We’re always rather amazed at how Alamance-Burlington school board members can sit with perfectly straight faces while considering some of the most outlandish ideas around.
We say straight faces, but sometimes they’re almost downright giddy, as this week when they acted in an all-too-frequent role as cheerleaders for more spending. Always more spending.
This week it was the pitiful plight of the “classified employees,” those supposedly poor hourly employees of the school system – bus drivers, cafeteria workers and others – who suddenly deserve a special taxpayer-funded supplement to their pay.
We’re almost always especially suspicious when “dire needs” that have never previously been mentioned as a problem or issue suddenly become “urgent.”
Their cause was championed by the local teachers’ union whose dozen or so members lobbied for the new supplement during a public hearing on the budget.
Their chorus was joined by vapid remarks by a few of the school board cheerleader contingent – Dr. Charles Parker, Seneca Rogers, and Avery Wagoner – who found this so vital that Rogers even termed these employees “basically the backbone of a school.”
No wonder our schools aren’t doing very well academically, if a school board member seriously believes cafeteria workers and bus drivers are the backbone of a school.
Such is the category of the $1.1 million in new spending to create a brand new county-funded supplement for these employees.
And, like so many other school system ideas, this one becomes the basis for even more future spending. With the formula that the school board adopted, the expense for these classified employees will grow even more in the years ahead.
It’s the equivalent of an entitlement at the federal government: once started, they’re almost impossible to stop or even curtail.
We suspect that this will be first, and easiest, cut the county commissioners will make after examining the school system’s multi-million dollar request.
The bottom line – which is what most commissioners will be considering even if school board members never give it a second thought – is what would be the taxpayer ramifications for this astronomical request.
By asking for $19.3 million more, on top of last year’s $59.3 million – thus a total of $78.6 million – the school system is asking for an almost one-third increase in spending (32.5 percent to be precise and round down).
The property tax impact of such a wildly out-of-line increase, if the commissioners granted it all, would translate, all by itself, to an almost 8-cent increase (7.72 cents), or a 16 percent increase in county property taxes.
That is outrageous.
We guess we should consider ourselves “lucky” that school officials made some nips and tucks to their originally-floated idea of an even higher increase of $27.3 million (which would have been 46 percent higher than last year’s budget), that, if fully funded, could have resulted in a 24 percent hike in property taxes.
But whether 24 percent, or the current 16 percent, keep in mind that these figures are without the impact from any other of a host of county departments and agencies that also want the taxpayers to spend more on them.
Now we hate not to be able to give an occasional plaudit to the school system, since they are so rare.
We would acknowledge, however, that it appears that the current hired leadership – if not members of the school board itself – are trying (or at least they say they are trying) to figure how to be more financially transparent, to acknowledge past mistakes (a very novel concept at ABSS and among its school board members), and to look for methods for trimming expenses.
In the case of past mistakes, school superintendent Dr. Aaron Fleming and chief finance officer Tony Messer, express dismay that past school board members and school officials did not allocate any of the windfall of Covid relief money (ah, that ostensibly free money from Washington) to repairing or improving facilities.
Both said the school systems where they worked at the time did so.
And that’s one reason this year’s budget is so out of whack – a whopping $13.5 million increase in proposed spending for capital improvements.
This is based, to some degree, on findings from a study commissioned by the county commissioners, on the physical status of all county buildings.
Fleming and Messer also say they were told by county officials to include that whole increase in this year’s budget request – even if they thought some reductions could be achieved.
We suspect the origin of that instruction came from county manager Heidi York, who’s never met a tax increase she didn’t like.
She has succeeded in persuading commissioners to adopt property tax increases in each of the past two years.
We’re guessing that York is hoping to use that facilities study as a pretext for hiking capital spending for the school system and thereby justifying higher spending (again) – and, by extension, the need for (another) property tax increase.
We doubt it ever occurs to bureaucrats in county government – or the school system – to spend much time trying to figure how unnecessary, duplicative, or otherwise extravagant spending could be reduced.
That’s one reason we’re at least a little encouraged that Fleming and Messer say that’s what they’re working on.
But there’s a long way to go, and a lot of previous bad decisions to be overcome.
And while, they supposedly looking for ways to trim, they’re a part of this proposed new supplement for hourly employees that’s, quite frankly, a non-starter.
If mostly larger and wealthier counties (such as Wake, Guilford, and Orange) are the primary examples of school systems that have adopted such a bonanza for their hourly workers (as were the examples given to the school board by Messer), it surely stands to reason that there’s not much of a foundation for doing so in Alamance County.
At any rate, the school board this week tossed the hot potato budget to the commissioners, who we certainly hope will douse most of the requested spending increases, starting with the new supplement.
