If it's a budget cut, then it's personal: it's inevitable that people you care about will feel personally attacked by the budget decisions you must make over the next few months

Leadership, March-April, 2003 by George Manthey

As I write these words, the media is full of news about a $13 billion deficit in this year's state budget. How timely that this edition of Leadership has the budget crisis as its theme. The governor has just released his new budget--a document that will make "everyone suffer." School leaders are faced, for the first time in my memory, with figuring out ways to drastically reduce current-year programs--as they try to predict what cuts will be required next year.

In a recent letter to the editor in my local newspaper a reader sent his suggestion for solving the budget crisis. He noticed that the state budget of four years ago was equal to the predicted state revenue for the next fiscal year. His solution: simply adopt the state budget of four years ago! While this kind of thinking makes me fear that the critics of American education may be right, it also reminds me that the general public has no idea of what a 6 percent cut in spending for education will mean.

Since I think it unlikely that employee associations will voluntarily cut salaries to absorb predicted deficits, the only alternative is to cut programs and/or increase class size. No Child Left Behind legislation may actually be of help here. The "capacity of the school" cannot be an issue when allowing students front Program Improvement schools to transfer to other schools. Recent decisions by our State Board of Education virtually guarantee that 83 percent of our Title I schools will be Program Improvement schools by' the year 2004.

This means the students in half of California's schools will be allowed to transfer to the other half of California's schools, regardless of whether or not the "schools of choice" have room for them. Presto: now that class sizes have doubled at half of our schools, our budget problem will be solved!

The ugly alternative

However, we're aware that although the American public often believes that American education is rotten, they are very happy with the schools that their children attend. This makes it unlikely that parents will exercise their "choice option." Our budget problem will continue leaving us with the ugly alternative of cutting programs. Of course, we can simply cut the "frills." That would be education of the arts, school nurses, student counselors, librarians. Oops, those are already gone!

What's left is for school administrators to recommend to local boards of education that the school year be cut (unacceptable) or staff be reduced. And it's impossible to reduce staff without being personal. Judgment calls must be made about who will stay and who will go. Even when attrition can make that decision a little less painful, it's still necessary to decide what work will not be done. Again, a personal (not personnel) decision.

In my department at ACSA each of us has been asked to assume part of the work that would not otherwise get done due to a decision to not replace an employee who is retiring. My first reaction upon hearing this decision was to think that at least some of the work I'm currently doing is not valued--otherwise, how could I be asked to stop it and do something else? That hurt. It felt personal. And I know better. I understand the "big picture."

Support from your association

It's inevitable that individuals you care deeply about are going to feel personally attacked by the recommendations that you must make (or interpret) over the next few months. Perhaps you'll read in other pages of this edition of Leadership some solutions to this problem. But, in light of the painful times ahead, I hope that as members of a true "association" we find ways to personally support each other. We're going to need it.

One hope I have is that you keep your perspective. Consider these words from the poet Wislawa Szymborska:

   The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.
   Ants stitching in the grass.
   The grass sewn into the ground.
   The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.

   So it happens that I am and look.
   Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
   on wings that are its alone,
   and a shadow skims through my bands
   that is none other than itself, no one else's but its own.

   When I see such things, I'm no longer sure
   that what's important
   is more important than what's not.

George Manthey is an educational services executive for ACSA.