In the 1980's, Ford Motor Company was struggling with a quality problem. Henry's surname had become an acronym for Fix Or Repair Daily. So the first step management took was to change its public image. Tens of millions of dollars in advertising declared "At Ford, Quality is Job 1". It's the oldest adage of public relations: repeat something enough times, people will start to believe it.
That lesson was not lost on the current QCSD board majority, and administration, as they unveiled their new 2010-11 budget strategy at the finance committee meeting last Thursday night. They will try to convince us that while every school district across the nation is slashing spending, we need to increase ours by $12 million!!!
We've endured this backward attitude before. When the rest of the country was dumping disgraced Integrated Math, the QCSD board was stacking an "advisory committee" with pro-IM shills in a vain attempt to avoid acknowledging their failure.
In the next few weeks, you will be told how we absolutely must raise spending by 12 percent, taxes by nine percent. And how we absolutely must not cut programs, or teachers, despite an enormous budget deficit (and despite the fact that every other district is doing so). And how we absolutely must blame Harrisburg, not QCSD.
Don't believe a word of it.
Any committee established by the board is purely advisory. Only the directors and administration actually make policy. And the "finance committee" wasn't even created by the board, it is comprised of whoever drops in to a meeting, so think of it as "unofficially advisory" (even though many board members attend regularly). It is a convenient tool for the board majority, which can gleefully cite the committee's "decision" to back their actions when convenient, or ignore it. But they have never needed to ignore it, because the committee has become basically a soapbox for chairperson director Kathy Mosley, who never met a tax that she didn't want to raise.
With shenanigans like this, nothing in QCSD should be a surprise to anyone anymore. Wait until your next school tax bill arrives. Apparently, news of the community's difficult financial times hasn't yet reached Mosley, or Superintendent Lisa Andrejko, or the finance committee. Recession? Unemployment? Mortgage problems? Don't tell QCSD. The conclusion of the participants was that they want to accept the administration's recommendation of the highest tax increase allowed by law. That would be 8.9 percent this year. And next year's increase will most likely be twice that!
They plan to raise your tax rate by an astounding 47.8 mils over the next three years. That's about a 40 percent increase. And if the state subsidy is cut, it will be more. Even in QCSD, where years of terrible financial decisions have forced school taxes to skyrocket for more than a decade, this is beyond belief. If you were drowning, Mosley and her cohorts would not only ignore you, they would propose a way to tax your struggle.
And the excuse they plan to give us is even worse, because it just isn't so. The board majority, and administration, will be huffing that this huge increase is due to the problems of the teacher retirement fund. After all, it's been all over the news, so they hope that we will just swallow hard and blame Harrisburg. Just like the board asked us to believe that school construction was the cause of the huge tax hikes several years ago, when the real culprits were over-hiring, and an outrageous late-night teacher contract.
The district's own calculations show that of the 12 percent increase in expenditures planned for 2010-11, only 1.76 percent is attributed to the pension crisis. (It could be 29 percent in three years if the state doesn't act, but has almost no effect this year). Director Paul Stepanoff, who, along with committee members Manuel Alfonso and Rick Orloff oppose the tax increase, was angry: "They are trying to pass off a MASSIVE 12 percent expenditure increase as a state-created pension problem. When I asked them to specifically itemize the PSERES (pension) portion of the 12 percent, it was only 1.7 percent. The other 10.3 percent represents a huge expenditure increase!"
Incredibly, after months of supposedly identifying ways to cut spending, the proposed budget is even higher than the preliminary budget, because the board has added band uniforms, even more technology (now $1.6 million), and items deferred in past years because the money wasn't there. This is certainly not the time to revive them. And, most incredible of all, they seem inclined to give 2011 raises to the teachers, who are already making the ninth highest salaries in the state, 50 percent more than our community's average income!!!
To be fair, QCSD does have problems beyond its control, like electricity and pension increases, and state subsidy fluctuations. But any private business, that does not have the luxury of simply raising taxes, deals with higher expenses by cutting costs. Getting leaner. Studying how they operate. QCSD refuses to consider any of these options. It's much easier to just raise your taxes. Over and over.
And the board majority is calling this the "brave" thing to do. Stepanoff retorted "It is not in any way a 'brave' thing to raise expenses by 12 percent, and taxes by nine percent, in a year when everyone else is barely surviving. Quite the contrary, balancing this monster of a budget increase on the backs of the taxpayers is the cowardly thing to do. The budget presented by Superintendent Andrejko was a $10 million increase. The board incredibly added another $1-1.5 million to that, and now is pondering increasing taxes by the nine percent maximum allowable. They're doing this while trying to convince us all that they have done everything possible to cut costs. The committee rejected every meaningful spending cut except the $50,000 savings by closing Haycock Elementary School. And that will guarantee larger class sizes in the other elementary schools."
Andrejko even rejected out of hand a suggestion that QCSD have a professional performance audit, to determine if budgeting and spending are being done as effectively as possible, and to identify potential areas of savings. More "bravery", since she, and buddy Business Manager Sylvia Lenz, would be squarely in the crosshairs of any negative findings.
Mosley, a Democrat, even injected politics into the issue by blaming Republican State Representative Paul Clymer for the district's problems. And to try to sell this very expensive crock to the residents, she requested that the entire finance committee agree on a unified message to "bring the community together": don't cut anything substantial, and raise taxes nine percent. Stepanoff said "Rick, Manuel, and I completely rejected that, and called it what it was - a sham."
QCSD residents might have seen something like this coming when Bob Smith defeated Alfonso last November, after promising Milford voters that he would support higher spending for programs involving their kids. Because we still use the antiquated regional voting system, the vast majority of district voters didn't get a say, but they will now be forced to pony up hundreds - or thousands - more tax dollars each. With Smith joining longtime overspenders Linda Martin, Kelly Van Valkenburgh, Nancy Tirjan, and Mosley, that majority is going well beyond a tolerable tax increase, to this absurd one.
And remember Pat McCandless (whose wife is a QCSD teacher's aide), and June Hunt, who both ran unsuccessfully for school board in prior years? They now "serve" the community as volunteers on the finance committee - and voted to support the brave nine percent tax increase. Remember them if they are ever brave enough to try to get elected again.
Orloff, a third-term supervisor in Richland, is pessimistic about the future here, because he doubts that the current school board has the stomach to make the truly "brave" decisions being made by more rational boards elsewhere: cut programs and teachers. He fears that the five-person board majority could be responsible for fragmenting the community. "Some residents will have no choice but to put up 'for sale' signs, and move to a better managed district, or even another state. If that starts to happen en masse, it will further depress already depressed home values." (Yes, Virginia, Orloff did vote to raise Richland's taxes last year, but that was the first increase in 19 years, with no additional increase on the horizon).
Once the new school taxes take effect, who will want to live here? Killer taxes, poor performance, large class sizes, deteriorating buildings. And a board that seems to live on another planet.
There is little that can be done about our big spenders this year. But Martin, Tirjan, and Mosley are up for re-election in 2011. Hunt and McCandless may try again. Hopefully, residents of their regions will do the brave thing, and elect directors who are actually in touch with the community - while we still have one.