By Jane Wright Santa Monica
Again we hear after the fact, of the local school board having approved of the school district’s administrative decision to implement more unnecessary, and very costly programs. (SMDP, Sept. 6, page 1). What sense does it make to use hard earned taxpayers dollars to pay known failing students, to tutor younger students than themselves how to read? And who came up with the idea to spend $50,000 of said scarce tax dollars to implement a “pilot program” to lure some failed or expelled former students back to school? What will that new unnecessary program cost after its pilot debut has run? $100,000 a year? Superintendent John Deasy on the one hand, has cried and complained that the district is woefully underfunded, yet his administration keeps recklessly spending more on new programs and teachers who are second to none in their pay and benefits here in California and elsewhere. Deasy has been free to allow the school district’s student choir and musicians to enjoy lavish and very expensive trips out of the country, and to places like Boston and Hawaii while holding Santa Monica — and curiously not also Malibu’s — taxpayers responsible for making up any budget shortfalls he perceives to exist, to the tune of $6 million a year, for about another six years. Do the simple math. A school budget that is state, and not in any way a city responsibility, or mandated. According to Ryan Hyatt’s article, last year there was a $1 million surplus in the school budget. If so, that huge sum of taxpayer’s money ought to have been returned to the city, not held on to until the district could craftily find a way to burn it up, as has been done without any consultation of the taxpaying public. The city taxpayers are entitled to have strict school fiscal accountability, and ought to have a regular vote as to what school programs are implemented, how much money is actually spent, and also to be able to not engage in any duplicity of taxpayer’s funds that are the sole responsibility of
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 13, 2005. Read the original PDF.