Students Were Always the Biggest Losers with the Democrats Blueprint
Defunding Schools in the Name of "Equity" is here, and it's students who are bearing the brunt of the malevolence of Maryland Democrats and their MSEA overlords
Those of us who have been following the Kirwan Commission Blueprint for the last several years, from its conception until its implementation, have known for years that a funding disaster was going to happen.
Now, the realization has finally hit School Systems that the Kirwan Blueprint requires them to rob from Peter to pay Paul:
The re-prioritizing has been painful. Cecil County school Superintendent Jeffrey Lawson examined what that would mean for two schools in his county if he had to carry out the Blueprint requirements next school year. One is Bay View Elementary, where 66% of students are considered poor and 22% have special needs. The school would have seen a $1.3 million increase in its budget, but the second school, Rising Sun Middle School, which has significantly fewer students with special needs and poor students, would see its budget fall by $1.1 million.
In stark terms, that would mean adding 14 teachers to Bay View and taking 12 teachers from Rising Sun. Lawson said Bay View would likely have two teachers in a number of classrooms, since there aren’t 14 additional classrooms in the school. The student-to-teacher ratio at Bay View would fall to concentrate attention on students who need it the most. At Rising Sun, student class sizes might rise to 35 to 40 students per teacher, he said.
Where is the “equity” in this? Where is the fairness? Where is the sanity in taking millions from one school to apply it to another based solely on socioeconomic factors? How are classes with 35 to 40 students per teacher sustainable when Democrats and union members harp on the need for “smaller class sizes? How is it logical for that to be happening when one school has two teachers in the same classroom?
This is madness on a statewide scale. And we told you it was going to happen in November:
In testimony before the Anne Arundel County Board of Education last week, an Anne Arundel County Public Schools official acknowledged that some schools may be required to lose funding to meet Kirwan Commission goals.
When responding to questioning from Board Member Corinne Frank, AACPS Chief Financial Officer Matt Stanksi noted that funding may have to be removed from some schools in order to send the money to other schools.
On top of all of that, the spending priorities mandated upon the counties by the state are having a real impact on students across the board, including in areas that are allegedly important to those who are pushing Kirwin:
That scenario is happening now in Cecil County, where a senior at Rising Sun High School, Allison Stoudt, decided to lead a revolt against the proposed school budget for next year that wipes out middle school and Junior Varsity athletic programs, along with marching band, and limits fine arts.
While I will grant you that athletic programs and marching bands are not the highest priority when it comes to funding, I think we can all agree that they offer a tremendous opportunity for students to learn very important life skills.
And Democrats have been lamenting the loss of fine arts in public schools for decades. Now, through their incompetence, they are actively forcing cuts to fine arts programs. And I am guessing that Cecil County is not alone in this.
Naturally, MSEA honcho Cheryl Bost doesn’t care about any of this as long as MSEA collets more union dues salaries go up:
Cheryl Bost, the president of the Maryland State Education Association, said it doesn’t have to mean involuntarily transferring large numbers of teachers around a district. If school systems think creatively, she said, they can entice veteran teachers — who command the highest salaries — to schools with the neediest kids. They could pay teachers significant bonuses or add extra social workers, guidance counselors or other staff to support a child’s learning.
“The Blueprint has to get the superintendents out of the mindset that we are treating all the schools the same; we aren’t anymore,” she said.
Bost is correct that schools are no longer being treated the same. But they are being treated not according specifically to performance, but instead to socioeconomic factors.
Instead of taking money from certain schools and reprogramming it to others, how are Superintendents looking to create cost savings from non-classroom dollars. After all, as I have pointed out before, at least 80% of school system budgets are tied up in non-instructional spending.
What cuts were made to administrative overhead?
What cuts were made to non-classroom infrastructure?
What cuts were made to non-essential travel?
What cuts were made to administrative salaries?
Only after those questions are answered should reprogramming money from one school to another even be on the table.
And yet, the elephant in the room remains that there are no benchmarks or standards in place to determine success. There was never an evaluation to determine if the methodology used by the Thornton Commission was successful, yet that methodology was merely rolled into the Kirwin Commission recommendations with an astronomically high price tag attached.
As always……I told you so:
While we can agree that education must be improved the Kirwan Commission and its recommendations are flawed policies that burden the state with an unsustainable tab.
Oh….and I told you so:
The Kirwan Commission is operating in a dream world unencumbered by fiscal restraint or fiscal realities. The entire Commission and its funding working group have shown that they are not committed to serious solutions to fix Maryland’s schools and instead have charted a course that will ensure unbearable financial pain on Maryland’s middle and working-class families. These recommendations are neither realistic or sustainable.