School budget growth

The Clark County School Board voted 5-0 Wednesday to approve a tentative $2.14 billion budget for the 2007-2008 school year — the first such budget ever to surpass $2 billion.

Superintendent Walt Rulffes commented, “It represents the tremendous growth in the Clark County School District.”

Of course it does. But growth in what, precisely?

The boundaries haven’t changed: No one thinks Mr. Rulffes means “geographic growth.”

Most would probably assume Mr. Rulffes refers to the growth of the student population. But projected enrollment will rise by only 3.8 percent next year — far less than the 9.7 percent jump in planned spending.

In fact, over the past five years, the school district’s budget has grown by an average of more than 10.7 percent annually, more than twice the average annual growth of the student population, which has run about 4.2 percent.

Can the difference be attributed merely to “inflation”?

Yes and no. Used literally, “inflation” refers to the growth in the nation’s money supply, a purposeful policy that has the effect of devaluing each dollar — at which point it requires more dollars to buy each desk, each lunchroom meal, each school bus tire. This helps people who borrow money (including the school district), because debts can be paid off with devalued dollars. (Conversely, it erodes savings.)

But used in a more general and metaphorical sense, other things have been “inflating” in the Clark County School District. Things like the percentage of the budget that goes to administrative support and overhead (now nearly equal to what’s spent in the classroom, including teacher pay), and the ballooning cost of keeping up with health care and retirement benefits packages far more generous than those offered the private-sector taxpayers who foot the bill.

It’s the job of the elected School Board and their chief hired hand, Mr. Rulffes, to routinely take the machete to that growth.

If that job were getting done, instead of mouthing sleep-inducing platitudes about “routine growth on a par with national averages” in such areas as “curriculum development,” these guardians of the public till would be asking, “Why are we still developing new curriculums at all? Didn’t we pretty much know how to teach grammar and arithmetic 50 years ago?

If that were going on, of course, the shrieks out of the ed shed would rival the noise from the henhouse on the night of the red fox jamboree.

It’s the current satisfied purring and clucking that give the game away.