Lo and behold, what a difference a day makes. Well, probably not, I always had a feeling that all members were not drunk on kool-aid over at the Board of Ed. Bruce Kimmel has emerged from the Corda kool-aid eclipse in the Hour today:
“I have not agreed with Dr. Corda’s approach to exclude administration personnel from budget cuts. My view is that we start by assuming the schools are sacrosanct, that they are the option of last resort — and that includes after-school programs,” Kimmel said.
Other board members said they want to look at cuts to operations before they discuss eliminating teachers or reducing athletic programs, but board members Tom Vetter and Jody Bishop-Pullan said program cuts may be inevitable.
Ah yes, perhaps a look at operations would be in order. But Corda likes to play fast and loose with the game of words, and suggests that it would be hard to find savings in “supplies”, an oblique reference to office supplies without trending toward the cliched paperclips.
“But you don’t find $3 million by saying spend less money on supplies,” he said. “My concern is we don’t want to do anything that’s going to disrupt the educational progress we’ve already been able to make. There will be decisions some people aren’t going to like and other decisions people are going to applaud.”
Kimmel and Bishop-Pullan agreed the first place to look for cuts would be operations.
Of course Xerox has a whole marketing campaign on how to save millions by getting rid of “stuff” meaning stacks of paper, which might be a good place to start by asking how can the school system reduce the use of paper. And while Corda is dismissive of the diminutive nature of the office supply, he perhaps is unfamiliar with the old Boeing adage, “watch the ounces and the pounds will take care of themselves”, which is just an aerospace engineer’s way to saying that small savings add up.
But maybe Corda doesn’t have to look all that far. It seems from the comments here that there’s plenty of questions to ask Stu Opdahl, who has made numerous presentations before the Common Council with numbers that have not added up. Maybe there’ll be a reformer on the BOE who will say enough is enough, and post the budget and actuals of BOE spending on the Internet so that all is open and transparent.
And those energy costs? Last night the third floor of city hall, day 3 of the vacation week, was cranking enough heat to qualify as a sauna. The thermostats were set to 74! At 7PM! When all the offices were empty. The previous night the council chamber was hot too. Were all the schools cranking out heat at 74 degrees during a vacation week? Is there a mandate to use up all of this years energy budget? Feel free to periodically report thermostat settings in the comments as you find them.
source: The Hour, School board scrambling to cut costs, By ANNA GUSTAFSON, April 19, 2007
