the choir too. I wasn’t always. I don’t remember the schools in California being so money hungry like they are in Portland. The schools here, it’s never enough. Cops or teachers, what kind of choice is that?
If you lived in California prior to 2000, school bonds required a two-thirds vote to pass. (In 2000 the law was changed to require a super-majority of 55 percent.) To win a two-thirds vote, a successful school bond had to be carefully plotted. I think California schools tried harder to justify what they wanted. In Portland, administrators create wish-lists, throwing in everything they want. At several school meetings I’ve attended, administrators have mentioned the need for “natural light” as if that’s responsible for the low graduation rates. They forget that some voters went to schools with artificial lighting – and higher graduation rates.
Pamela
I remember watching a wonderful PBS dramatization about Oppenheimer. It began in a classroom with Oppenheimer presenting an equation on a blackboard and asking his students if they knew the answer. They didn’t and they asked him what the answer was and he said something like “I don’t know either that’s the beauty of it.” I think the art of teaching is nurturing a childs natural curiosity. If anything in watching my childrens education it seemed like the process led more to suppressing it.
It’s that kind of sentiment that has been missing in the nine meetings of the Portland Public Schools’ Long Range Facilities Plan Committee (the unwieldiness of the name says something). Nancy Hamilton, one of the co-chairs of that committee, spoke at the last school board meeting. She described going to a performance at one of the high schools, and she ranted to the board about the “crappy” stage and auditorium. That’s one way to poison students’ enthusiasm. Hamilton might be surprised at the humble venues where some famous names first performed.
Pamela