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Letter to the Editor: Too much ‘school’ spending supports pensions and wages, not education

<p>If blame were peanut butter, the debacle at Wilkes-Barre Area School District could be spread from here to Harrisburg.</p><p>The school board&#8217;s vote last week to suspend four popular, educational programs has sparked passionate appeals, calls for the ouster of all nine members and morning-long student protests.</p><p>The vote came on the same night that the board&#8217;s members passed a preliminary budget for next year, which increases taxes the maximum allowed by state law, and started the process of borrowing up to $150 million for construction projects.</p><p>Who&#8217;s to blame?</p><p>The school boards of the past hold the heavy weight of inaction. When the idea of consolidating this district&#8217;s three high schools was rejected in 2002 &#8211; <em>14 years ago</em> &#8211; then-Superintendent Jeff Namey warned: &#8220;We can&#8217;t sit back and wait three or four years. We simply don&#8217;t have the money.&#8221;</p><p>School boards past also bear the burden of creating maintenance-free school zones. There exists a stack of reports, dating back a <em>decade</em>, citing serious problems with the older buildings. The can-kicking ended with this board&#8217;s directors for a simple reason: They ran out of road.</p><p>But the district does not bear all the failure. It worked with a tax base perpetually eroded by population decline and nonprofits gobbling up property, taking it off the tax rolls, yet rarely offering something in lieu of money lost.</p><p>Harrisburg is hip deep in this cornucopia of culpability. Remember the 2001 public pension boost? One of the fastest-growing costs for local districts comes from covering the $50 billion-plus shortfall in the Public School Employees&#8217; Retirement System.</p><p>The Legislature also has played politics with education funding for decades, doling out money with little connection to each district&#8217;s actual costs, creating inequities that make the quality of a child&#8217;s education contingent on his or her ZIP code. Harrisburg&#8217;s haphazard oversight of charter schools compounds the conundrum.</p><p>As noted by a new advocacy group, Citizens for Fair School Funding, a nonpartisan commission last year had determined 170 districts are underfunded; that includes Wilkes-Barre Area, shortchanged by $29 million annually.</p><p>Do you want to blame unions? Considering the complexity and importance of teachers&#8217; jobs, criticism of their pay seems often misplaced. But when state money got tight and then-Gov. Tom Corbett urged unions to agree to pay freezes in 2011, the Wilkes-Barre Area&#8217;s teacher union said no. And this is the union that brought you sabbatical abuse &#8211; remember Elise Mosca&#8217;s &#8220;Bachelor&#8221; leave?</p><p>Then there are administrators who accepted raises months before cutting programs.</p><p>But there is one other culprit: inattentive district residents. In May 2009, for instance, they gave board member James Height 600 votes in the primary election even <em>after</em> he had been charged in a federal corruption crackdown, resigned and agreed to plead guilty.</p><p>And while board meetings lately have become crowded affairs, thanks to proposed high school consolidation and program cuts, any person angry at recent events needs to ask: Why, for more than a decade as these woes festered, were the audience chairs at school board meetings so very, very empty?</p><style>
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Our Opinion: Blame shared widely for Wilkes-Barre Area School District’s predicament