So...How's That Appliance Fee Workin' For Ya?

We've asked administration a number of times: HOW MUCH DID YOU ACTUALLY COLLECT in appliance fees?

You know...that HUGE --genius--permanent budget reduction initiative designed to save us $6,000 per year on a $72.3 M dollar budget. That's 0.0083% for you folks keeping score at home.

Well...the only answer we ever got out of administration was, "All that money goes into the one pot". So...how much went into that pot? No answer.

Well...we have the answer for you: A whopping $3,001 dollars.

Since admin refused to tell us, we smelled something rather ripe...so we decided to review all the accounts receivable and check registers for the past several month and filtered out of them all records related to appliance fees. Here's the actual data.

2009-10 Appliance Fee Collection

-------->Collected - Refunded
February -- $ 120
March ----- $1,256
April ----- $1,235 ----- $180
May ------- $ 585 ------ $ 15
------------------------------
Sum ------- $3,196 ----- $195
Net -- ----- $3,001

Accordingly, we have a few follow-up questions for administration.

1. WAS this ridiculous appliance fee assessed equitably? Or are there staff members (and we don't blame them) that just said, "No frickin' way am I paying your stupid little fee!". And if that's true--and we believe it is-- how fair is that to those that paid?

2. How come those that have been through the building tell us repeatedly that they see personal appliances without the de rigueur "super special SPASD approved and paid personal appliance fee sticker"?

3. How much did all the monitoring, invoicing, accounts receivable, and stickering COST?

4. Are you really serious about continuing to implement this two-bit, cheesy budget reduction initiative? (we apologize if we indicated our feeling about this in any way).

5. Assuming your pride is going to once again get in your way and you continue this practice...how do you plan to make up for the shortfall in projected budget reductions that you sold to the public?

We have an idea. If the school board insist on this silliness, let;s exercise our power of the electors and reduce school board member salaries by $3,000 in October!

Maybe that will drive the message home (and we apologize to the 1 or 2 school board members that DO think that appliance fees are silly).