Guest opinion: Tough times make everyone tighten their belts
By Steven K. Teuber Vice Chairman, Lee County School District
When I consider the tough decisions facing the members of the Lee County School District regarding the budget crisis and lack of funding for public education, it reminds me of a story from a small southern town. When a visitor finds an employee in the stairwell of a tall office building having a heart attack, he runs to the rooftop to get a cellular signal to call for emergency response. When he arrives on the rooftop, he finds a young man standing on the ledge appearing like he is ready to jump. The visitor calls in the heart attack and the potential suicide jumper and then queries the young man on his suicide attempt. The young man responds, “Oh, I’m not going to jump. I just want to be in the newspaper.”
A fellow board member has alleged that the current fiscal policies of the district can be improved and has offered the media and the public snippets of solutions void of any supporting data or foundation for these ideas over the past two years. Many of the ideas provide minimal savings, others actually cost the district more, and many others have little or no impact on the current budget. While I have formally requested each of these ideas be discussed openly in a public forum, accompanied by supporting data, I strongly doubt that this will materialize for obvious reasons. While the focus of this board member is only on personal gain, the underlying premise that we need to budget more effectively is irrefutably correct. Therefore, I find myself much like the man calling for help from the roof, I find myself in the correct location maligned with someone at the same place for much different reasons.
We do both agree that the state of the economy is dire and recovery does not appear in the distant future. Everyone must scrutinize their budgets and change the way they conducted themselves in the past. The Lee County School District, like all other governing bodies, is no different and to think otherwise is not reasonable or prudent. Article IX, Section 1 of the Florida Constitution states that “the education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida. It is, therefore, a paramount duty of the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders”. It can be argued that the Florida Legislature has failed in that mandate over the past several years. Regardless how you opine on that issue, it is the duty of those elected officials to fund public education and not that of local school boards. We must make the funding provided by the state work for the betterment of the children in our county. While I don’t support reducing opportunities or programs that are offered to our children, I will continue to work on finding alternative ways of delivery and methods that reduce cost while still maintaining the quality of education in our district without raising taxes on our citizens.