We were a bit surprised by some of the public’s reaction to last week’s headline – in print and online – that the school system has been labeled as one of the 20 worst in the state, based on end-of-year, end-of-course testing across the state.
We thought that was a pretty damning indictment of ABSS school officials and school board members.
But we observed (primarily in online comments, which we suspect were largely from social media folks who didn’t bother to read the actual news story, but expressed their views nonetheless) that some people used the new test results to blame the county commissioners for the school system’s poor performance.
They typically claimed that Scrooge-like commissioners have withheld funding for programs that the school bureaucracy and its supporters assume would have “cured” the poor academic performance demonstrated by the fact that over half of the schools in the county (20 of 36, or 55.6 percent) received Ds or Fs from the state.
Commissioners, by way, don’t have line-item control over how ABSS spends the millions provided by the county.
We guess everything is in the eye of the beholder, but we certainly can understand why commissioners might have a bit of a defensive reaction to those who want to blame them for poor ABSS performance.
The fact is, as shown in the accompanying chart (reprinted and updated from one published during budget season earlier this year) that the commissioners have, in fact, consistently funded the overwhelming majority of funding requests from the school system.
[Story continues below chart of annual ABSS requests and the allotments made by the county commissioners.]
Indeed, they have consistently provided 90 to 100 percent of ABSS’ requested levels of spending – both for day-to-day operations and for capital needs – each and every year over the past seven years.
We might add that some of the programs and policies that the commissioners didn’t fund wouldn’t have done anything (even by ABSS’ admission) to address academic performance.
But even if its stoutest defenders were to assume the commissioners are, somehow, at least partially at fault for ABSS’ poor performance, it seems to us it’s hard to justify more than 10 percent “blame,” as it were, since more than 90 percent of all annual ABSS budget requests, were, in fact, funded.
No, it seems difficult to avoid the inevitable conclusion that the poor ABSS performance – in previous years, culminating in being labeled one of the 20 worst in the state – rests with ABSS, not the county’s commissioners.
But we’re not quite sure when ABSS officials will face up to their obligations and responsibilities.
At this week’s school board work session, there was not little mention or acknowledgement that the state had labeled ABSS as one of the 23 lowest low-performing school systems in the state, 20th lowest to be precise. Or that 20 of 36 ABSS schools were given low-performance letter grades of D or F.
Oh, there was plenty of vapid rhetoric about how they’re “committed” to things getting better in the future (much like the empty promises of improvement made in most past years), but without any realistic acknowledgement about how dismally they stand now.
