Florida TaxWatch: Schools must spend smarter

Times are tough. Money's tight. School districts leaders across Florida are talking about layoffs, program reductions and more.

Florida TaxWatch suggests there must be a better way. In a report issued today, the watchdog organization posits that the state and schools can set better spending priorities that will help cut the fat without hurting student learning. It offers 10 concepts to get to the heart of the matter. Among them:

• Eliminate unnecessary duplication of services.
• Streamline bureaucracy.
• Spend less on non-instructional programs and services. (They don't say 65 percent solution, but the sentiment is there. And notably, and perhaps controversially, the group includes student transportation in this category.)
• Maximize flexibility. (Think class-size amendment here.)
• Examine big-ticket items for return on investment. (TaxWatch particularly likes Voluntary Pre-K.)

"Every dollar we can redirect into the classroom can actually increase student performance," Dominic M. Calabro, the group's president and CEO, said in a news release. "We must free ourselves and our children from excessive bureaucracy that gets in the way of classroom instruction."

To read "The 2009 Budget Crunch: Making Good Decisions in Bad Financial Times," click here.

Comments

[Shelly]

Sounds like you either are or are related to an admin.

[Chris W]

Shelly:

I hear you throwing out a bunch of Republican agitprop along with the idea of making administrators justify their jobs (which I think is a good idea, by the way).

If you really wanted to zero in on where the school district wastes a *ton* of money, start looking into the district's purchasing department and their land acquisition processes. You'll have better luck with that because you can compare hard numbers (what they paid and what they *could* have paid with more due diligence).

If you start bleating about overpaid administrators and bloated programs, you're going to run smack into the people who *do* benefit from said programs that have to be run by said administrators and it'll look like a food fight. And nobody will listen to you because you'll sound like just have an axe to grind.

[Shelly]

Start with no admin making more than the highest paid teacher. Start with admin being forced to substitute and teach at least one year out of every three, preferably in a low performing school. CUT admin by 40%. I have a friend working there in a dept with 12 people and she says 2 of them do the work and the other 10 don't do much at all. JUSTIFY your job, teachers have to do it all the time. OUTSIDE auditors designed to cut waste will do it. The REAL world is forced to work within a budget and cut things when the budget doesn't work. You don't cut food, you cut luxuries like cable. We can't afford a bloated admin and bloated programs. The stuff you mentioned, by the way, is gov't funded. Such as it is and there's a LOT of waste even there. Kids throwing away the breakfast or just drinking the juice. I've seen it. Gifted parents subsidize BIG TIME their program. I've done it.

[Stacey]

How many of these "officials" who are looking to make cuts have ever sat and talked with the teachers and parents? Reduce costs? I am a parent, with one daughter in a magnet program (gifted). I have already spent over $350 this year (electric pencil sharpener, glue, glue sticks, pencils, erasers, paperback reading books, snacks, plus lots of other supplies) on COMMUNIAL supplies for all the children in her classrooms. The teachers spend $$ also. They are limited in their photocopies so they go to office depot and pay out of their salaries for copies for the kids.

I have spent over 350 volunteer hours in her school so far this year, helping with her classes, driving kids from other grades on field trips and helping with the PTA.

I have the highest level of respect for ALL TEACHERS, and I think they should be paid more for the job that they do. For those of you who think otherwise, I suggest you go and volunteer in a classroom and see what the teachers have to deal with on a daily basis.

THANK YOU TEACHERS!

[Chris W]

jwt:

All of those are interesting ideas.

Using Kindle isn't the answer because you'll spend a buttload of money buying them and have another maintenance problem *plus* having to track them from student to student.

As for repurposing ROSSAC administrators, it's a good start. At the very least it would give them a direct view of how their policy whims affect the classroom.

I would attack another part of the problem - capacity and building. Building new schools is hugely expensive and disruptive, and under the class size amendment variations in student population can wind up mandating redrawing of school boundaries (and many upset parents). What if we went another way? Portables are a low-rent solution to capacity problems and they have a bad reputation, but what if we could design a much sturdier modular school? Build what amounts to interlocking blocks out of reinforced concrete that can be added or removed as student populations change size. Flexible A/C ductwork could hook up to the main school's A/C system for climate control.

Or, we could rent houses or storefronts or vacant office buildings in or near crowded neighborhoods and set them up with broadband internet and run virtual schools, with the idea that you could bust up the big-box WalMart schools we have now and let kids go to school closer to home.

[jwt]

BTW-that is at the ROSSAC level--we can't stretch teachers any more--we'll already lose a significant number due to working conditions and 6/7.

[jwt]

What about Kindle? What about revisiting job descriptions of ROSSAC personnel and put some of those folks back in the classrooms ? What happened to substituting 1 day per week? What about not replacing people who retire and reallocating job responsibilities among other department members? What about a moratorium on promotions above the school site level ?

[Chris W]

Shelly:

What, exactly, would you consider a "non-essential" program? Free and reduced-price lunches? Vocational education programs? Gifted education? Magnet schools? All of those programs serve an extremely worthwhile purpose.

When TaxWatch says spend smarter, they don't mean start a food fight among program constituencies just because you can. To my mind, they're actually looking for *ideas*.

The one that struck me was $272 million for textbooks, which could be reduced *a lot* if the state went to digital textbooks (protected eBooks, gated websites, on-demand printing, etc.) so they didn't have to maintain and track hundreds of thousands of hardbound textbooks each year.

[Shelly]

How about OUTSIDE auditors to go over the bloated salaries and waste of non-essential programs and cutting out useless admins? Taxpayers keep passing new taxes to keep funding things that should not be funded and their money is totally wasted.

[Printer]

My company just printed a stationery order for Hillsborough Board chair Faliero. Does the school board really need to spend a couple of hundred dollars (wholesale price) on letterhead in a time of fiscal crisis?