Hick's New Cuts

When I first started teaching at Green Mountain High School in the mid-seventies, I remember being struck by the relative largesse of the place. The place had a new building smell; the carpet was orange and clean and cheery; the library was well-stocked and centrally located. The language arts department had its own secretary. So did every other department. There were secretaries in the library and the main office and the counseling department. And to top it all off, I was pulling down a cool $8500 a year. This, compared to the $6300 I was making at Marycrest, a catholic girls' school, was almost too good to be true.

Things didn't stay that way. The story of my 34 years as a public school teacher is the story of yearly emergency budget talks responding to potential or real cuts. It was only a year or two after getting hired that we lost our departmental secretary. A new ditto machine was placed on top of her old desk where the pictures of her family used to sit. Pretty soon the number of library secretaries was pared by one. Eventually, the wonderful lady who acted as the single secretary for the entire factory, her position having been cut by yet another budget crunch, was moved into the main office as a secretary for one of our four assistant principals and two administrative assistants. When I first came to Green Mountain, we only had three A.P.s and one of them just sat in faculty lounge all day. All through this succession of lean times where we were annually enjoined to pitch-in and share the burden, I noticed that as faculty secretaries shrunk in number, the number of secretaries and administrative help in the main office--you know, the one that is the furthest away from kids--grew.

Other things grew during this constant cutting back. The list of teacher responsibilities grew. The time it took to do the paper work that our departmental secretary used to do grew. Our constantly evolving computerized system for taking and tracking attendance made the time it took to do the reporting grow. The amount of blame teachers got for low test scores or the apparent lack of preparation of our students grew. The worries about getting sued, monitoring email communication, being careful not offend any one, or drive anyone to suicide because of too much homework, all of that stuff grew exponentially.

And every year we would read in The Denver Post or Rocky Mountain News that Jeffco was in the worst budget crunch of its history and we were given a list of options for cutting costs that we needed to prioritize, first in private, and then in groups during a day long faculty meeting complete with coffee and donuts in the morning, pizza and soft drinks for lunch, and enough butcher paper to stretch from West Alameda Drive to the Ad Building.

Then we would have emergency union (oops I meant to say Association) meetings where we were told how this was yet another example of the powers that be trying to balance the budget on the backs of teachers. And we were told about phone banks to man and strike plans to create. We would root for our negotiation team and spread nasty rumors about the administration's negotiation team and something would get settled--always too little money, too few benefits, and too many concessions. We would, amongst lots of loud, tough talk, finally ratify the thing and get back to the business of teaching kids.

Here I am many years removed from the whole thing looking at the front page of The Post: "Schools bear brunt of Hick's new cuts." Since school spending amounts to some 40% of Colorado's budget and since states, unlike federal governments, can't run deficits, something has to go. Three hundred and thirty-two million slashed from k-12 funding. Another $36 million from higher ed. According to the article, that translates to a $497 cut per student in k-12 and $877 less for each college student. We're talking 40 kids in first grade classrooms. Hundreds of teachers will join the ranks of the unemployed. But as Hickenlooper said "balancing this budget would be a painful task." Painful for whom? Hickenlooper also said that "we have to find ways to make the entire culture more pro-business." Call me stupid, but I don't see how cutting funding on a higher educational system that already ranks in the bottom three in the country is a pro-business decision. I see it as a decision that will convince even more companies (like ProLogis for example) to move their headquarters elsewhere.

Will there eventually be a politician out there with the guts to point to what is fast becoming the only budget fixing alternative left? Will Warren Buffet continue to be the only public person out there to say we need to raise taxes, particularly on the rich, the very people the budget cutting republicans in Washington fought for when it came to rolling back the Bush tax cuts? How can these people sleep at night when they take funding away from schools, but don't tax the wealthy. Yeah, yeah, yeah I know that the wealthy currently pay most of the income tax in this country. Why should I apologize for that when the top 1% of the country account for more wealth than the rest of us put together. Adam Smith, all you neo-cons out there, said in The Wealth of Nations that the wealthiest would have to contribute more than their share for the benefit of society. Smacks of socialism doesn't it? I suppose Smith's masterwork is now part of the liberal plot to ruin the country.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to pay more taxes any more than any one else does. I also don't like going to the dentist (no offense, Dr. Arendt) or waiting on the highway for lane painting, or having to spend ever increasing amounts of money on food, but somethings are simply necessary.

Why do budgets get balanced on the backs of those groups least able to pay? For the third year in a row Colorado government workers will get no cost of living raise. On top of that they are facing the second year in a row where more money will be taken out of their checks to pay for rising health insurance costs for retirees.

Hickenlooper's reaction: "There are people all over the state that have no job."

What does that have to do with anything? That answer doesn't work for the wealthiest 1% does it?

I wouldn't mind trading places with one of the wealthy one per centers, even if I did have the threat of a tax hike hanging over my head, keeping me from hiring, ruining all my plans for innovation, research and development. I know it would be tough, but someone has to bear it.