Coffee Club: "Big Thoughts"

I've had spiders on my mind this morning. Have you noticed them staking out their territories under the eaves on the porch? Anyway, that old children's rhyme has been running through my head, you know, the one where the spider says "walk into my parlor..."

I was wondering if the taxpayers sometimes feel like that fly, you know, being lured and lulled, flattered and jollied and cajoled... until it's too late!

All this led me into thinking about the school budget, probably because the budget flyer just came in the mail, and I started having these "big thoughts," not about our budget really, but about school budgets in general.

One of the big thoughts had to do with ratios, ratios between different parts of the school budget, believe it or not. All this is an odd frame of mind for a Friday morning! Must be I haven't had enough coffee yet!

They say salaries are 80 to 85% of the budget. How much of that is teachers, how much support, and how much is administration? I just read a piece about a guy, the head of Overstock.com, who's proposing that 65% of school budgets be spent in the classroom, on instruction and materials.

Apparently everyone, right and left, hates the idea, so it seems like he's hit a nerve! The 65% seems a little arbitrary, but it bears some looking in to. Maine as a state comes out looking pretty good, above 65%. I wonder what the percentage is for our District?

I know that businesses are evaluated, at least in part, according to how far they conform to, or deviate from, financial ratios appropriate to their line of business. Everybody knows about profit, profit before taxes, and that sort of thing, but they also look at rates of capitalization, debt ratios, and so on. It can get pretty complicated, but it seems to be a useful tool. It lets you know if you're out of line with your competitors, or if you're pretty typical. I don't know why you couldn't apply something similar to non-profit organizations and to schools. You'd be looking at different sorts of relationships than in a business, of course.

Another thought: it would be interesting to compare our school budget and how it's put together to the budgets of nearby districts. Everyone would be a bit different, but if there were big differences you'd have to figure out why.

Did you see that a selectman from Embden wants the schools to give money back to the towns? I'm not sure he's got it exactly right, but it does raise the question of where did tax relief go? Or did we have all that fuss not too long ago only to slow down the rate of growth in taxes for a year or two?