An Indianapolis Star article I caught in the Muncie Star Press discusses Beech Grove’s consideration of discontinuing school busing if a property tax referendum doesn’t pass. The article states that transporting children to school is not required of school districts and that might be one of the places where the hatchet falls if the deep cuts have to be made.
“The . . . only place we can really cut when this (property tax cap) is fully implemented is . . . transportation,” said Beech Grove Superintendent Paul Kaiser, “and then I’ve got to eliminate a big part of capital projects” if the district’s Nov. 3 referendum fails.
Several school districts are turning to public referendums to stave off drastic cutbacks, and even more districts are expected to follow suit in the coming months.
A major factor squeezing the schools is the state’s 1 percent property tax cap, which was offered as a solution to homeowners facing skyrocketing taxes after a court-ordered overhaul of property-assessment rules.
One of the problems with this is that a lot of our urban and school district planning decisions have been made with school buses as an assumption. The districts are too big, often, for kids to walk to school. The roads leading to and from school frequently are not pedestrian friendly. In my case, we would just drive our kids to school — but this isn’t necessarily an option for every family. For a child to walk from my house to the elementary school would require 2.5 miles of walking, most of which is through narrow, heavily traveled two lane road with no shoulder and no sidewalk.
Is busing really one of the first targets of budget cuts? Or is this the most visible, most painful cut a school administrator could publicize in order to encourage a voter to vote in favor of a property tax increase? Guess we’ll have to wait and see.
“For a child to walk from my house to the elementary school would require 2.5 miles of walking, most of which is through narrow, heavily traveled two lane road with no shoulder and no sidewalk.”
And I’d guess most mornings they will have to do it in the dark. This problem becomes more and more serious the further north you move in the state and the closer to the Lake (Michigan) you are. In the snow season my kids have had to deal with businesses clearing their parking lots by dumping much of the snow at the sides of the access drives (and across sidewalks) forcing children to go out into the street to get around the snow banks. This is bad enough in Fort Wayne where we get around 40″ of snow in an average year. I can just imagine what it would it be like in South Bend where they average around 80. We end up with kids worming their way around snow banks, popping in and out of shadows (which are located in ever changing locations) cast by streetlamps under conditions of morning darkness and dealing with commuters who are driving in a near stupor.
I grew up in Michigan, where they have a millage system for property taxes. This problem came up in the late 80s (I was in kindergarten or first grade so I don’t remember all of the details) but the voters refuse to approve a millage increase so the schools cut out buses for a few months. Our neighbors and us all took turns driving the kids to school every day. After a short amount of time a vote was called again and needless to say, the parents were glad to approve the millage this time.
“Educators”, ha ha, would cut off air if it served their purposes.
“Educators”–with or without the scare quotes–have been used like badminton players use a shuttlecock since the Red Scare and Brown. I have precious little use myself for administrators who run schools like small businesses trying to attract attention to themselves, and plenty of experience of that second-hand, but that’s not to say I don’t understand the pressures.
It’s not the biology teacher’s fault that some parents–not to mention some school boards–object to 19th century science. It’s not a school system’s fault that Constitutionally-mandated religious neutrality is portrayed as hostility to Christianity by the tax-exempt multi-million-dollar outrage industry. It’s not any “educator” I know who’s pushed the insanity of high-stakes standardized testing, aside from the few who go into politics. And it’s not school superintendents who crafted the one-dimensional Property Tax “solution” which insists, simultaneously, that we can freeze one source of funding, make up the difference with cuts, and then complain about the people who do the cutting.
For that matter it wasn’t “educators” who raided my stock portfolio last year, either.