How to Screw the Schools.
By Jim Conley • Oct 26th, 2007 • Email This Post to a Friend •
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It’s a mystery to me why the Brookline School Committee and parents are going all Armageddon over school financing for the coming years. The schools have been getting screwed by the 6th floor of Town Hall for years. Mostly this has to do with the ridiculous Town/School partnership that theoretically gives half of the municipal operating budget to the school department.
It says something that the schools need to sign a treaty with the Selectmen and the Town Administrator to get a budget allocation that most municipalities give over freely.
Folks, in the 2008 Municipal Budget your representative town meeting, at the urging of the Selectmen and the town administrator, used $2.1 million in cash (for starters) to finance a town hall renovation so that employees there can enjoy new lounges. That’s on top of the $14 million in new debt that the Town will have assumed on the renovation [see the town's capital budget plan].
Add to that all of the money the town takes off the top before the 50/50 partnership kicks in and you’ll see how the schools get screwed so that the Selectmen can operate - among other wastes - an economic development department that is nothing more than a PR adjunct for real estate developers.
Parents would be well served to become less apocalyptic and more analytic. Brookline takes in $200 million in annual revenue and only $55 million of that goes to the schools. Work back from there and you’ll see what town government’s priorities are, and that a proposed Proposition 2.5 override will make little difference to the quality of education in Brookline.
Jim Conley is publisher of On Brookline.
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How many Selectmen and/or TMMs does it take to screw the school system?