More Budget Whoas!

Our reader writes again!


I went down to the presentation..
to get my fair share of bad news.
They said they need to raise Granny’s taxes
So the purse strings can stay fast and loose.

I say (to paraphrase the 20th century philosophers Jagger and Richards), you can’t always get what you want, so figure out what you need and forget the Chinese grade schools.[1]

In good times, school funding is insulated from the basic economic principle of “scarcity” (a little help for you administration types can be found here: http://www.socialstudiesforkids.com/articles/economics/scarcityandchoices1.htm ). I suspect that the administration and board understand what scarcity is, because many of them have budgets of their own. The problem is that they don’t think it applies in a school setting outside of Business Ed. They have the budgetary process broken down into 3 easy steps:

1) Make a list of what we want;
2) ?????????????; and
3) Buy what we want.

Couldn’t be simpler, as long as you don’t get too bogged down in Step 2. And they don’t. In good times this really doesn’t matter much, since with all the new construction and rising home values and full employment in good paying jobs the money comes in without a lot of grumbling. People treat the school board and administration like they treat their children, by just grimacing and forking over the money when asked and making a half-hearted attempt to encourage the beneficiary of their largesse to spend it wisely (though none but Roger Fetterly are naïve enough to ask for change back).

When the new concrete stops flowing and people start losing their jobs, it’s a different story. ATM visits get further apart and checkbook balances start hovering near the red and, as much as it hurts us to say ‘no’ to the children, we say ‘no’. And our children adapt. They adjust their budget, vending machine visits get further apart and they get used to going through life with the pocket change supply hovering near zero a little more often.

When things get bad, our children still get what they need. We still feed them, buy them clothes, and keep shelter around them. We just cut out the extras that are kinda’ fun but don’t directly contribute to our #1 worldly obligation of raising good young people. We focus on the essentials, and recognize the nonessential for what it is—nonessential.

The board and administration need to do the same thing. The things they buy that are nonessential are keeping families from providing the things that are. If they want to make their mark on the world by doing something revolutionary, then develop a way to keep costs down so that we can provide our children with more for less. Who knows, the observant students might even see what we are doing and learn from it. Lessons ripped right from the pages of Business Ed…
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[1] Unless you are prepared to go full-immersion Chinese grade school and have the students spend a couple hours each day rolling fireworks to pay for school books. Me either.