Some advocates say Washington and Harrisburg should be doing more right now to stave off the crisis, including raising new revenue.
“We should all be telling our state legislators that we need the Marcellus Shale tax (on natural gas companies), and that we can’t keep cutting any of the services that matter to children and families, including education,” said Shelly Yanoff, executive director of Public Citizens for Children and Youth. “There’s not enough money. We need to increase the pool of money.”
Yanoff also called on the School District to do a better job of keeping the public abreast of the impact of all the budget changes on services to children. “We should institute red alerts if we’re cutting into some of the wonderful goals of increased counselors or the increased attention to kids who’ve started to fall back.”
Even if the SRC chose to eliminate all $180 million in costs associated with the more than 60 initiatives in Ackerman’s Imagine 2014 reform blueprint, it would not fully offset the potential shortfall caused by the loss of federal funds.
District staff has grown by about 1,000 employees since June 2009, most of them teachers. The costliest of the new initiatives included the hiring of teachers for class size reduction in the early grades, the addition of counselors in middle and upper grades, and expanded summer school.
These Imagine 2014 programs would not necessarily be the SRC’s first targets for cuts. School closings are one other area to be considered. But Masch has pointed out that about 60 percent of the operating budget consists of mandated expenses that are off-limits for reductions, such as debt service and the costs associated with maintaining the minimum required staffing levels in schools.
Philadelphia Public School Notebook – October, 2010 – Read article online…