Car bumpers all over Connecticut carry a sticker that declares, “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.” Of course, most cars with such stickers are driven by employees of schools, not people serving in the Air Force, which still relies heavily on bombers (B-52s) and air-refueling tankers (KC-135s) that were built in the 1950s, even as education consumes far more of the country’s resources than the military does.
Community groups in Connecticut are holding a lot of bake sales and other fund-raising events for schools these days, but it’s not because money is being diverted from education to the military. (To the contrary — Connecticut being home to military contractors like United Technologies and Electric Boat, the military in effect pays for much public education here.) No, Connecticut’s schools are not being starved but cannibalized from the inside.
A recent example is Tolland, whose school board eliminated 10 student activity programs when it wrote its last budget a few months ago and now has restored two of them — high school girls junior varsity volleyball and high school boys junior varsity lacrosse — because booster clubs have raised the few thousand dollars the two activities cost. And yet Tolland’s school budget rose this year by nearly 9 percent and $2.6 million. This increase still wasn’t enough to sustain the usual student activities because the biggest part of it was applied instead to raises and benefit increases for school employees. That’s where the money for the student activities that were eliminated was diverted.
For when it comes to the compensation of school employees in Connecticut, there is never the need for a bake sale. State law requiring binding arbitration for public employee union contracts puts school employee compensation ahead of everything else in education. Because the law gives public employee unions the power to force their contracts into arbitration, school boards have lost the power to set priorities, lost the power to enforce the public interest. A school board’s decision on employee compensation can never be final; only a decision to cut services to students can be final.
It’s Your Fault
School services are being curtailed around the state because the resources of taxpayers are not keeping up with increases in school employee compensation.
Indeed, there are indications that average household incomes in the state are declining even as arbitration guarantees raises for public employees, making them a privileged class.
State financial grants to most municipal school systems are increased every year, but usually not enough to cover the raises and benefit increases required by the arbitration mandate. This causes municipal property tax increases as well as service cuts.
Of course, the influence of the public employee unions is so great that repeal of the arbitration system is considered politically impossible. As lieutenant governor, M.Jodi Rell spoke often of the need to relieve municipalities of costly state mandates. She was indulged because the lieutenant governor’s power consists only of presiding over the state Senate. As governor, Rell has dropped the mandates issue, and her administration’s only resistance to encroachment by public employee unionism has been to oppose collective bargaining for high officers of the state police, which would remove them from management in an agency whose great powers still require far more management than state government has ever provided.
Connecticut’s elected officials sometimes complain that their hands are tied by binding arbitration, but they may love it secretly for relieving them of political responsibility. For under the arbitration system, Connecticut’s de facto state motto is: “There’s nothing we can do.”
But a mechanism of reform is available short of repealing the system. Arbitration could be preserved and democracy restored to municipal government if municipal contract arbiters were not appointed by a state agency, but rather elected by townspeople along with other town officials — mayors and council and school board members.
Those other town officials could continue to pretend to govern. Towns would need to find only one resident willing to answer at an election every two years, as town contract arbiter, for the disposal of what is typically 70 percent or more of town revenue.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
