Recession may force a change for the better in school tabs
posted by Loki on Jan.22.2009 at 10:59 am
|
MyCentralJersey.com
New Jersey’s top official in charge of education has asked school districts to freeze all spending on nonessential items for the remainder of the year. Of course, that’s like asking any vampire to swear off blood; like the Count Orlok of “Nosferatu” fame, school officials are by nature loath to restrain their inbred thirst.
Give Education Commissioner Lucille Davy a little bit of credit for trying, though, even if her words are more than likely useless. Otherwise, local boards of education and the administrators to whom they pander would have taken a knife to spending a long time ago. Instead, New Jersey continues to witness all manner of excess and patronage and wasteful behavior in its public schools, from bloated superintendent contacts, to gold-plated health and retirement benefits, to Taj Mahal-like school construction projects.
Even the depths of recession haven’t whet the education establishment’s appetite to consume even more of the public’s dollars. Just ask the taxpayers of East Brunswick, whose superintendent of schools was awarded the nose-bleed raise of $29,400 just this summer, and whose yearly salary of $209,400 now tops that of newly appointed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ($191,300), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md. ($183,500), all of the associate justices of the U.S. Supreme Court ($203,000), and every governor of every state in the nation, among whom the highest earner takes home an annual check of $206,500.
If districts like East Brunswick and their highfalutin’ brethren aren’t concerned one whit about containing the cost of big-ticket items like administrators’ pay, who in their right mind thinks for one second they’ll start to pay attention to the small-ticket items — the so-called “nonessentials” — any time soon? The answer is: no one with half a brain, that’s who.
And define “nonessential.” What the average school board rates as critical to education the average taxpayer could as easily do without. Just take those superintendents, for example: Quite a few people of high intelligence in this state firmly believe that New Jersey only needs one superintendent for every county, easily doing way with all of those others, or at least downgrading their titles and pay.
That’s why the state must do the job for recalcitrant boards of educations, no matter how much squealing or ruckus is raised.
Some steps have been taken. New Jersey last year put in place a new set of rules to limit certain minor expenditures within the schools — how many teachers can attend a professional conference, for example, or making educators pay for food brought in to staff meetings — but those advances have been halting at a best. Lawmakers have even tried to rein in compensation for administrators, but to little avail, so the buffet continues, catered by the beleaguered taxpayer.
Davy said New Jersey might not have the money to expand preschool as was planned in the fall of this year. She also warned all school districts it is far from certain how much aid they will receive from Trenton come the next school year, a sufficient warning that the state’s financial largess might soon be exhausted.
Frankly, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it forced a change of habit in how school districts too often abuse the dollars they are supposed to hold in trust.