Cranbury Forum | Bulletin | Info Sharing

Post a reply

Username

Subject

Message body

Emoticons

Font colour: Font size:

Close Tags

[quote="Guest"][quote="Guest"]In pratical terms voting down school budgets is a mostly symbolic act.  Look at what happened last year when a majority in the State failed.  In a vast majority of cases the subsequent adjustments were small and token.  And then the electorate turns around and still votes mostly for the incumbents that largely ignored the "mandate" of the no votes with their tiny reductions.  Meanwhile the portion of the budgets that re based on state mandates gets larger and larger with no action on the part of the state to change that.  So really the entire school budget voting process is mostly optical and not meaningful.[/quote]

I think you are correct, but I question some of your reasoning.  I don't think incumbents ignore the mandate.  I think people get on these boards and discover there is little discretion on the part of board members.  They can't change curriculum much, this is locked in by state mandate and testing.  For instance, 1st graders must have foreign language training.  Roughly 3/4's of their budget is fixed.

The only way boards can cut spending is to cut staff.  They can privatize custodial work, cut extracurriculars and increase staff size.  All of these things get major pushback from the community.  I think some of the same people who want the budget cut also complain when there are 25 students in there kids class.

Over the past 10 years curriculum has become standardized through state and federal mandates.  Local control is slowly becoming extinct.[/quote]

Options
HTML is ON
BBCode is ON
Smilies are ON

	Disable HTML in this post
	Disable BBCode in this post
	Disable Smilies in this post