Two related schools stories

First, we have the Wisconsin Taxpayer Alliance's annual hand-wringing over public school spending:

School spending statewide rose 4.6% last school year, the largest increase in three years, according to a new report by a non-partisan taxpayers group. [. . .]

Last year, Wisconsin school districts spent an average of $10,367 per student, or $477 more than the year before. Public schools enrollment dropped 0.3% last year, making the per-pupil increase slightly higher, at 4.8%.

Because the state's share of school costs for that year increased only by 0.5%, most of the additional money came from increased property taxes, which were up 7.2% last year, the alliance says. [. . .]

The majority of the school spending last year went for instructional costs, which went up 5%, to $6,068 per student. Spending on teacher salaries and benefits rose 4.6%. The rising costs of health insurance have spurred some districts to call for a referendum so they can spend more than they are allowed under state law, [WTA president Todd] Berry said. "One of the things putting pressure on districts in terms of cost is that the state revenue cap often doesn't grow as fast as the salary and fringes grow," he said.

One thing not mentioned in the article, or the WTA analysis, is that most school districts settled their 2003-2005 contracts during the last school year, resulting, in most cases, in both raises and back pay for staff. That alone would account for a good chunk of the increase over the previous year. Beyond that, what Berry noted about the increasing cost of benefits is true. I will come back to that in a moment.

Before I do, we have the second story, which is all about how the high cost of energy is squeezing schools' budgets:

With tax increases limited by state revenue caps, Wisconsin's public schools are wrestling with a question felt throughout the nation: how to pay unexpected higher energy bills.

Like many districts, the Kenosha Unified School District has cut programs. It raised class sizes, cut school counselors and eliminated some district secretaries and administrators in order to budget $500,000 for the expected increases.

"It's like someone on a fixed income," says Miles Turner, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators. "How do you afford that increase in gas prices? It cuts into education services--and everything else."

Milwaukee Public Schools face bus fuel prices $1.5 million higher than expected, said Gretchen Schuldt, a fiscal policy analyst for MPS. The district doesn't anticipate a problem with heating bills, she said, because it pre-purchased natural gas at a budgeted rate. But that won't be the case next year.

"We are expecting a multimillion-dollar hit next year," said Michelle Nate, finance director for MPS. "Every million dollars is the equivalent of $11 per student that could otherwise be used to buy teachers. The more we have to spend to heat the building, the less we can spend on classrooms."

Part of me wants to just say, "Welcome to George Bush's America--where the oil companies make record profits and school districts fire teachers to buy gas." But I know that that kind of attitude isn't helpful.

Instead, note the common thread here between these stories. School districts are being asked to provide consistently better performance (No Child Left Behind requires "Adequate Yearly Progress") on revenue-capped budgets bedeviled by spiraling costs outside the district's control. On the one hand, the cost of health care keeps increasing at many times the rate of inflation, forcing districts to choose between making a difficult job that much less attractive to good teachers and siphoning money out of the classroom. On the other hand, the price of energy is also increasing at far above the rate of inflation, again forcing a choice between teachers and comfortable classrooms. There is no wiggle room in school budgets for this kind of unreasonable and unexpected inflation in costs.

All of this points to something I have believed for a long time about "tax freezes" or TABOR idiocy: It is nonsensical to arbitrarily tie government spending to inflation (like the CPI), because what governments buy is very different from what consumers buy. While yes, consumers buy both energy and health care, those costs make up a vastly greater proportion of school district budgets (for example) than household budgets.

What you end up with is the kind of mess you see in current municipal budget proposals, from Tom Barrett's fee-increase laden budget tin the city of Milwaukee to Scott Walker's decimation of services in his Milwaukee County budget proposal. No one wins under either scenario.

The answer, of course, is not higher taxes. The answer lies in a national health care policy that takes insurance costs out of the hands of employers--including municipal employers whose budgets are paid by taxpayers. The answer lies in a national energy policy that encourages conservation and alternate, renewable energy instead of handouts to energy companies. Neither of these things can happen without a national will to make them so. And what's frustrating to me as an informed citizen--and as a municipal employee for whom "greater efficiency" means teaching 40 students in a class--is that all of the various governmental entities facing these crises haven't raised a collective howl, to force the political will to make these changes. Taxpayers, too, should be screaming bloody murder, since they are hit both in their personal pocketbooks and in their tax bills.

And yet the political will remains absent.