I received a message recently from a student who remarked on budget cuts in the school district. Here’s part of what he had to say —
I don’t know if you have heard but recently the WUSD released its tentative cuts for next fall. They might be cutting the 5th grade band program but for sure they are getting rid of Josh Barret the current band director at that level. The administration of course will still be receiving its 10% raise this year though. I feel that this is a serious mismanagement of government at our school level by the administration because most Americans across the country are taking pay cuts now. If you should chose to run with this story you may email me at any time and I will be willing to help you out.
I wrote back privately, and here’s a longer public reply —
Our community will often hear that a certain cut had to take place, because of a loss of state aid, the bad economy, etc. Someone will declare that we’re out of money, and so a certain cut had to take place.
That’s not true, as the reader correctly observes. Cuts may be necessary, but that doesn’t justify any particular cut. Our city and school district confuse – deliberately, sometimes, I think – cuts generally with specific cuts. We find ourselves in the position where the City of Whitewater and the Whitewater Unified School District will surely lose contributions on which they had counted from the State of Wisconsin.
As the state budget’s unfavorable, we can expect that cities and school districts across Wisconsin will feel that impact. And yet, it’s so easy to declare that cuts to a particular position, or service, where inevitable, because we’ve received less state money. It’s as though, faced with less from the state, there were only one choice possible — the very choice that politicians, administrators, or bureaucrats made.
Choices are seldom so constrained, that there is only one possible solution. It’s not as though we’re on a lifeboat, with one cracker left to share.
One might cut staff, but there are other options, too. We might have chosen differently before now, and we might choose differently now as well.
Declaring that cuts made were forced as a consequence of declining state aid masks the responsibility and accountability for choosing one cut over another.
Specific cuts, by the way, often seem to fall on others, including front-line workers, rather than politicians, bureaucrats, etc., themselves.