Our local districts deserve better than this

Flag in a school I was in last week

 I was in a local district budget hearing when the news broke last week that half the U.S. Department of Education was being laid off. It was within minutes of a school committee member asking the question that is getting asked in every school budget discussion I've been to this year--what about federal grants?--and so the timeliness was quite something.

We're told "efficiency" is the name of the game, and it has, for quite some time, been very much the thing to hate on U.S. DoE and their equivalent state agencies. At the local level, we may most often see, or more likely recall, such agencies at their most regulatory-est, and so it is easy to recoil. I know whereof I speak; you've got attestations right here back to 2008 if you'd like them.

That misses, of course, the aspects that you don't know that you've got til it's gone. It's perhaps satisfying to exclaim that U.S. DoE is gone, and we can all reassure ourselves that much of the federal funding streams predated the agency. That misses first that this was not a controlled cut; we have no reassurance at all that the needs we have locally will continue to be met by an agency that was halved, and with little regard for what it does or how it functions. And while most are quick to say "except Civil Rights" (unless it is weaponized), the places where so many of us used federal data and federal work often without even knowing it are being waved away.

There are people who do this work. Their work is valuable. We need it.

The sloppy callous disregard for people and their valuable work particularly hit me over the past few weeks as I am in and out of school committee meetings. Spring is budget season, of course, and it isn't news that this is a tight one (more on that to come). Tight school budgets usually mean position cuts, because 75-80% of most school budgets are employee salary and benefits. Education, after all, is a people business. 

Both sides, then, of any such cut hurt: the loss of the work with and for students (and all work in school districts is for students) hurts the students, their families, their coworkers. Those whose positions are cut lose their livelihood and work one hopes they valued and where they felt valued.

And our school districts in Massachusetts are small, even the biggest ones. The agonizing local conversations over how to ensure the budget is balanced while meeting needs when the way through is position cuts are done about people we know, people who have cared for our kids, people who we value. 

The time and emotion and energy poured into local school budgets, and the stark contrast with the utter disregard for people, both those doing the work and those who the work supports, of this administration smarts right now.