Answers lacking on school workers

2/23/07

From the corner store up to multinational corporations, there are certain tenets to which every budgeted operation must adhere. First among them, it would seem, is knowing who is on your payroll and on what the organization's money is spent.

These basics have escaped the Bridgeport school system. In a stunning embarrassment for a system chronically asking for more money, officials revealed that 55 school positions, many of them teachers, were somehow omitted from the education budget. It is unfathomable that such a large number of positions, totaling $1.8 million in salary, could simply go missing.

In a massive, $214 million budget proposal, $1.8 million may not sound like much. But of the proposed increase of $17.3 million over last year's budget, a full 10 percent comes from this lack of financial discipline.

Despite a tortured explanation from Supt. of Schools John Ramos, there is no legitimate excuse for this debacle. Blaming the problem on the requirements of federal education law or the filling of vacated positions with temporary workers is not good enough. There are always complications and changing laws to sort out, and it is the administrator's job to do so.

Likewise, the school board can not escape blame. The board is tasked with overseeing the school system, including budgeting, salaries and staffing issues. With a properly functioning board, a problem like this would have long ago been discovered. The revelation comes after years of excusing the relatively poor performance of city schools on lack of funds. If only, the laments go, Bridgeport got the same money as the suburbs, everything would be different. There may be some truth to that, but how can the schools ask for more money when they can't even account for what they have? Ramos says these positions include teachers and other necessary staff members. But if 55 positions are active but unaccounted for in the school system, what else has been lost in the shuffle?

To the Ramos administration's credit, the zero-based budgeting starting this year was what led to this revelation, and it was quickly disclosed to the public, opening all sorts of (justified) complaining from parents and taxpayers. But there can be no doubt that this is a disaster for the schools, both from a fiduciary and a public relations perspective.

Bridgeport's public schools lack many things, and its students, as always, deserve better. And it is the students hurt the most by this, because it calls into questions every dime the schools ask for. Necessary programs will see more scrutiny, take more time to pass muster and have a greater chance of not coming through thanks to the school system's inability to keep track of basic financial necessities. It's an unforgiving job trying to run a school system in a poor city, a city that only provides 11 percent of school financing, with the state contributing the rest. But it's hard to find sympathy for an organization that can't even count its own employees.