Not a good time to be a super

 

Excerpt of editorial by Kendall P. Stanley
 
Who’s next?

That seems a fair question to ask this week after the fourth area school superintendent decided last week to move on, taking with him years of experience.

I won’t begin to ascribe motive as to why all four of these leaders are leaving their job, but I can tell you I wouldn’t want their job for anything.

Slipping or stagnant student numbers on which state aid is based, cutbacks in state school aid funding the state provides and continuing pressure to produce more with less – in some cases much less – can’t be making the job of school superintendent any fun. At all. On any given day.

And when you get right down to it, for every taxpayer out there who says “Just balance the budget, I have to,” you have to note that balancing the budget is easy – but you probably won’t like the end results. Or maybe you will, but your neighbors and their kids might not.

Can you imagine the Friday night landscape without the Loggers, Red Devils, or for that matter Rams or Northmen, as a part of it?

Schools are very limited on how they can generate income. Because of Proposal A there’s no easy way to go to the well to get more funding. So the increase revenue part of the equation is bleak, and that leaves cutting expenses and for school districts that means cutting people.

You can offer incentives to older teachers to retire to save some money, and it does, but that’s not going to solve the underlying situation of declining revenues decimating school budgets. Even the best superintendents can’t keep a fund balance safe from the onslaught.

Eliminating positions is the only way to make headway in balancing a budget, especially when almost all of your expenses are salaries and benefits.
Worse, these are your friends and colleagues you’re giving the ax to. Who would want to be faced with those choices?

This is a very talented group of educators and their contributions to their school districts will surely be missed. But the issues they faced sitting atop their respective districts aren’t going away any time soon. Their successors will find a very hot seat to fill.

Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the Petoskey News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net.

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Source: Petoskey News Review, 5.24.10