We’ve all heard public school officials bemoan the budget cuts they’ve endured and how they have sacrificed enough. But over at the Midland-based Mackinac Center, which has turned into a snarling, snapping watchdog that hounds the K-12 community daily, their policy analysts have unearthed several examples that indicate otherwise.
In particular, they cite the Rochester Community Schools as a district that has overstated its frugality and has successfully encouraged the media to parrot their claims.
Essentially what’s going on here is the old Washington game of cutting back on increased spending that was planned, rather than actually taking an ax to the budget and forcing the numbers to go backward.
In a March board meeting, Rochester Superintendent David Pruneau told his board of education that they had cut $13 million in services and programs over the past three years and he congratulated them on tough negotiations with some of the employee unions. He then bemoaned a $16 million budget shortfall the district still faces, according to the Mackinac Center, but added that the administration and board hadn’t been “shortsighted.”
However, figures compiled by the Michigan Department of Education and the district’s own web site show that Rochester’s general fund expenditures had increased — and had not been cut — from $154 million in 2007-08 to $158 million in 2010-11.
Worse yet, about four months ago, the district approved a new contract with its teachers that allowed for significant raises.
The new contract spells out example that shows a teacher with a master’s degree would go from $65,772 in salary in 2010-11 to $71,273 in 2011-12. This is an 8.3 percent annual increase. Newer teachers would see raises ranging from 7.1 percent to 9.9 percent.
“They don’t live in the real world,” Charles Owens, state director of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, told Mackinac’s “Capitol Confidential” writers. “The fact that they are getting those kind of increases in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression … shows how out of touch with reality they are.”
