Too Many Home Fires Burning

We’re approaching the ‘settle your bill’ portion of the annual exercise that is our municipal budget creation. We all knew going into the process (which shouldn’t have a beginning or an end, just a NOW, because it’s ongoing) that no one was going home happy and as it turned out, we were right. Not enough of anything for anyone.

Many homeowners feel they are at the end of their financial rope and insist the City Council hold to as flat a budget as possible while reviving the annual argument that those who live here with school-age children, as renters but not homeowners, are somehow not shouldering the same amount of the tax burden that they are.

They, and it’s not just them, see public education, and the percentage of the municipal budget needed to fund it, as an expense rather than an investment. And when you’re looking at your tax bills, it’s almost hard to argue with that position so let me point out that it’s not the correct argument we should be having, especially now.

In recent weeks I’ve listened as hard as I can to the ongoing discussions by members of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Board of Education and City Council (intended to facilitate agreement on annual budget requests) especially on one small (relatively speaking) budget item: funding the costs of school resource officers (police dedicated and trained for the school environment) in classrooms as if it were the most normal expense in the world, except in the world in which most of us grew up, there were no police officers in our classrooms.

Twenty-first-century schools have more metal detectors than our airports, for, sadly, very good reasons. Instead of expending the time, talent, and treasure to understand the underlying causes and mitigating them, we've expanded our notion of 'the cop on the beat' to include the hallways between the school cafeteria and the library. I think we’re continuing to ignore a much larger and more important question: how did we become people who need to do this to our children?

We've got more children having free or low-cost breakfast in schools than ever because how we care about one another has shifted from when you and I were school-age, and no one seems to wonder (or care) what causes so much food scarcity that the school meals are the only ones our children can count on.  

Far too much of our Brave New World looks a lot like the old one that the promise of technology, access to tools, equality of opportunity, and enhanced diversity were all going to change. The gap between the promise and the performance has grown not only exponentially but obscenely. We argue about ‘Who started the fire?’ instead of ‘Who will help put it out?’

We've spent, literally as well as figuratively, more than a generation using government to establish programs that have little to do with why we created a government in the first place, offering the argument to one another 'Someone has to do it!'

Unless and until we can agree to define and then refine those tasks our government should be doing and which ones are our responsibilities, we can hold budget hearings until the cows come home (and guess who'll pay the dairy subsidy?) but never fix the fundamental problems. We'll continue to put out fires with gasoline and take solace that our mileage may vary, but sadly, never the outcome.
-bill kenny