No Heat in Classrooms: Look Beyond the Tragic Photos and Cast Blame on the State, the City, and the Kirwan Commission - Entrepreneur Generations

Baltimore City Public Schools are in the national news right now, due to frigid classrooms throughout the system. Photographs all over social media show students in classrooms in winter coats and boots, and the Baltimore Teacher Union even publicly asked for all schools to be closed until the heating situation could be evaluated and fixed. Today, we have a Snow Day, but it's not because of the heating systems; we have a few inches of snow, and the windchills are frigid for any walkers or bus-takers.

My classroom has actually been quite warm this week. It hasn't always been, over the years, but this year the boiler is sending heat to my corner of the building. This isn't true everywhere; in fact, my colleagues three and four classrooms down have no heat. This is fairly typical; pockets of our very old buildings have heat and other pockets don't.

A lot of people are expressing outrage -- I just saw a tweet from Orioles outfielder Adam Jones -- which is nice. But what the expressions of outrage often miss is the reasons behind the issues, and how this heating issue is but one symptom of decades of ignoring and mistreating the youth of Baltimore City by the state and the city. I want this same outrage to be happening not only when our kids don't have heat, but also when, such as last year, we have a budget crisis where our school's budget is decreased in one year by 10%, forcing the layoffs of 8 faculty members and the elimination of many Arts classes, Health class, and Physical Education, and forcing the school to change its schedule from offering students 7 classes a day to 6 classes. And this is only what happened in the last year: teachers, students, and administrators had to beg the state and city for additional funding and what we received wasn't enough.

Evidence of underfunding abounds for years, as the 2002 Thornton commission findings were never funded, and Governor O'Malley's budget flat-funded education to not adjust for inflation and that has never been corrected. Funding to City Schools have remained stagnant, and the district has continued to lose students. Adding to this is Baltimore City council over the years, which has granted TIFs to big businesses for years, which has led to much growth, but which artificially increased the tax base without increasing the actual taxes coming in. Baltimore City Schools are unfairly harmed by the state funding formulas for this, because it looks like Baltimore has a great tax base but really doesn't because of those TIFs being granted. This makes it even more gut-wrenching when a company which benefitted from these TIFs -- like Target -- picks up and leaves town when the TIFs run out. On top of this, the Baltimore mayor, Catherine Pugh, allots almost double ($481 million to $265 million) of the city budget to police rather than schools.

Last Nov. 30, an independent commission found that Baltimore City Public Schools were underfunded by $358 million. As a teacher, I've been hopeful that all of this attention and this independent audit would lead to some better funding for our students, but, so far, it hasn't.

The latest abomination is the Kirwan Commission, which formed in the summer of 2016 to study and address funding inequities in Maryland Schools. For months, as we have struggled through job uncertainty and tough years (indeed, this, my 17th year of teaching, is my most challenging since my 1st, due to our drastic schedule change which were the result of the budget cuts), City Schools teachers have been hearing that we need to wait for the Kirwan findings because, surely, they will come and rescue us, because anyone who studies our situation will know the funding situation for city schools is dire. Unfortunately, the commission has been meeting only monthly -- hardly the pace required for such a drastic issue -- and, in October, they announced they needed more time, despite the fact that they had been meeting more than a year. In an outrageous editorial, the Baltimore Sun agreed with the decision to delay.

Make no mistake about it: this is a political decision. Dr. Kirwan was appointed by Governor Larry Hogan, Senate President Mike Miller, and Maryland House Speaker Michael Busch. All are up for re-election in 2018. The rest of the commission have also been appointed mostly by politicians, none of whom want to deal with education funding during an election year.

Education funding needs gutsy politicians who will be willing to make tough decisions, not punt until after the election cycle. Until then, our kids -- who have so many needs brought on by poverty, trauma, lead paint, and poor health care, who go to schools with crumbling infrastructure with funding that can only deal with problems when they become emergent -- will continue to suffer.

Larry Hogan has had an antagonistic relationship with Baltimore City since his election, and his attitude towards the schools is no different. Citing "record" funding given by the state isn't relevant when the state has criminally underfunded schools for years and when he has the power to fix issues such as heating with emergency funds. He could be a leader, but instead he's trying to throw blame back at the schools, and I'm sure he's very pleased by the delay of the Kirwan Commission until after the election. Ditto Mike Miller and Michael Busch, who have sat on their hands while state funding has remained flat for years. This is a failure of politicians and policy. The whole public should be outraged, not just at photos of kids in winter coats in classrooms, but of the colossal failure to fund education in Baltimore City for decades.

from Epiphany in Baltimore http://ift.tt/2CG4Yye No Heat in Classrooms: Look Beyond the Tragic Photos and Cast Blame on the State, the City, and the Kirwan Commission - Entrepreneur Generations

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