At the May 31 Regional School Unit 19 budget validation meeting, someone said schools, like businesses, should cut costs annually. This assumes the goal of a school district is financial profitability. It’s not. The goal of a school system is broad education of our youth so they become citizens who want to stay and contribute to the local community that has invested in them and, therefore, in itself.
But let’s assume an RSU is a business. There are two ways to create profit. Cut costs or increase revenue.
Residents in the towns comprising RSU 19 — Corinna, Dixmont, Etna, Hartland, Newport, Palmyra, Plymouth and Saint Albans — have for several years focused on costs. This is problematic. We’ve created a perpetual cycle of emergency. From a business perspective this is, at the least, poor marketing. Successful businesses are recognized for innovation and achievement, not crises. Also, cost reduction hasn’t worked. Every year our schools cut programs, fired teachers and forego needed maintenance, creating an impossible backlog. Yet, the school budget increases.
There is another path to profitability: increase revenue. Some members of our communities point out, quite correctly, that the budget for RSU 19 has been mismanaged. But this won’t be addressed in Facebook rants and tirades at the annual budget meetings. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy. “Democracy,” as Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, said, “is not a spectator sport.” The board and committees hold weekly public meetings. By the referendum, the budget should be well understood and crafted so as to ensure passage with vast community support. If people don’t understand how the money will be spent by the time the budget is presented, it isn’t the board that’s failed.
When it comes to increasing revenue, some people don’t want to or legitimately cannot make investments in our schools through increased taxes, investments that have an incredibly high return on investment for our communities. But increasing the amount each investor pays isn’t the only solution. We could increase the number and diversity of investors. Here we’re failing.
I was asked and honored to lead the campaign for RSU 19’s state-funded school construction project that passed overwhelmingly. But between that process and the budget referendum, we’ve learned some very troubling facts.
Our schools face an alarming trend of decreased enrollment. In fact, our new school is being designed with that in mind, albeit with room to expand should we turn things around. At one of the important meetings before the construction vote, a local realtor said he routinely suggests homes in our communities but our school system’s financial woes drive prospective buyers elsewhere. At the validation meeting the superintendent noted that RSU 19 has only three tuition students, another source of revenue, whereas other districts have much higher numbers. These trends mean taxes will continue to increase while education quality, a major contributor to quality of life considerations that influence where people (investors) decide to raise families or start small businesses, will decrease.
Finally, if a school were a business it would be a subsidiary of the towns. No corporation is successful when it pits its subsidiaries against one another. When the town manager and members of the select board stand up in opposition to the school budget and attribute a rise in the property tax rate solely to the school budget, they do a disservice to the communities we ask them to govern.
At least in Newport, this zero sum equation is demonstrably false. Our select board and town manager recently ensured construction of two buildings, a garage and public safety building, including gym, kitchens, museum and a multimillion-dollar price tag. The return on investment for these buildings is mostly limited to the savings we obtain through energy efficiency, though in some ways they can contribute to the community’s overall quality of life. But potential investors looking at our communities don’t ask about the firehouse or garage. They ask about the schools.
We’re about to get a new school, and we must begin making investments in our RSU and communities. Otherwise, we’ll have a new Corvette with no drivers, money for gas or people to change the oil and replace the occasional tire. We’ll have something once fancy, slowly deteriorating into something neighbors roll their eyes at instead of something that makes people move into our neighborhood.
Ryan Parker is a former staff member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He writes, lives and farms with his family in Newport.