In Part 1 of this series we used the example of free COVID tests to show how our county’s budget favors, quite frequently, the rich at the expense of the poor. In this installment we show how our our heartless school district and teachers’ union leave our most vulnerable residents shivering in the cold.
The “W’s” is an amorphous classification for school clusters in the county’s more affluent areas. They include Whitman, Walter Johnson, Wootton, Poolesville, BCC, and Churchill. By no means is every student attending these clusters an heir to the inflammatory “white privilege.” There are students in those schools who come from modest or struggling families, and there are students in the other clusters who come from affluent households. Nevertheless, as a proxy, the residents in those clusters are, generally, well off enough to sustain the property taxes, mortgage payments, utilities, maintenance, and repairs on their properties. The student body of these high schools is approximately 11,000 out of 52,000 system-wide, or a rough 20% of the high school population. Let’s use that as a proxy for the entire student body.
If 20% of the public-school students come from affluent families, then there is no reason to give those students “free” public education. We can estimate that 20% of the entire school budget (operating and capital) is dedicated to those families who don’t particularly need it. Reducing 20% of the schools’ operating budget results in a savings of $660 million/year.
Here’s where we reach the point of heartbreak. The state government has announced the very likely possibility of a significant multi-year budget cut to transportation, including transfer payments to Montgomery County. Council Member Andrew Friedson reacted quite convincingly:
Choking off transportation funding to counties will leave behind many of our most vulnerable residents on the side of the road.
There are two moral problems with Mr. Friedman’s position. First, there is no justification for the state government to fund any part of our bus system (and the Purple Line). Before we expect that kind of munificence from our fellow Marylanders, I would like to take a day trip with anyone from the county’s budgeting office to Allegheny County and ask the residents there if they agree to finance our Ride-On bus operation.
More importantly, that $660 million we are allocating to affluent families’ education should arguably be going somewhere else, and the vulnerable residents on the side of the road waiting for a bus is one reasonable suggestion. Instead of asking Governor Moore to fund our bus system, we should be asking the school system and the teachers’ union why we should “fully fund” them—and the $1.3 million severance payment to Gloria McKnight—instead of the poor.
Does this mean we continue to fund the schools at a rate of $3.3 billion/year and send all the affluent families to private schools? Is it fair that those families continue paying $10,000/year property tax bills and then an additional $15,000/year/child tuition? That outcome would only aggravate the brain drain and capital flight already affecting Montgomery County. We’ll show a way out of our distorted economic priorities in part 3 of this series.
