I had hopes for House Bill 1208. Originally it was just a shell, introduced by my Senator Russell Olson and GOP compadres Brown, Gosch, and Lust to hold a place in the hopper until someone could figure out a way to translate their boilerplate about reducing government mandates into practical money-saving ideas. I thought maybe our legislators could identify some real inefficiencies caused by their meddling from Pierre and help schools invest more in students.
There I go again with my silly optimism. Our legislators could have voted to free South Dakota schools from satisfying the expensive and mostly fruitless testing mandates of No Child Left Behind. They could have voted to lift teacher certification requirements and give districts more liberty to hire teachers based on experience and proven performance (heck, just close the certification office, save teachers the application fees, and pour the money for processing and Praxis tests into K-12 funding!). They could have repealed state curriculum standards and freed teachers to spend more time teaching instead of generating endless documents shoehorning descriptions of what they are teaching into neat little boxes for Pierre bureaucrats.
But what do we get? In the final form that lurched out of the Senate yesterday, we get nibbling around the edges:
- We still require schools to conduct criminal background checks on new hires, but we remove school districts' authority to reimburse employees for that cost of employment. So the Legislature isn't really reducing the cost of state mandates; it's just shifting that cost from school districts to individuals.
- We reduce required bus driver training from once a year to once every five years. We also require bus drivers to pay for that training, again not eliminating costs but shifting them from the government to the individual.
- We eliminate authority for school districts to let teachers attend annual professional association meetings without loss of pay. As with the background-check rule, we're not even removing a mandate; the statute HB 1208 repeals here isn't a mandate, but an option giving districts the freedom to support teachers attending these useful professional meetings. But I guess Pierre doesn't want to make it easy for teachers to get together and network. Those darn teachers might organize some plot against the government....
I had hoped Senator Olson could put some real money where his mouth is. But HB 1208 proves that even given two months in Pierre, after babbling about how 10% cuts to K-12 education would be "a good idea," our legislators can't identify practical ways to cut even a significant portion of that from our school district budgets. With HB 1208, Olson et al. have proven they can't think past budget trivialities. It's up to the school districts to do the hard work of firing staff, cutting programs, and raising taxes.
p.s.: School budgets are hard, and the Legislature just made them harder. Madison Central and every school district will need serious policymakers to help them get through this awful mess. That's why you vote to put me on the Madison Central School Board.
After thirty six years of Republican governors if they would say they were going to cut waste would be an admission of thirty six years of incompetence. But 'cutting fat' has gotten them elected for a very long time. Now just plain cutting seems to win votes. When they have employees pay for their own training is simply irresponsible management. So are they ever going to just do what is right or are they going to perpetually find one liners to impress voters. If South Dakotans are not educated enough to see through this, they we have bigger problems.
My father owned a small business in a small town. During the 80's farm crisis it didn't matter what business you were in you felt the hit. My dad had to let employees go, take a part time job at night, re-finance loans, dip into retirement funds and deplete savings. He did this not just to keep his business running and our home in the family, food on the table and heat in that house, he did it because he had two kids in school.
My sister and I weren't spoiled, but we were able wore decent clothes, we were able to participate in sports, band, theater, oral interp and take swimming lessons and piano lessons. Why? My father put the needs on his children before his own needs.
I don't think that my story is unique...especially not here in the Midwest. It's a shame that Russel Olson (Please vote this clown out...PLEASE) and his cronies couldn't remember that. Oh and I grew up 6 miles from Russel Olson, I drank with Russell, fought with Russell...and I know Russ has a similar story. It's a shame that mister Big Shot can't be bothered to remember the face of his father...to remember where he came from.
The shame of putting their reputations before the needs of their children and those less fortunate among us that rely on state programs. Shame on them all.
You also missed the most critical part of 1208, the repeal of part of the requirement to be a sparse school. With the budget caps removed five more schools will become sparse and one of them is Miller. With out additional money added to cover these in coming schools, it will steel money that is critical to west river schools like Faith, Bison, and Lemmon. At the end of FY2010, Miller had a General Fund Balance of $1,300,000. Now they are going to get additional dollars for being sparse? This is the real crime that was committed with the passage of 1208!!
Sorry "west river" - that was one of the few benefits of HB1208 as it force more consolidation. Why is it hard for folks to consolidate their emptying school districts when they think nothing of consolidating ranches and farms? We don't need an average of 3 school districts per county, especially in the empty counties. Several counties should be in one school district. We cannot afford a principal for many nearly empty schools. And we can not afford to subsidize extracurricular non-scholarly activities. Anyone arguing there is no fat in K-12 or higher ed just isn't looking or is willfully blind.
But John, if the big fat is too many districts and the big savings are in consolidation, the Legislature didn't have the guts to pull that trigger. And if I'm reading the sparse school line of HB 1208 correctly, this bill makes it easier for sparse schools to get aid, right? Again, the Legislature can't muster the will to impose specific cuts on the districts; it just cuts the funding and leaves it to districts to do the hard thinking. That's an abdication of policymaking responsibility.
[Slightly more than tangentially related: Jon Marshall proposes hard-core consolidation of our higher education system.]
As a teacher I can't believe that one would say we don't need curriculum standards. We need to have a standard of education to cut down on the number of pet projects that teachers repeatedly teach each year. Standards have helped with this but it has not been eliminated. I don't like seeing teachers who have no regards for standards and what they should be teaching students. If all teacher taught they way they should we wouldn't need standards but a few have forced them on all of us.
Secondly, you don't want teachers to have to pay to get a job. Do you disagree with having to pay to get your drivers license? Perhaps the state should pay for that also. There is nothing wrong with having standards and those who simply hate one political party will bad mouth everything they do when in all reality they agree with several points but have their heads to far in the sand to be honest with themselves.
Hang on, Sara. I'm just pointing out how hard it is for the legislature or anyone else to point to concrete budget items, be they mandates from Pierre or choices at the local level, that constitute real fat that can be cut from the K-12 budget.
Now I would suggest that if we are going to talk about mandates from Pierre that impose costs on local districts, state-level curriculum standards do impose costs, arguably more costs in time and money than the budget nibblers in HB 1208. I'm not against standards. But I think every qualified teacher already has standards and doesn't need Pierre to tell them those standards, let alone require them to engage in hours of in-service busy work where we turn the standards we have built through years of education and practice into happy little bullet lists or spreadsheets that we submit to Pierre for no one to read.
As for teacher certification, consider this alternative: suppose we gave school boards the freedom to hire good teachers with demonstrated knowledge and experience without requiring those teachers to go through the bloated university teacher education program. Do you think your school board could still evaluate job applicants and current staff to determine whether they can teach effectively? Just how well does that teaching certificate translate into effective teaching?
These aren't easy questions. And these questions aren't about hating one political party or another. I'm asking just where the fat is that legislators think K-12 can cut. When the best the Legislature can come up with is HB 1208, that's a sign there's not much to cut.
There is a very vocal minority of South Dakotans that sees a huge amount of fat in education. They do not see the need for small schools, sports, busing, computers, support staff or high teacher and administrative salaries.
It's all a matter of perspective in what's important in your life. If you have kids, then education is a strong priority. If you are older and struggling to pay the bills, then spending more money on schools is seen as wasteful.
In small schools, there are opportunities to be involved in everything. A star on the ORR Raider basketball or football team would not necessarily even make the team in Sioux Falls.
If we really wanted to save money on education, we would have to sacrifice all local control. We could eliminate all "extras" and have the state decide which school would be lucky enough to stay open. We could fire experienced teachers and hire young teachers at a much cheaper salary. We could get rid of all electives and just teach the core basics. We could make parents responsible for transporting their kids to school: no busing. We could get rid of all sports. We could eliminate the state retirement system. We could lower graduation requirements. We could allow students to quit school after completing the eighth grade. We could repeal open enrollment. We could standardize curriculum and teaching methods.
I don't think that the citizens of South Dakota are ready to do all of these things, BUT there are those who would pull the plug on some of these services and activities if they could.
And Michael, regrettably, under the abominable Russ Olson budget, some of those options are going to be on the table for some school districts. I dread the budget decisions I will have to make when I'm on the school board.
We can't hang the credit for the budget on just one man.
Yes we can. The vaunted Senate Majority Leader certainly tries to claim credit for lots of other projects to get mileage at the ballot box. It seems only fair to assign him due credit for the budget that will make life hard for school boards, teachers, and students across the state. In District 8, Rutland, Oldham-Ramona, Flandreau, Colman-Egan, Chester, Madison, Howard, and Sanborn Central, Woonsocket can all blame their own senator for this budget and for HB 1208, which offers little significant practical assistance in making ends meet.
Sorry “John Kelly†maybe you should look at your map and do a little bit of homework first. Let’s look at the schools that are left in West River.
In Dewey County there are two Schools, Timber Lake and Eagle Butte,
In Ziebach County there is one School, Dupree
In Corson County there are two Schools, McIntosh and McLaughlin
In Perkins County there are two Schools, Bison and Lemmon
In Harding County there is one School, Buffalo
In Meade County there are two Schools, Sturgis and Faith
In Butte County there are two School, Newell and Belle Fourche
10 of these schools are listed as sparse by the definition in statute. These 12 schools cover well over 30,000 square miles.
So if we are going to close schools out here which one should we close. Faith already brings students in from 75 miles away and they live in town all week and go home on the weekends.
By your comments, if you live in these rural areas these children are not worthy on being able to attend school and should be home schooled? These children already live in an isolated area of the state and we should just isolate them some more by making them homeschooled.
There is a bigger and bigger divide in this state and it gets worse every year, East River vs. West River, Rural vs. Urban, and I don’t see it getting any better.
West River makes some good points. How far should rural studentss have to drive or be driven to get to rural schools so that some doctor's, medical administrator, or lawyer's kids in Sioux Falls can be in even more multiple athletic and extracurricular activities?
The Republicans are also hellbent on killing public broadcasting which brings perhaps more of educational value into the boondocks than does any other organization.
The SD GOP is a bunch of retrograde Republicans who apparently regard ignorance as a benefit to them and their special interests.
I'm with you, Doug. The only way we can consider sparse school districts to be "fat" is if we decide that entire communities in sparsely populated areas don't deserve the basic social-contract guarantees of schools, roads, cops, etc. Do we really want to declare wide swaths of our state (East and West River) to be "no man's land" where you can go live if you want but will have to be entirely self-sufficient?
The entire legislature and in turn all residents of this state now take ownership of this budget. In real terms, only several legislators could have made a difference in taking the state budget in a new direction. One of them would have been Russ Olson. To that extent, he failed to display leadership for this state. If the requirement for being a majority leader is to carry the "water bucket" for the governor than so be it. But if being majority leader is to foster new ideas and guide diverse ideas by legislators, then lets demand that of a majority leader. l
Right on, Charlie. The Majority Leader sets the agenda. He more than any other Senator can make or break any given piece of legislation. If Olson had any good ideas for supporting education or reducing burdensome mandates, he could have stamped them onto HB 1208 or the budget. Instead, we got Dennis Daugaard's "new norm", a permanent hamstringing of K-12 education and public services. Olson owns this mess, and we must fix it by (1) making hard choices at the local school board level, then (2) firing Russell Olson in 2012.
http://tinyurl.com/4pnjfqs
I remember when GWB used those words. I hope that our current Governor is more prophetic that our past president.