Richard Moll, deputy superintendent for finances for the Volusia County Schools, gave a talk to the New Smyrna Kiwanis recently to explain the financial problems the district is facing. After listening to his talk, it is hard to understand what the problem is. Like a lot of us Kiwanians, Ray Hallstrom commented, “I still don’t know what it is they would like us to do.”
Moll started his presentation by stating Florida was near the bottom of the list of states when it comes to how much is spent per capita for education. This may have gotten him off on the wrong foot since most members of the audience know that we are spending a lot on education.
Looking at the raw numbers, there is a reduction of about $45 million in a budget that is well over $1 billion (Several years ago it was 1.3 billion). Why a reduction of less than 4 percent should cause such a great problem was a great mystery to us.
When you realize that $1.3 billion comes to $20,000 per student per year, sympathy for the district's problem vanishes. This is between 3 and 6 times what it would cost to educate a child at a private school.
The difference in costs between public and private schools is due mainly three factors.
First, the public schools have proportionately about 3 to 4 times as many people not teaching as private schools.
Second, the public school facilities are lavish compared to private school facilities.
And third, the private schools don’t pay as much as public schools for teachers.
One could argue that private school teachers are inferior except the private school pupils score higher on standardized tests and the rate of college attendance is much higher for private school graduates. If one were to argue that the private schools use non-certified teachers, note that studies have indicated that teacher certification has no correlation to teacher ability or performance.
The school officials argue that their huge overblown construction budget can’t be used for other purposes. This is a very serious institutional problem. If they can’t move resources from where they are not needed to where they are needed, then it becomes a non-functional system.
In fact, if they can’t handle a 4 percent decrease in funding when their personnel roster is bloated they obviously have a non-functional system.
The problems with the public school system are very frustrating because for every reasonable solution presented by the taxpayers, the public school authorities have about a dozen legal, bureaucratic and emotional reasons why such solutions can’t be used to solve their problems.
The only acceptable answer one get from the school system is to give them more money.
But the he problem with giving them more money is that it won’t help.
The system has reached the “Parkinson point” where a bureaucracy becomes so big that more money makes things worse instead of better. One typical phenomenon is that the excess personnel in the system start turning out useless paperwork that the rest have to respond to. In the school system, the teachers have to take time from teaching to fill out useless paperwork, and therefore, become less effective.
If the school officials see they won’t get any more money and that parents are belligerent about cutting out good school programs, then maybe the school administrators will work out a fairly good solution to their money problems.
If we give them more money we are simply enabling them to continue as they have in the past unchecked with our checks.