Dear Editor:
This may be a first, but I’m giving the
”
Golden Quill Award
”
to the op-ed editor for poignant, matter-of-fact recommendations
that will provide better relationships between the public, GUSD
employees and the Board of Education.
Dear Editor:
This may be a first, but I’m giving the “Golden Quill Award” to the op-ed editor for poignant, matter-of-fact recommendations that will provide better relationships between the public, GUSD employees and the Board of Education.
As a former business entrepreneur, public school instructor and, once again, in private industry, I’ve learned that there is a huge disconnect between the workings of public education and how the public perceives education works. In private industry, one must have a product to promote, advertise, and sell. With money coming in, there is paying off overhead and employees, developing, promoting and selling the product at a profit that will continue this cycle of capitalistic profit. Without a product to sell, money stops rolling in, and the cycle stops.
Education is the opposite. Districts receive public money without any promotion, selling, or advertising of a product. Students are not inanimate objects that abide by the rules of capitalistic product consumption. On a daily basis, student achievement is regulated by the home, friends, work, and school. Unlike consumable products that exist without external influences, students are reflective of the environments in which they are engaged, and respond accordingly.
State law recommends districts to set aside or reserve a minimum percentage of received funds for any unexpected, calamitous events. The average for most districts is a reserve of 3 percent of total expenditures. All monies beyond the “reserve” should be spent on student programs, employees, and maintaining facilities.
Most districts do not follow the state’s recommended procedures. Over the last 10 years in California, districts have averaged 10.1 percent in reserves. In effect, districts have not been spending 7 percent of the monies the public sends to them for education. Instead, districts “squirrel away” or, in teacher vernacular, “hide the money,” for reasons that aren’t quite clear.
The public should know that when money is sent to the districts to spend on education, then it should be spent.
District budgets are neither like private industry nor household budgets. In these, if the money doesn’t come in, products cannot be purchased. In education, the money comes in, and districts spend the money as they determine, or befits specific, categorical programs. Along the way, the public is befuddled by educational financial acronyms that create a maze of confusing budgetary jargon.
The editors of The Dispatch get the Golden Quill for making public overtures in eliminating this “fog of fiduciary financial foolery,” and replace it with consumer friendly, public understandable phraseology in which the common person can determine what is happening with the funds that the district is receiving and spending.
How might this be done? An educational financial column in The Dispatch on a regular basis explaining the what’s, where’s, how’s and why’s of educational finance could do wonders for the public understanding.
Dale Morejón, Gilroy
Submitted Thursday, Jan. 2 to ed****@ga****.com
