Thanks to less state funding, we’re nickel and diming our KY public schools to death | Opinion

This year I served as a parent representative on my kid’s school’s budget committee, which meets once per year to evaluate departmental requests for funding for the next school year. The committee met this week, and this peek behind the curtain into the abysmal financial state of our kids’ schools both depressed me and confirmed for me the deep commitment and love the teachers have for our kids. It also reminded me that we each need to do more to support our schools financially, both through direct contributions, and by urging our legislators to direct more of our tax dollars to public schools.

The budget committee I served on received instructional funding requests totaling over $160,000, but had only $40,000 available to allocate. Just to provide a sense of what we are talking about, representative teacher requests included $41 for 6 glass beakers for the science department, $104 for paper for the art department, $38 for Post-It Notes for the library, and $400 for new copies of required reading materials by the English department. There were some larger requests as well – subscriptions for digital instructional tools ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, and many teachers on the committee made strong arguments that these tools were essential for their jobs. Several thousand dollars in requests came for repair costs associated with aging technological equipment or to replace unusable items. Historically teachers had been authorized to request $30 to replenish classroom supplies. I heard one teacher wax rhapsodically about the new Ticonderoga pencils she bought with her $30 last year.

Faced with this list of requests, the budget committee — a group of teachers and administrators, plus me, as the parent representative — went through and slashed item after item, denying requests for new ping pong balls, new uniforms for the chorus, and a new microscope right off the bat. But those were the easy ones! Then the cuts went deeper – no new Spanish textbooks, even though the school doesn’t currently have ANY. No disposable gloves for the science department — just get the kids to wash their hands! No donuts to celebrate the Student of the Month, and no new bookshelf for the ESL department.

By hour three of the meeting the really aggressive cuts started. Eventually we took away that $30 classroom budget from every teacher who’d requested it – a savings of almost $1700! We cut several of the licenses for those digital learning aids the teachers had argued for, and many of the books requested by the English department. In the end, with the principal phoning the finance director to see if there was any room in the current budget to move some of the requests forward to this year, we made the numbers work.

Because the school expects to be identified as a Title I school for the coming year, some additional federal funding may flow in to close some of the gaps and bring back some of the items we had to cut. But, even with the additional federal funds, I heard from several teachers over the course of the night that they’d just have to fund some of these things themselves next year, as they’d been doing on and off for years. If this were a different kind of op-ed, I might be arguing more strenuously for more public funding of these public schools (which I’d certainly say we need, and is just the opposite of what will happen if we allow public money to be redirected under the so-called “school choice” proposals).

But in the meantime, I think there is more we can each do in our individual capacity. When my kids were in elementary school, we’d get requests from teachers for things like tissues, disinfectant wipes, or dry erase markers for the classroom. It seems like these requests fall off parents’ radars as our kids get older. But high school teachers need our help too! I plan to head to Costco this weekend to stock up on disposable gloves for the science department. The next time I buy Kleenex, I’ll grab a few extra to send in with my kid for their math teacher. I encourage you to consider doing the same. Our public school teachers are doing more and more with less and less. I urge you to ask your kids’ teachers if there’s anything you can contribute to help them do their jobs and teach our kids. I can tell you that the biology teacher was devastated to give up his request for $174 for seeds for next year’s lab projects, and for only $27.50 you can fund glass stirring rods for next year’s chemistry classes at Henry Clay High School.

Jennifer Bird-Pollan is a University of Kentucky law professor and a parent and volunteer at Henry Clay High School.