Here’s the Trib’s editorial today as it first wades into the deficit question:
The question gets spit out every time the Duluth school district hits a bump in the financial road. With news this week that the district’s budget deficit for next year had climbed another $1 million to more than $7.3 million, fever-pitch venom could be expected to accompany the inquiry.
Is the deficit because of the Long-Range Facilities Plan; can we blame the Red Plan for our district’s money woes?
The short answer, at least according to the district, is no.
“no?” Sadly the District’s explanation is never challenged in the editorial. At the conclusion there is a call to keep debating the question but not once does the editorial stake out the Trib’s opinion. I presume that wishful thinking has over taken the Editorial Board and they are simply hoping for the best while taking the District’s head-in-a-hole explanation at face value.
“There would be a deficit whether the plan existed or not,” …
Considering all the problems in the state of Minnesota this is probably true. But lets ask ourselves, since the Trib lacks the imagination to make any inquiry, how many other Minnesota school districts are contemplating a four-day school week? How many other Minnesota School districts have lost ten or fifteen percent of their student population to neighboring districts over the past three years? The answer is very few if any. If the Red Plan had not been inaugurated and then stage managed so incompetently we might very well be stuck with our supposedly inferior buildings but we would likely be one of the better off school district’s financially.
…planning statement released this week. “In fact, the (Red Plan) helped reduce the current projected deficit by $2 million and has helped reduce the need to cut budgets over the past three years by allowing schools to combine and (by) reducing non-teacher expenses.”
This is bullshit. We have cut teachers and other staff but we have done it to pay off the bonds which were necessary to pay JCI. Describing these cuts as “savings” is particularly galling. Because the Red Plan buildings are largely unfinished there have been no savings of consequence because of the Red Plan. Staff cuts have left crap on the classroom floors at the end of the school day because we are employing fewer janitors and classrooms are more crowded. In no way does this decision represent educational efficiency.
We have moved student populations around willy nilly with the “big fill” but once again this was simply logistics. We couldn’t mix children and pile drivers. Putting the Ordean kids in Woodland or the Denfeld students in Central was house keeping at best. At worst it was like putting scorpions in a bottle with the understaffed teachers acting as referees.
