CARE's Juicy Rhetoric Does Not Equal A Plan: Letter

The following letter was written and submitted by Cristina Schimert Lasko.

I attended the last two community meetings in which CARE and Move112Forward presented solutions for the school’s financial problems. This is what CARE announced as their solution: Let’s get all these smart people in a room together and they will figure out a better plan and they will have a much better process. We’ll convince the current Board to change their mind and start over. Good Luck!

Is this promise worth risking the collateral damage of failing to come together around the current plan?

It’s quite disconcerting that HP residents would easily discard the referendum proposal after years of collaborative effort. That would be taking an enormous gamble on the future of our children based on the emotional rhetoric spread by CARE. CARE is not telling the whole story. Their materials are filled with distorted half-truths and inflammatory rhetoric designed to stir up one’s emotions and to cast doubt on our educational and community leaders’ intentions and integrity.

For example, CARE likes to highlight the total cost of the $198 million referendum as being $350 million as if to say that the District were hiding something. That is not deception, that is how mortgages and debt instruments work--there is a cost of borrowing.

What CARE conveniently omits is the corresponding savings, which is over $200 million in operating savings when one compounds the referendum’s $4.5 million in year-over-year savings, for 30 years. And that benefit doesn’t stop at 30 years, we benefit from those operating savings indefinitely. That sounds a lot less scary to me than $340 million and I would say it is a smart investment for so many reasons that are both financially and educationally based. CARE has a zinger statement for nearly every feature of the plan.

The problem is that they are distortions.

It’s really easy to poke holes at a plan, but it’s much more difficult to create a viable solution. CARE has enjoyed the finger pointing, paper waving, rhetoric and weekly “gotchas”. While the district certainly didn’t do themselves any favors by having a mistake in their financials, CARE has excitedly exploited this point well beyond its impact on the solution. The fact remains that the proposed plan goes much farther financially than any other of the dozens of configurations studied--without cutting programming and while adding full-day kindergarten and restoring some previously cut programming.

CARE has only suggested looking at a two-middle-school option, an option that was already thoroughly studied and found to cost much more and to fall far shorter in operating savings by $2 million annually. Our other two-middle-school option is the Budget Deficit Reduction 3 (BDR3) scenario that involves Edgewood and Northwood bursting at the seams with increased class sizes, outdated buildings, loss of some neighborhood schools, etc. Any scenario in between would necessarily involve some combination of compromising educational quality and equity (increased class sizes, inferior programming, and/or abandoning full-day kindergarten) or achieving less in ongoing operating savings. It’s that simple.

CARE has offered nothing new, nothing revolutionary, nothing cheaper and nothing educationally better. That’s because we have a very complicated and serious financial problem. We will never agree on a solution until we put our individual interests aside to achieve a viable solution for the greater good.

CARE’s promise doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that we will be able to avoid a chaotic outcome if the referendum fails. The rules over the election timing and the seating of a new Board simply don’t support this promise. It’s quite a gamble to assume that BDR3 won’t be set in motion before CARE supporters could possibly overturn it.

Furthermore, it assumes nothing about the new Board members’ inclinations. Nor does it assume anything about the ability of these smart people to pull together a better plan than the dozens that were already studied over the past six years. Nor does it assume anything about their ability to work productively with the existing school administration—one that has already endured a very long and difficult effort above and beyond their day-to-day responsibilities. Most importantly, neither does this assume that the community could all agree on how to prioritize the competing tradeoffs. This strategy is a disaster and who will suffer? Our children, our teachers, and our community’s already tenuous reputation and our property values will suffer.

If the referendum fails, the Board will have a fiduciary responsibility to begin abatement on the long-deferred facilities violations, and to take action to reduce expenses so as to keep the district solvent in the coming years. They simply cannot wait several more years to begin budget deficit reduction. Without the community’s support, the Board has no choice but to act assuming no additional funding. Every year we continue to study this problem, every year we delay action, the further the problem compounds and the steeper the cuts need to be.

I would love to have a plan that avoids a tax increase, that keeps a school in everyone’s neighborhood, and one that keeps class sizes small, but also provides enough sections so we can offer differentiation for different learners, one that delivers a full-day kindergarten, and has middle schools centrally located on ample open land. Of course all those things sound and feel so good. But we need a real solution, not a fairy tale.

Voting NO might cement our children’s fate to being crammed into large classes in old buildings with programming reductions. So before you vote, please get the facts at www.112information.org and please don’t take a gamble with the future of our children.

The proposed solution may not be perfect, but it achieves the greatest ongoing and long-term savings while achieving educational excellence and makes a strong statement that our community is committed to our schools.

Cristina Schimert Lasko