This drives me nuts every time I see it happen. The Arizona legislature is purposefully and knowingly starving schools and school districts. There’s not enough money to fund current programs adequately or to add new programs. So, whenever a district decides to put money in one place, it’s like it’s stealing food from one child and putting it in another child’s mouth. Schools fight for morsels of funding from the district. Teachers vie to have their administrators throw them a few crumbs. Parents and other community members complain that other people’s children are getting more from the district than theirs. Meanwhile, the Republicans in power sit back and watch the fighting. “This is almost as good as the way we pulled TUSD apart by targeting the Mexican American Studies program!” they say, rubbing their hands together with glee. “Not quite as good as the chaos we created over MAS, but close.”
Here’s a case in point. According to an article in the Star, the TUSD board will be voting on a proposal to add more grades in some of its schools.
Borman, Collier, Drachman, Fruchthendler and Sabino could have grade levels added to their campuses in a proposal the TUSD Governing Board is set to consider Tuesday.
The grade expansions would result in renovation and transportation costs. TUSD estimates it would amount to about $1.5 million if all the school changes are approved.
Let’s step back and take a look at the plan in isolation for a moment, separate from TUSD’s funding problems, separate from the court’s mandated desegregation orders. It’s addressing a real issue. TUSD is losing students who, if they stayed in the district, would attend those schools. Currently, a significant number of parents are choosing to leave TUSD and send their children to BASIS or schools in the Vail or Catalina Foothills school district. If TUSD can make the programs at those five schools more attractive, it stands a chance of holding onto some of those students, bringing more money to the district and filling some of the schools’ empty classrooms.
If the board votes for the program, will it succeed at increasing district enrollment? I think there’s a strong possibility it will. Adding middle school grades at Sabino High and expanding some elementary schools to include more grades is likely to make them more attractive to parents, which means they’re more likely to keep their children at TUSD. And the $1.5 million price tag for the expansion really isn’t that much in a district the size of TUSD.
To me, looking at the plan in isolation, it sounds like a pretty good idea. Except, nothing exists in isolation at TUSD.
Right now, people advocating for the court’s deseg orders are angry that not enough money or attention has been given to some of the district’s magnet schools. They complain that the schools have been underfunded over the past few years, and the district has cut new funding plans by a million dollars. They also say that the schools have depended on long term substitutes rather than certified teachers to fill too many positions. And they have reason to complain. The district has dropped the ball when it comes to those schools. So now, when the district wants to lavish funds and attention on five schools, most of which serve the district’s Anglo community, that creates another battlefield for the district and the deseg plaintiffs to fight on. True, the district is talking about adding a bus to bring non-Anglo kids to the schools it wants to expand, but that sounds like an attempt to put a deseg ribbon on what is basically an Anglo-centered package. Bottom line, the proposal means $1.5 million would go mainly to schools with a majority of Anglo students, not to schools with a majority of Hispanic students.
In a better funded world, this wouldn’t feel so much like an either/or, where you either put scarce funds into improving the educational offerings of the Anglo community or you use the money to take care of the needs of the Hispanic community. It could, and should, be a both/and. That $1.5 million is less than 10 percent of what the state owes TUSD as its portion of the court order for the legislature to restore $330 million a year which it illegally withheld from the schools. If those funds were added to TUSD’s budget, the district could afford to add money to programs in other schools and still make the changes at the five schools in the proposal.
And remember, if the funds which were taken away illegally were restored, Arizona would still be at or near rock bottom in per student funding. If the legislature and the governor decided to move us closer to the national average, that would add a substantial amount of money which would give TUSD some discretionary funds to target low achieving students with additional help and resources and to develop programs which could help increase the racial and ethnic balance in its schools — and still have funding to add resources and programs in areas where the students are higher achieving and more affluent. And also have funding to lower class sizes, and to increase teachers’ shamefully low salaries.
As long as K-12 education is starved for funds, everyone is going to be fighting over the scraps. Putting more money in the system would relieve some of the pressure and the tension that fuels anger and resentment among school employees and the communities they serve. The problems wouldn’t go away, of course, but they would be more manageable, and the fights wouldn’t always come down to trying to spread too little money over too many vital educational needs.
This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2015.
This is about shutting down TUSD down which started a long time ago. Tom Horne said he would see TUSD closed. I think the issue he was screaming about was deseg, diversifying, and Mexican American Studies. Racism continues and now as David S said, TUSD keeps getting boxed in more and more with few choices due to funding cuts, and the deseg. order(my summary of what he said). It is difficult when since at least the early 1990’s ( I didn’t pay attention before then but that is when charter schools started here), we had people like Tom Horne(2003-2011) as superintendent of schools working against education. We have a large Hispanic population and he fought MAS? Later we had John Huppenthal later who was caught being a racist and working against desegregation. This was court ordered and our superintendents of schools were acting openly against it.
This is on another level about privatization of education through painting public education in the worst possible light so profits can be made. This was no accident or poor administration in the schools. Yes all school systems around the country make mistakes. It is very difficult to show progress and improvement when so many in office are working against public education. Public education has been demonized for a very long time in Arizona . I keep asking why people keep electing the same people who do the same thing and our state is more in debt and education is the worst in the nation. We also have more charter schools than any other state in the nation. I think that is why people like me are finding Diane Douglas a breath of fresh air because she appears to really be caring about children. Let’s hope she has some pull in the right direction and her ideas remain in the best interest of children. There is only so much she can do with so many fighting to have the public schools fail. People need to stand up for education and stop voting for Republicans.
David, please count the number of students who will be brought back by that $1.5 million–the estimates are in the proposal on the TUSD Board agenda for last nights’ meeting—and do the math. Almost 1 million dollars were removed from the magnet plans, and that money would benefit many many more students. It really is like a lesson on the morality of the district.
The Federal government only contributes 7% of school costs to the state. The property tax pays for the largest piece of the educational pie. People who live in big houses pay more property tax. The more NON revenue contributing people you allow into your community the less money you will have for schools and Hispanics are propagating 78% of the new population. The schools will get poorer and poorer and there is nothing you can do about it except DEPORT the poverty that SELF-imported.
Those children are having problems because their parent is illiterate and YOU insist upon teaching them about where they came from INSTEAD of where they are going. YOU want to turn your entire educational system into a Special Education Program and that’s why the US scores so badly against other countries. The SATs are in English!
This country became great BECAUSE it had a very SELECTIVE Immigration Program. No poverty, single women with kids or pregnant women were allowed in without a sponsor to see to their WELFARE. They were sent right back on the boat that brought them. That is still on the immigration law books – if any non citizen becomes a “Public Charge” they are inadmissible to the US. 1/2 of the 28,000,000 Legal Permanent Residents should be deported just with that law alone.
The US did not become strong by importing only refugees, the dregs and the “REFUSE” whose own countries don’t even want them.
I am a Labor Democrat and worked on both Obama campaigns. If the Democrats want to win in 2016, they can start by listening to the 9,000,000 unemployed workers who were displaced by cheap illegal labor but are forced to subsidize the very people who displaced them with the taxes on their unemployment checks. The Democrats lost the House in the last election because the didn’t represent their constituency. WAKE UP – it’s not Central America or Mexico!
This is an excellent article. How are a constitutional mandate to adequately fund public schools and a court order to restore $330-million in funds political issues? While the right hems and haws about Hillary Clinton supposedly breaking the law on emails, we have a governor here in Arizona flouting the state constitution and thumbing his nose at the courts, and somehow this is ok. As a substitute teacher for a couple public school districts, I see first hand the pain this is causing, and I have nothing but respect for the full-time certified teachers still hanging in there for the students.
David:
Let’s take a look at just a few details from your friend Dr. Sanchez’s track record for allocating funds in this sadly underfunded district:
-in a context in which the district is starved for funds, he accepted an insanely inflated compensation package that, if I’m reading his contract correctly, awards him 40 days of paid vacation per year and includes the right to exchange up to 50 unused “vacation days” for pay at the rate of $1,000 per day. This is in addition to receiving an unreasonably high salary, bonus, and expense accounts. You yourself found the compensation deal inadvisable and wrote about it at length.
-after accepting an unreasonable inflation of his own salary — what many regard as a mis-allocation of public funds — he chose to use $10,000 of the taxpayer funds the board had wrongly given him to donate to UHS, a majority-Anglo school with one of the most affluent student populations in TUSD.
-the grade expansions you refer to which deseg advocates justifiably object to were originally pitched for Fruchthendler-Sabino, affluent Anglo schools on the east side. Fruchthendler is the elementary school which — is it a coincidence? — the Sanchez family utilizes. After the deseg authority vetoed this plan, other schools were bundled into the plan to make it seem like it wasn’t a plan that privileged exclusively the already-privileged.
– Sanchez has awarded $10K bonuses to central administrators and public records requests keep turning up ugly little details like one that was mentioned in the Call to the Audience at last night’s board meeting: according to the speaker, he arrived early at last year’s school board association conference and booked a $500 per night suite which was paid for by taxpayers. When the other board members attending (Grijalva, Foster, and Juarez) arrived, he changed to a room in the neighborhood of $270 per night. They all stayed in individual rooms, which (according to the speaker) is against the district policy requiring that in such situations district officials and employees share rooms.
The social justice concerns of desegregation advocates are justified and cannot be dismissed as people fighting over insufficient funds. It is not correct that “everything would be find if the legislature would just give us more money!” The question right now is what Sanchez and his friends are doing with the very insufficient funding available to them: and it cannot be denied that there are documentable instances of them awarding it to more rather than less affluent students and treating themselves to inappropriate luxuries on the taxpayers’ dime. If they had more funds, I doubt it would mean that students’ needs — or the cause of social justice — would start being their first priority.
It’s about time you faced the truth and realized that if you continue to support these people, you need to stop presenting yourself to the Tucson community as someone who cares about social justice — or racial justice.
Social justice – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/?title=Social_justiceWikipedia
Social justice is “justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society”. Classically, “justice” (especially corrective justice or distributive justice) referred to ensuring that individuals both fulfilled their societal roles, and received what was due from society.
Really? Really?
How disappointing for the quality producers.
In situations where insufficient funding degrades teaching and learning conditions in a school system, affluent parents can and do put supports in place (private tutoring, supplementary books and study guides, etc.) to ensure that their children’s educational needs are met. They also raise funds to supplement their children’s schools’ budgets, and donate and recruit more tax credits. Low-SES parents in many cases cannot afford to put supplementary support in place or do not realize what sorts of supports would benefit their children academically, and their capacity to raise supplementary funds is not as great. In a district as poor as TUSD, for central administrators to apply the PUBLIC funds available to prevent white flight from schools serving affluent neighborhoods is a travesty. The students in these schools are already much better funded and supported than students in other parts of the district.
To fund bus service so a token few minorities — far fewer than the thousands who would benefit from attending better funded and better supported schools — can be granted the favor of “sharing the wealth” in schools like Fruchthendler and Sabino is a ridiculously insufficient band-aid slapped on a gaping wound that requires surgery, not band-aids.
What kind of “surgery” would most benefit TUSD’s students? The removal of Sanchez, Grijalva, Foster, and Juarez would be the first procedure needed. After that happens, it might be possible to start repairing some of the damage they’ve done in the two years since they gained control of this unfortunate district.
Safier writes, “If the legislature and the governor decided to move us closer to the national average, that would add a substantial amount of money which would give TUSD some discretionary funds to target low achieving students with additional help and resources and to develop programs which could help increase the racial and ethnic balance in its schools.”
What exactly does Safier call the millions of dollars TUSD has been receiving each year for decades in desegregation funding? Aren’t those taxes levied specifically so they can be used to “target low achieving students with additional help and resources and to develop programs which could help increase the racial and ethnic balance in its schools”? How many times, in the sad 40-year history of the desegregation case, have the funds collected for this purpose actually been used that way?
TUSD’s habit is to beg for more funds to meet student needs and then not to make student needs the top priority when funding is applied. Their habit in relating to constituents is to ask for input and participation in planning and then to push forward with their own self-serving centrally concocted schemes, ignoring the valuable information and suggestions provided by constituents. There is a fundamental abusive dishonesty in TUSD’s institutional culture and in their approach to managing their relationship with the public. Sadly, increased funding will not change that.
…and what did we get for our money?
It’s so refreshing to see all the throw-away accounts created to leave what amounts to the same comment over and over again. Because, as we all know, if something gets repeated often enough, it magically becomes true!
“Funding Doesn’t Cure Abusive Dishonesty.” That’s specifically for ILLEGALS. You came here Dishonestly and now want to be TOTALLY subsidized honestly. Honestly…. I don’t think so!
These people don’t belong here. They need twice as much money to educate and sustain as our OWN kids and YOU want US to subsidize them. How ridiculous is that? THIS IS WHY WE HAVE IMMIGRATION LAW! So they don’t dilute the educational pool and steal jobs!
Ldonyo’s comment is puzzling: there are no comments in this stream that repeat information or “amount to the same comment over and over again.”
Everything said about TUSD in the above stream is familiar to those who follow the district’s business, and it is documented or documentable fact. Saying over and over again that “IT IS NOT!” does not magically make denial of reality a viable strategy for defending the way this public school system is being managed.
Watch all the TUSD Board meetings that have taken place in the last three months, Ldonyo, from beginning to end. Videos of the meetings are all available on the district’s website. After you’ve done that, then come back and tell us what is true and what is not true. I’m guessing that if you actually took the time and trouble to pay close attention to the district’s governance, you wouldn’t be commenting in defense of it.
Some people just hate letting other people have opinions. Maybe they weren’t spanked as a child.
If you are a legal resident or citizen, speak English and don’t advocate the overthrow of the US government, don’t send your kids to TUSD. It’s nothing more than a liberal indoctrination center for radical chicanos, the Grijalva’s personal toilet brigade and future thugs of America.
When did it become wrong to educate children? When did it become wrong to have a certified accreditated teacher? What kind of human beings would not put their children first? Even the cavemen cared and educated their children, or you and I would not be here. What is wrong with educating our children? I just do not get it! All the side bars, twists, deflecting, does not answer my question. When did become wrong to educate our children?