By Tom Sgouros in
RIFuture.org
I
woke up today to an automated phone call from the school superintendent telling
me that the first day of school in North Kingstown has been delayed by a
strike.
The
Educational Support Personnel (ESP) union has walked out over the School
Committee’s action to outsource the jobs of all 26 janitors, and so my daughter
is home today instead.
As is usual, there is a welter of claims and
counter-claims. The ESP union offered some pretty substantial concessions this
spring. They say they met the dollar figure the School Committee had insisted
was necessary.
The Committee responded that they were close, but the
superintendent had already budgeted some of the savings the union was offering
so they needed more. An arbitrator was called in and that report offered a way
to save $1.3 million over two years, but again that was measured over the
previous year, not over the proposed budget, which already included some of
those savings, so it wasn’t enough.
In response, the School Committee voted 5-2 to outsource
the 26 custodian jobs. They did insist that the new contractor hire back as
many of the custodians as possible, and I gather that 21 of them took the new
deal: their old jobs at about 70% of salary, minus the health insurance and
pension. In other words, around a 40-45% pay cut, give or take. Would you take
that?
I talked to my daughter about this, and she told me about
the custodian at the middle school who had encouraged her with a model car she
and some classmates built for a Science Olympiad competition in seventh grade
(their team won the state event, and went to the national event in Wisconsin
that year), and about the elementary school custodian who talked and joked with
the children in the cafeteria, but also knew them all, even the first graders.
Those are the kind of people you get when the jobs are good jobs.
But I guess that kind of thing is to be part of the past
now. Instead of jobs that can support a family, we’ll have jobs that people
move through. We’ll have custodial staff stretched thinner, and we’ll have an
outsourcing company that is making good money off the deal, that indispensable
part of what some people call progress.
Will the district save money? Maybe this year. But
the teacher contract comes up in the fall. What do you suppose will be their
level of enthusiasm when the School Committee requests concessions to get
through this fiscal storm?
Oh yes, that storm. In all the ire directed at the School
Committe in this dispute, let’s not forget that it was the actions of the Town
Council that precipitated this crisis. The School Committee told them last
winter that they weren’t going to be able to meet the property-tax caps imposed
by the state without severe pain.
In response, the Town Council cut the school
budget even further than the property tax cap demands. North Kingstown has a
notoriously dysfunctional School Committee, but it was Council President
Elizabeth Dolan, and members Michael Bestwick, Charlie Stamm, Carol Hueston,
and Charles Brennan who have effectively put the screws to the custodians.
Council members I’ve spoken to seem proud that they’re
willing to hold the line on taxes, but at what cost? North Kingstown’s
taxes are already lower than average in the state, according to the tax effort
formula defined in state law (75.5% of the average).
In a conversation one summer evening this past July, one
council member told me with certainty about the waste that could be cut out of
the school budget. As I usually notice when people decry government waste to
me, the member could supply no specific suggestion to cut beyond the job of an
assistant to the superintendent, a cost of less than one fifteenth the amount
they insisted be cut.
The custodian contract wasn’t the only change this year.
Just looking at the high school (where my family’s attention is focused, for
better or worse), the foreign language offerings have been slashed, school
supplies cut way back, and graduation requirements lowered, all for budget
reasons.
One of the curiosities of government around here that we
take for granted is that we elect School Committee members, and don’t give them
the independence to make their own decisions. I’m doing policy consulting work
in other states lately, and I’ve noticed that in lots of states — maybe the
majority outside New England — school departments are a parallel government,
operated independently of the city or county where they are located, often with
separate tax bills.
School Committee members there are directly responsible
to voters for the decisions they make. Around here, by contrast, the School
Committee is subservient to the City or Town Council. The North Kingstown
Council has spoken, its members are largely responsible for the budget crisis
in the school department, but they take no heat for that. Union press releases
inveigh against the School Committee, but ignore the Town Council. This, it
seems to me, is the opposite of taking responsibility.
So, Liz Dolan: Your Council cut the school budget. You
overruled the opinions of the people supposedly responsible for that budget.
Where exactly is the waste?
Michael Bestwick: Precisely what would you cut?
Charles Brennan: Where else do we find savings?
Please be specific.
Carol Hueston: What other jobs are to be
outsourced?
Charlie Stamm: How do we settle this dispute? It is
the straightforward consequence of your decisions: how will you defend those
choices? Or will you just hope no one notices that you were behind the
hard choices made by someone else?
Tom Sgouros is a freelance engineer, policy
analyst, and writer. Reach him at ripr@whatcheer.net. Buy his book, "Ten
Things You Don't Know About Rhode Island" at whatcheer.net
