Given all of the allegations, going around town, that TCC and the Budget Committee are trying to run roughshod through our schools with sledgehammers, a few of us have been trying to get a handle on just how much money the district operates on and from where it comes. Here’s the basic picture, with the School Committee’s request and estimates for the 2011 column:
As you can see, the basic intention of the School Committee and administration is to raise local taxes in order to make up for a decrease in state and especially federal aid, which was particularly high this year. The picture gets a bit more interesting when it’s limited to that aid:
The green segments of these columns represent the state and federal aid that the schools have used publicly in their budget discussions. The red segments represent state and federal aid that have been undisclosed until members of TCC pushed for them, this week. The reason the district has given for keeping these millions of dollars out of the discussion is that they’re “restricted” funds intended for specific purposes.
Consider where that puts the current budget discussion, though: The school district is insisting that taxpayers will be “decimating,” “gutting,” and “destroying” the school system if we don’t increase our contribution to make up for a loss in restricted funds that we didn’t even have to know about, before, because they essentially amounted to direct purchases of services by the state and country. During this school year, those “restricted” funds went from 5.43% of the total budget to 7.93%. In dollar terms, that’s a jump from $1,443,381 to $2,141,944; now the school departments wants Tiverton residents to work that windfall permanently into the budget.
It seems to me that if we didn’t need to know about this portion of revenue and expenses, before, because it didn’t involve our money, then we aren’t responsible for the services that it provided. If anybody in town is gutting the regular programming of the schools, it’s the people who insist that they’ll keep funding restricted programs with general revenue should locals decline to pick up the tab.
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