Part Two

...Continued from yesterday

While the sub-committee of the sub-committee of the Plan for Excellence committee was busy looking into district configurations, the rabble-rousers were looking into school district business as well. And eureka! A discovery was made. The problem wasn’t the evil troll misappropriating district funds. It was the holiest of all objects in the districts possession. Silver Lake Elementary. It seems that the school district I trust my children to, lied to me. Actually they lied to all of Cuyahoga Falls. To justify building closures, the district presented a cost benefit type report to the people. In fact to a packed auditorium. They showed us building enrollment numbers. You can’t argue with cold, hard numbers.

Problem is, when the school district reported those same enrollment numbers to the state of Ohio for funding purposes, they weren’t the same numbers. Want to guess where the anomalies were? Save your breath, I’ll tell you. Newberry, Sill, and Silver Lake. I am going forward from here assuming that the enrollment numbers reported to the state are the accurate enrollment numbers. That means that the community presentation was not accurate. I had to ask myself why the school district would lead Cuyahoga Falls to believe that Newberry had fewer students than it actually did and Silver Lake had more.

So the rabble-rousers dug deeper. Administrators said the extra money spent at Silver Lake was because salaries were so much higher there. The rabble-rousers had two arguments for this response. Number one that would mean it had most if not all highly qualified experienced teachers. Not true and shame on them if it were. Number two- according to the Ohio Department of Education the real reason for spending disparities most years was in supplies and materials. You know-stuff. Not salaries, not benefits, not maintenance. Stuff. But they will tell you that any of the cool stuff in that building, is courtesy of the PTO. No I did not have a typo. I said PTO. You see if they were a part of the PTA, like the rest of Cuyahoga Falls City Schools, they would have to share stuff.

Anyway, the Ohio Department of Education numbers don’t lie. Money was being spent on supplies and materials. They are also high cost in the purchased services department. For all normal people out there, think utilities. For some reason government cannot call things what they actually are. All accountants, please shut up. You are a very small portion of the population.

Rabble-rousers started getting a little public about this apparent protection that was going on. The school district wasn’t making decisions with responsible financial impact. It was implementing “recovery plans” and “curtailment plans” and proposing levies. It was closing schools in Cuyahoga Falls and telling me my kids were resilient and could handle a change fine. They don’t even know my kids.

OK Sherman, one more time in the Wayback Machine, except this time we’re only going back to February 20, 2007.

The sub-committee of the sub-committee of the Plan for Excellence committee has come to a board meeting to make their recommendations. Drum roll please....

“Reaffirm and celebrate the district’s commitment to its neighborhood schools in the existing configuration ofK-5, 6-8, and 9-12.”

Wow. What a let down. Two years of work so we can do nothing. Typical. Just like the bus committee. Oh, you didn’t know we had a bus committee? That’s because they did nothing either. See that’s how we work in this district.

Run out of money, get the community riled, form a committee, have committee decide that nothing should change, ask for a levy.

Repeat cycle for 40 years. BTW- Got the levy renewal schedule from the treasurer today. Good timing.