How to really cut costs in Walling ford-Swarthmore
To the Times:
As the Wallingford Swarthmore School District debates a later high school start time, many residents have been discussing the cost of the transportation department, i.e. buses.
In hopes of bringing some common sense to the discussion I offer the following:
The school transportation budget is $3.8 million dollars. The total school budget is just shy of $85 million. That means that the transportation budget is 4.7% of the school budget. Now keep in mind that the buses and their drivers are not only for getting students back and forth to school but also used for field trips for all five schools (three elementary, one middle school and one high school) as well as transporting special needs students (required by law), but also for transporting the multitude of sports teams for both the middle and high school teams.
For the sake of argument let’s just cut the transportation budget to $0. Parents can make their own arrangements for transportation. Kids can walk to school. We don’t really need field trips and after-school sports. We may not be able to avoid transporting special needs kids, but let’s assume we can. If your school tax bill is $6,000 a year and we eliminate transportation we saved you $282 per year or $23.50 a month.
If we don’t have a transportation department we should eliminate the sports programs in the high school and middle school. Lots of people think that’s a waste of money anyway! We can’t expect to play all our games at home and we’ll save some money that way. Hard to tell but I suspect sports programs probably cost us about $1.5 million per year (about 2% of the budget). So now we’ve knocked down your tax bill by another $122!
After we’ve made these changes we now live in a community where hundreds of children are walking our streets to get to school (we never put in sidewalks) or parents are driving their kids to school and tying up the roads to drop their kids off. Since most parents work, getting kids to after-school programs would be quite the challenge. We don’t offer after school sports for anyone so the kids can find things to do on their own.
Now the fun part. You want to sell your $350,000 home in a community where the kids have to walk to school on busy streets or you have to drive them yourself. They can’t play sports in middle or high school as we offer no programs. No sports, cheerleaders, marching band and such. Whoops, your $350,000 house isn’t so desirable to families anymore because the school district is much less desirable. So maybe you can sell your house for $275,000 or $300,000.
You lost $50,000 on your house’s value. You can cheer up knowing we saved you $400 a year in school taxes, so if you just stay in your house another 125 years it will all work out!
Maybe next week we’ll discuss cutting teacher’s salaries, dealing with strikes and increasing class sizes. We can really save some money there!
“After we’ve made these changes we now live in a community where hundreds of children are walking our streets to get to school (we never put in sidewalks) or parents are driving their kids to school and tying up the roads to drop their kids off.” — Mike Mayer