Do It Right
Apr 10th, 2008 by Dave
The state’s school districts have been asked to give back 10% of their state funds to help eliminate the deficit. That is a lot of money, and it is patently unfair to ask them for it. There is a lot of waste in our education spending, but an immediate 10% giveback is just crazy.
What the situation also provides is an opportunity to implement some of the key reforms in the LEAD Committee report. Two specifically come to mind: shared services and purchasing.
The school districts could start by eliminating some administrative positions, allowing for the creation of county-wide school services departments. For instance, instead of every school district having a comptroller, there would be two or three per county. We need to leave the key decision-making at the local level, but provide the services at a more regional level.
Also, purchasing reform is key. We can provide some revolutionary reform by giving the schools some control over their budgets, but mandate that what the schools do buy, they buy within a coordinated statewide purchasing system. That spending should be tracked much better than it is now, and the contracts should be improved as often as possible.
Times where spending has to be tightened offer unique opportunities to set the table for the next ten years. The school districts, the DOE and the state should band together during this time and implement some much-needed reform.
“Also, purchasing reform is key. We can provide some revolutionary reform by giving the schools some control over their budgets, but mandate that what the schools do buy, they buy within a coordinated statewide purchasing system. That spending should be tracked much better than it is now, and the contracts should be improved as often as possible.”
Dave, As a former public servant I’ll give it a shot. I have found that buy anything through the state is a time consuming process unless you spend your own money; and each purchasing office operates like its own little fiefdom with its own centrally planned state preferred contractors. In the end this type of and often lack of enterprise resource planning and allocation is more reminiscent of Soviet Armenia and less reminiscent of the system we used to have with local providers of reasonably priced goods and services to the state. Regulations control much of what should be in the hands of the local administrators, or the workers themselves.
It costs me much less to buy supplies at Target then to go through a three month process to buy from the state purchasing office. The vendor system needs to go if vendors are not competitive with other market sources.
In a free market one must have the opportunity to succeed but also the opportunity to fail if one cannot compete. In a planned market one goes out to bid to provide standard services. There is room for both in schools I think, but am not really qualified to say, still things like textbooks, desks filing cabinets should probably be through a centralized resource planned system- on the other hand the unions should support a move to provide relief the struggling public servants who are forced to wait three months for a ream of paper for their computer. A simplified disbursement and reimbursement system would do this effectively, as long and this is a big caveat, as it is properly accounted and justified for say for an hour of work each week, four hours each month and then the report is sent to the administrator. Only purchases above a certain level should need authorization say 200$; but every expense must be justified in the month end report.
This can then be plugged into an ERP software system and a total report made to show who spent where on what and allocate needs according to where they belong. This is basic enterprise resource management 101, but it is not typically used in public agencies.
It would be much better to have a simple standard reimbursement or disbursement system that is accounted for at the end of the each month and at the end of the year in each department so public servants generally 1. Have the supplies they need, 2. There is less preferential contracting, 3. Fraud and waste are kept to a minimum through direct monthly expenditure reports from each user, that is then complied each month into a unified report for the administrator.
What exactly is a ‘public servant?’ I see no sense of ’servitude’ among the ruling elite of academia; it’s more like a sense of infallability, which is quite humorous considering the 30-year deterioration of standards and performance extant within the pubic school system. ‘Public nusance’ might be a more apt term to describe our ‘education’-degree endowed, NEA-dominated ’servants’ in the school system.
“Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life…….[but] to make them as unlike their fathers as we can.”…………..Woodrow Wilson, America’s ‘father’ of Dewey-inspired Socialist ‘education.’
Red-baiting Rick mentioned:
Dewey-inspired Socialist ‘education.’
America would do well to have educational systems as good as the social democratic countries:
archives.cnn.com/2002/EDUCATION/11/26/education.rankings.reut/index.html
noman: You know as well as I do that there are MYRIAD factors involved in determining those #s. The political system is probably well down on that list.
What exactly is a ‘public servant?’
Rick there are a lot of good people who work in the schools, in the universities, in the government itself. Many of them take their oath to the Constitution very seriously, so I would not be so quick to judge them. We need intelligent people not arrogant people, agreed, but that is going to take some time to correct. If you have a beef with some people who work for the government, please make that clear so it does not include many of our soldiers, teachers and others who genuinely want to do what is right for the people of this nation. Note I am NOT including the bitchy DMV worker who acts like a public master.
In the spirit of comment rescue: Dave, this giveback business has been going on for years. . . .
The truly disingenuous part is that the government still lists those funds as applied to public education even after they have been taken back.
In the spirit of comment rescue: Dave, this giveback business has been going on for years. . . .
The truly disingenuous part is that the government still lists those funds as applied to public education even after they have been taken back.
I suggested some time ago that we should suspend implementing the all day kindergarten and the building of schools/class rooms to accomodate the Neighborhood Schools Act until our budget can handle it. We should insist that this money being stripped away goes against the top levels of management and nothing in the classrooms.
10% education funding giveback…
typical political crap.
Ruth Ann says:
“Won’t vote for my tax increase? well then we will have to cut the widows and orphans fund”
what was her junket budget for last year?
“The school districts could start by eliminating some administrative positions, allowing for the creation of county-wide school services departments. For instance, instead of every school district having a comptroller, there would be two or three per county.”
No way that county-wide anything will work, especially in Sussex County. We are too spread out. Plus, I can just about guarantee that if some of these administrative positions are consolidated that you’ll see them eventually return to the same number as they were when it was by district. We’re talking about government, don’t ya know! Keep stuff local, even more than now.
Dear Mr. Burris:
Although we do not often land on the same side of an issue, I cannot agree with you more than on this topic. This shortfall, although damaging to services, is an opportunity to address bloat within the Department of Education, the ridiculous anti-education policyknown as DSTP, and as you clearly mention, the possibility of regionalizing and consolidating services across the state in order to get more out of our educational dollar (which is clearly the taxpayers’ dollar as well).
I would appreciate your bloggers assistance in each and every school district to show that Delaware’s citizens are concerned about the classroom. They can do this by flooding their school board superintendent’s office and school board members’ email with their views.
The results of these cuts will cause overcrowding and the increase of academic and disciplinary stress within an already burdened system. As an educational professional, who is in the classroom, I can tell you - there is fat to be trimmed and bureaucratic belts that can be tightened. The results of that type of non-partisan political willpower on the part of DOE and the local districts would save jobs and not sacrifice educational quality. That type of will power would place meaning into the term “public service”.
I appreciate the chance to demostrate that there are always issues on which differing minds can find common ground.
Tom Chapman
Seaford
Thanks for coming by, Tom. It’s certainly a complicated situation that needs a lot of attention.
I’ve got to get a better job security plan than with DSEA. ALL of our district administrators signed their contract deals in december - bet they didn’t even know about the project budget cuts since they received raises…. hmmm?