Kathy Scott: Mandates, regulations lead to unequal classroom spending

When the word “choice” is used to justify why Arizona legislators have embraced expanding charter and private-school voucher opportunities, what is left out is that this option is solely and exclusively for parents and not for the public school district officials.

After just concluding my 44th year in public education, I was fortunate to participate in one of the best workshops I have ever attended, namely the 64th Annual Arizona Association of School Business Officials (AASBO) conference held in Tucson July 19-22. Attendees were provided information on mandates for operating under Arizona Department of Education’s (ADE) laundry list of financial rules, the Arizona Auditor General’s Office, and guidelines for federal programs such as Title I for students in poverty and IDEA Basic for special-needs students.

While similar workshops are offered frequently, the reason this particular one was so significant is that those in power in Arizona have recently made it much more difficult to operate in the public-school arena because of increased regulations and mandates. These obligations to document, report and validate every penny spent are perhaps one of the major reasons it is totally unfair to say that there is really a “choice” when evaluating the value of a school based on the spending on classroom dollars rather than other factors.

After all, public districts must devote far more funding to meeting these mandates, while no such added burdens have been tagged to the private schools sucking funding from state coffers through Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA).

Just the cost of reporting school attendance, high-school classes taken, free-and-reduced meal participation, assessment data, statistics for determining the new school and district letter grades — and a host of other mandates — has exploded. This increase is mainly due to the obligation to master complicated online programs that even ADE officials can sometimes not explain.

It takes a small army of personnel, continuously retrained, for all but the smallest districts to meet these requirements and for many, the man hours are so great and the tasks so complicated that they have no choice but to hire for-profit companies and mentors to get the process completed. That means, despite the best of intentions, less funding for classroom dollars as none of these public-school reporting mandates come with additional funding.

This is just one small slice of the inequity pie.

Ironically, a public school district must still share a portion of its federal funding with private schools. The private schools do not actually get the dollars directly; rather the public district in which the private schools reside must either contract with a third-party provider or oversee all the hiring of personnel working on the federal program, do all the purchasing, inventorying and distribution of supplies, and must make sure the students served are assessed. The public-school district then must submit a host of documentation to ADE to prove it has done all this.

In the midst of the depressing news of even-more stringent financial reporting and tougher rules for taking an override or bond to the voters, there were two very bright spots at the AASBO conference — namely the two keynote speakers: Fredi Lajvardi, whose minority-and-poverty heavy Carl Hayden High School’s robotics team beat out top university competitors and Capt. Mark Kelly, who by his own admission was a poor student until he made a personal decision to succeed in order to “walk on Mars.”

It was the testimonies of these shining stars that gave those in attendance motivation to continue the good fight as they battle for the future of public schools, despite the uneven playing field of “choice.”