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Rhino Blog
February 03, 2009 | 01:48 PM
It takes a certain type of twisted audacity to pour $300,000 into a glitz-and-glam overhaul of CMS' website and then turn around and use it to announce that the school system is so stone-broke that hundreds of teachers, principals and school security officers will lose their jobs if budget conditions don't improve.
But that's exactly what Superintendent Peter Gorman did last week during a school board budget workshop, where he outlined a series of cuts to meet a 5 percent reduction in state and county funding to the tune of $53 million. A press release of the proposed reductions was posted on CMS' newly revamped, turbo-charged website. Included on the chopping block: 350 teachers, 29 assistant principals, and 50 school security personnel; $3.6 million to eliminate the long-floundering High School Challenge program; $6.3 million from the district's building-services program; $2.2 million from consolidating small-population schools; $4.2 million from local accountability bonuses; $1.3 million from English as Second Language student education; $707,000 from reducing summer school offerings; $373,000 from eliminating 10 Bright Beginnings classrooms; $847,000 from AP Exam fees, which students would have to pay; and $219,000 from Arts & Science Council field trips.
Gorman even tossed out the prospect of eliminating all middle school sports programs. To his credit, he apparently has stopped short of threatening to snatch crayons from kindergarten classrooms.
The notion that CMS must resort to cutting hundreds of teachers and middle school athletics to get its budget in line is patently absurd, unless you consider the gross spending binge that has occurred over the last half-decade, much of it coming under the watch of the latest change-agent superintendent: Millions of dollars to expand an already bloated bureaucracy through the addition of so-called community learning centers, which even proponents concede do absolutely zilch to advance student achievement; a nearly 30 percent increase in top-heavy administrators pulling down six-figure paychecks; hundreds of millions of dollars in misprioritized school construction projects that placed a premium on petty politics instead of physical realities; and millions of dollars more on a slick public relations machine to assure folks that everything was fine.
In that context, it's relatively easy to see how CMS has worked itself into dire fiscal straits, while barely budging student achievement levels in some areas and losing ground in others. The sad part is that Gorman and a majority of the school board refuse to open their eyes.
A fiscally conservative minority of the school board that includes Larry Gauvreau, Kaye McGarry and Ken Gjertsen has for years begged, pleaded, cajoled and baited their colleagues to reduce CMS' budget by at least 10 percent – and for their efforts were tagged as child-hating villains bent on destroying public education. The spending sprees continued unabated and, well, what do you know – now we're left to ponder killing middle school athletics to simply stay afloat.
Gauvreau lasted less than a half hour into last week's budget workshop, before he blew a gasket and left after learning that Gorman & Co. hadn't compiled a budget projection that included a 10 percent reduction in spending, which he had requested. Like he has requested lo these may years.
"It's a circus in there. It's a circus and I'm not wasting time with that," Gauvreau told News 14, which caught up to him in the hallway. "We've got bigger fish to fry than what's going on in there. The CMS school budget is horribly inflated and they use these environments to condition the public into seeking more."
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