Orders under suspension

REVISED: sorry, these late night meetings are getting to me!
(or, "Why it pays to stay to the bloody end of the City Council meeting." Further subtitled, "You're never going to find this in the T&G coverage.")

Councilor Germaine asked Mayor Lukes to forward a suggestion to the School Committee: in order to save money, we could cut out or down on busing students. He cited his own family driving to the bus stop to suggest that people could drive their children to school.

The wisdom of that suggestion can be taken up separately. What happened next is what gets interesting...

Mayor Lukes said that, due to the "aggressive demands" for increased funds from the School Committee, it raised the question of what the relationship between the two elected bodies is going to be going forward. The "intensive lobbying effort" from the School Committee members, followed by the joint subcommittee meeting held Monday, is, she said, "indicative of the direction we are going." It is "inevitable" that there will be a "blurring" of roles.

We can trace this confusion about responsibility back, again, to the passage of Proposition 2 1/2. Recall that prior to 1982, the School Committee made their own budget, forwarded it the City Manager, and he took it from there. The City Council has only been in the middle of this since 1982. As Ed Reform (passed in 1993) funded schools to a more appropriate level, it's only in the past six years that the ax that the City Council can wield on the school budget has become clear.
That's a real problem. The School Committee members are the directly elected officials responsible for our schools. They no longer, however, have the power necessary to execute their responsibility. They don't hold their own purse strings, so they have to, as the Mayor puts it, "intensively lobby."