Cuts inevitable for education

School dis­tricts across Col­orado will likely fall vic­tim to one of the largest bud­get cut pro­grams since the start of the reces­sion. Dur­ing his first month in office, Gov­er­nor John Hick­en­looper recently pro­posed bud­get cuts esti­mated at $300 mil­lion in K-12 and higher education.

Restric­tions on cuts regard­ing health care and prison fund­ing have left law mak­ers with the heavy task of reform­ing pub­lic edu­ca­tion finances. Leg­is­la­tors on both sides of the aisle agree slash­ing edu­ca­tion resources isn’t favor­able; how­ever, nec­es­sary to pre­vent sim­i­lar or worse deficits in the future.

Some democ­rats like Sen­ate pres­i­dent Bran­don Shaf­fer (D), hope to com­pro­mise with the gov­er­nor to reduce cuts in half. Many repub­li­cans like Speaker of the House Frank McNulty ® are demon­strat­ing bipar­ti­san­ship by agree­ing Hick­en­looper is “dead on” but with neces­sity of refor­mu­lat­ing the pro­posed bill.

State law­mak­ers are strug­gling to find bal­ance between main­tain­ing a strong edu­ca­tion sys­tem while try­ing to recover from over a $1 bil­lion state debt. “It’s unfor­tu­nate over the past years we’ve seen these cuts, but reduc­tions will have to be made. Mak­ing the tough deci­sions today will ben­e­fit us tomor­row,” said McNulty in a Capi­tol Hill press con­fer­ence regard­ing the state bud­get and edu­ca­tion on Feb 18.

Col­orado is fac­ing its share of dif­fi­cul­ties, but the deficit is top pri­or­ity in pol­i­tics. Sen­a­tor Bob Bacon (D) said, “There are other issues present in Col­orado, but I think the eco­nomic prob­lems are most pressing.”

McNulty is a sup­porter of rid­ding teacher unions in hope of turn­ing the focus from polit­i­cal power to stu­dents’ per­for­mance. Though the edu­ca­tion bud­get bill is not likely to pass as writ­ten, real­is­ti­cally cuts have to be made. As a result, teach­ers could poten­tially lose their jobs.

Accord­ing to Shaf­fer, mech­a­nisms includ­ing the Teacher Effec­tive­ness Bill and other assess­ment pro­grams are being devel­oped to ensure enthu­si­as­tic instruc­tors remain employed. Law­mak­ers are weary to put this bill into effect too quickly as to ensure its suc­cess. The pub­lic will likely see the pro­gram a few years down the road.

Some pro­pos­als to bal­ance the bud­get include, let­ting teach­ers go, result­ing in larger class sizes, elim­i­nat­ing non-essential courses and clos­ing under per­form­ing schools. “Every teacher I know is not wor­ried about the size of the class. We need to encour­age teach­ers and par­ents to make sure stu­dents are get­ting the best edu­ca­tion they can,” said McNulty.

Gov­ern­ment offi­cials are aware cuts can only last so long before back­lash. “The num­ber one thing we can do is invest in kids’ edu­ca­tion,” said Shaf­fer. “If we’re going to com­pete on an inter­na­tional scale, we must even­tu­ally devote more atten­tion and money towards education.”

Though a size­able bud­get cut plan, many law­mak­ers spec­u­late more to come because of record low state rev­enue. Accord­ing to deputy com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor Jack Wiley, “It’s dif­fi­cult to pre­dict. It’s very likely we will see cuts in the future.”

Finan­cial experts agree the only way to earn rev­enue and turn the tides of finan­cial woes is to attract new busi­nesses as law­mak­ers under­stand increas­ing taxes is not ben­e­fi­cial at times of reces­sion. “If we aren’t invest­ing in our edu­ca­tion sys­tems, it’s hard to attract busi­nesses,” said Shaffer.

House and Sen­ate mem­bers have evaded edu­ca­tion cuts in the past, result­ing in higher cuts today; forc­ing schools to do more with less. Accord­ing to Shaf­fer, it is bet­ter than the alter­na­tive of “reach­ing a thresh­old of doing less with less.” McNulty said, “We can’t keep pass­ing down this debt.”

Written in collaboration with Jessica Zook