A hundred Milwaukee School employees filed into the Central Office auditorium on Tuesday, May 15th when a School Board committee took up the system’s budget for the next school year. Many carried cardboard signs with the words “Do the Right Thing” to protest the possible cuts to health insurance.
Some speakers accused the Board of being heartless, not caring if employees even lived or died because of a lack of health insurance.
It isn’t much fun to chair a Milwaukee School Board committee when that committee has to look at where to cut the budget, but it was my job to chair this meeting. Just what is the right thing for the School Board to do?
At previous meetings, the public accused the Board of being heartless because we were cutting teachers and class sizes would rise. Of course the teachers’ union asked its own members if they would consider a cut in wages to preserve some of the positions. The teachers said, “No!” in most emphatic terms.
I can understand why teachers near retirement would turn down such a request. The cuts would not just amount to a few thousand dollars of give backs for that one year, but rather givebacks of thousands of dollars over one’s lifetime from pensions.
The public also accused the Board of being heartless because we were not properly funding language immersion programs, librarians, social workers, early childhood programs, and a host of other programs. One supervisor said that we needed more curriculum specialists, not less.
Name the cut, the School Board was heartless.
Of course, few speakers suggested other areas to cut to save their programs. One retired teacher and frequent speaker at Board meetings, Ross Torsud, did suggest more cuts in central administration. But even Ross admitted to me after the meeting that such cuts would mostly be symbolic and have little impact on the overall MPS budget.
One former School Board member, Tim Petersons, recommended in a letter that the entire School Board cut their pay to zero to help balance the budget. Of course, Petersons is no longer on the Board, so it isn’t like he would be giving up anything. The School Board has not had a pay increase in twelve years, and the amount saved would pay for only a couple of teachers. More symbolism, but not much in real savings here.
As soon as you hear a politician stating that they can balance a governmental body’s shortfall be getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse, know that you are being sold a bottle of snake oil. MPS could eliminate half of Central Office and the cuts would not hire back a half teacher for every MPS school.
The real problem is that the state made dramatic cuts to the school system’s budget while increasing the amount of money coming out of MPS to pay for the school choice program. The school systems that look like they are awash in money after the cuts to collective bargaining and the cuts to school funding are school systems that received far fewer dollars from the state for school funding.
After next school year, MPS teachers will be paying into their pensions and health insurance programs saving the school system money. But where will we get the teachers willing to work in MPS at these lower wages and worsening work conditions?
The School Board would love to “Do the Right Thing” but it is becoming harder to know just what the right thing is or where we will get the money. Our hearts are breaking.
