I can testify that the buzz is out around town: one of the elementary schools is going to close. I’ve actually encountered parents for whom that particular scare tactic of the Tiverton School Committee was the final straw spurring the family to register the kids at a nearby private school. At the very least, the committee’s tactic is having some unintended consequences.
Part of the budgetary debate behind the threats of drastic cuts is the relevance of “restricted aid.” The following five clips, taken with my camera, present the School Committee and Superintendent Bill Rearick’s full presentation of talking points for the benefit, mostly, of an out-of-the-ordinary videotaping by somebody other than me. An interesting couple of counterpoised points regarding “restricted aid” come in clip 4.
The clip begins with local Democrat Deb Pallasch explaining, to calls of “that’s right” from Rearick and certain committee members:
I think where the confusion comes in is with the restricted aid: We don’t show the revenue, but we don’t show the expenses, either, because when you go to the town and you look at the docket, we’re talking about the revenue we can use… Restricted aid has nothing to do with general expenses. You can’t take IDEA money and pay for a math teacher.
But at the end of the clip, Director of Administration and Finance Doug Fiore explains the following about the 2011 budget:
Right now we’re asking for $617,000 of additional funds, and we’re losing over $500,000 of IDEA ARRA funds that were a one-time boost to our revenue, this year. Those services need to be provided; those expenses aren’t going to go away no matter what we do, we still have children with IEPs. That’s going to basically eat up over half of the additional funds we’re asking for.
Ms. Pallasch kept conceding that the whole “restricted” thing is very confusing, but I’m not confused. “Restricted” means taxpayers don’t have to know about aid that freed up local money for other expenses like salaries and benefits, except when the aid decreases and the school committee wants Tiverton residents to pay for the previously restricted expenses as well as whatever the district spent the liberated dollars on. Got it? They can’t do just anything with restricted funds, but they can do anything with the funds that restricted funds allow them not to spend on restricted expenses, which were general expenses until somebody else offered to pay for them, and which become general expenses again when the additional revenue goes away. That’s why a chart of the district’s total aid — including state and federal, restricted and general — looks like this:
The dotted-line box is the amount of additional tax money that the School Committee would like to draw from the town, and it’s obvious that most of it is intended to be a general revenue replacement of restricted revenue. The question is: How did all of that targeted money get built into the budget? That’s something that’s not answered in these videos.
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