Posted on 05/07/2008 10:17:40 AM PDT by Disturbin
The rising price of gas for buses and food for cafeterias is forcing Bay State schools to either pass the cost on to students this fall or cut staff and programs.
“Districts are facing a lot of tough choices as they make their budgets this year,” said J.C. Considine, a spokesman for the state Department of Education. “Everyone agrees kids have to get to school, and it’s essential that kids are properly fed at school. The question is how to pay for those things when the price of gas and food keeps going up.”
In Boston Public Schools - with 56,190 students, the state’s largest school district - the cost of bread alone has increased by 74 percent since last year.
“That’s a huge increase in the cost of one of our staples, and indicative of the challenges we face,” district spokesman Jonathan Palumbo said.
Experts and food industry insiders say food prices are being inflated by rising fuel costs and increased wheat demand in China and India, and U.S. farmers turning to corn instead of wheat to meet a new demand for corn-derived ethanol.
Unlike some suburban school districts, however, districts like Boston and Brockton, where the majority of students come from low-income households, don’t have the option of charging students a transportation fee or significantly raising school lunch prices.
Instead, Boston, for example, is cutting costs by:
• Moving to self-insurance for the school bus fleet.
• Freezing all vacancies except classroom teaching positions.
• Freezing all salary increases except those required by union contracts.
• Restricting most travel, contracted services and other discretionary spending.
• Adopting energy management practices to reduce utility costs.
• Deferring the cost of painting projects and bus-fleet replacement.
Brockton Public Schools - the state’s fourth-largest district, with 15,500 students - has estimated a 5 percent increase in energy costs, amounting to about $300,000, as well as increases in the cost of milk and bread, said spokeswoman Jocelyn Meek.
“For a large district like us, it’s definitely a major concern,” Meek said.
But, like Boston, the district doesn’t see bus fees as an option and has yet to determine lunch prices for the coming school year.
Larry Quinzani, co-owner of Quinzani’s Bakery, which supplies Boston Public Schools with bread, said he will have to charge more next year, although he would not say how much.
In the last nine months, he said, the bakery’s prices for a loaf of bread have risen three times, or 24 percent, because of the rising cost of flour and fuel.
How many other bloated government agencies are NOT being threatened with cutbacks?
In the middle 80’s when my husband was transferred to that horrible state on an AF Education with Industry assignment, we moved to the Groton, MA, area and were told that we had to transport our own kids to school as there was no more room on the buses and there would be no more buses.
Had always taken the kids to school so that was no problem but I did ask if we would receive a rebate since we were not allowed to use their transportation. They didn’t think that was funny but it didn’t hurt to ask.
My opinion of education under Dukakis and his wife is not much. Worst education my daughter received in the public schools was that one year in Groton that wasn’t even a full year as we were transferred at the end of May and they went to the middle of June.
When I was a kid (in Boston), we walked to school (one school I went to was about a mile away) and brought our own lunch, which we ate at our desks. The school sold those little half-pints of milk, I guess at cost. IIRC, each school had a full-time principal, but the vice-principal was a classroom teacher -- no other administration.
I'd be tempted to tell them what they can do with their Homosexual programs but, well, you know.
I was very active in the MA school voucher movement ten years ago. Back then, the per-pupil expenditure in Boston was $10k/student. I can't imagine what it is now.
One reason for this outrageous cost is teacher union salaries (twice that of private, i.e., Catholic, schools). Another reason is administrative overhead. Typically, city gov't schools have 100 times as many administrators as Catholic schools. A Catholic archdiocese might have 4 or 5 administrators, in comparison to 4-500 administrators for gov't schools.
To make matters worse is the fact that the schools teach a smorgasbord of worthless PC dogma, they can't deliver the three R's, and they prohibit the free exercise of religion by forcing the children of religious parents into "God-free zones" for 6 hours per day. Finally and ultimately, any form of education that purports to prepare children for life, yet ignores the final end of human life, eternal life with God, is not true education at all, but child abuse.
The whole contemptible system should be abandoned and replaced by just about anything else, vouchers being the obvious, but union-hated solution. The system does more harm than good. Future generations will look back at 20th century gov't schooling the way we look back at the dark, satanic mills of the 19th century.
“and it’s essential that kids are properly fed at school.”
That is mom and dad’s job.
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