My talk with Governor Romney and Commissioner Driscoll

By Colleen Kirby Cho

Lynette Culverhouse and I attended the Town Meeting on Education with Governor Romney and Commissioner Driscoll at Woburn High School from 6:30-7:30, Monday, May 10th.

Obviously they weren't really too interested in soliciting questions as they only schedule one hour for the event and that included introductions, and short speeches by the Governor and the Commissioner. During the introduction the Commissioner mentioned that he had been superintendent of schools in Melrose. After the introductions of all notables in the audience it was clear that there weren't too many parents in the audience so I made sure to raise my hand as soon as they began the question part of the evening. Amazingly, I was called on first.

I thanked them both for having this forum and I told them of my beginnings in Melrose as a girl scout leader. And that thanks to the large cuts in Education which resulted in the closing of the elementary school my daughter had attended in Melrose, which was also the highest performing school according to the MCAS, and thanks to the cuts in state funding to the Arlington schools last year, I have become somewhat of an expert on school funding. Then I read my prepared remarks.

I am incensed by your education policy in the past 2 years. From what I see in my town, Arlington, the effect of your policies is to ensure that children on the lowest scales of the economic ladder get left behind and that those who live in middle-income communities are thrown overboard without a life preserver.

I have lived in Melrose and Arlington for the past few years. Both communities are residential communities. We are two of the minority of communities across the state that are dependent on Additional Assistance Funds, which in our case, makes up for our lack of commercial tax revenues to fund our public schools. You nearly took away our Additional Assistance funds last year which would have been a cut of 40% of our state funds. Instead thanks to our representatives we were cut by 20% which meant a decrease of 10% in our school budget in 1 year.

We had to let about 50 school employees go to make up for this cut. I have spent the past year in my local school to provide art enrichment classes and library time. I do not have a degree in education and I have no art or library training! In order to make up for the loss of one teacher we have 35 parents volunteering instead.

The recent Hancock case ruled that the state is not providing the funding to meet the goals of Education Reform. I can assure you that this is the case in my town. Thanks to your huge cuts in state funding last year we are going backwards in what we are providing our children. We now have children at the high school sitting in study halls when they used to have trained teachers in class. And this is called time on learning.

Not only that, the recent approval of the new Commonwealth Charter school in Cambridge is threatening to make our situation even worse. If just 8 children are sent to this Commonwealth Charter school, your atrocious funding formula will cause us to lose one whole teacher.

I want to know how you are going to fix this problem?

The current funding formula does not take commercial taxes into account and so residential communities are suffering disproportionately. Education Reform puts a greater burden on communities but the current foundation budget does not cover the costs of implementing it. The Commonwealth Charter school funding formula forces the public schools to bear too great of a burden and these schools do not even have to meet the same standards of student access. (Unlike the Horace Mann charter schools which do not impose a funding burden on the public schools.)

I was quite impressed by the nice smiles the two of them maintained during my treatise and during the answers afterward. I did express a few too many points that are complex but they only tried to figure out how to make themselves look good for the cameras rather than try to get at these issues in my opinion. If I recall correctly, he said that education funding did not decrease last year and that what happened was that he focused more resources on poor communities. Yeah, right. And that well off communities such as ours that are presumably above foundation budget are not in need of state funds. As I understood it he basically was implying that we are just being greedy. He glossed over the Hancock result also by indicating that we are currently above the Foundation budget. I did point out that we were coming quite close to that Foundation budget having lost ground with the huge budget cut last year. As for Charter schools, he says that communities don't seem to accept Horace Mann schools so that's why they are pushing the Commonwealth charters.

So basically, I left without feeling as if anything I said was heard by our Governor who is so concerned with parent's views that he has provided an e-mail address where they want to listen to YOU! parents@doe.mass.edu

So I would encourage you to write. And make it simpler than my way too complicated message. I'm sure if enough people wrote our message might start getting through. Best, Colleen

PS The one point I wish I had been quicker to respond with was to recommend that he restore the income tax so we can have enough revenues to actually give the residents of our state the services they need. Now that would be a way to make the greedy rich pay for the needs of the poor that he likes to mention (although from all the information I have seen, it is those without the resources who are being most effected by our states lack of funds)