Stan Geiger

Two Hundred No-Shows Per Day

Schools are facing budget cuts; we’re all doomed! So say the plentiful local TV news reports on the matter. Of course, November is a ratings month. The political-educational complex just keeps rolling along.

It wasn’t long ago that the state’s General Fund was bulging with new money, thanks in large part to revenue collections generated by high oil and gas prices. General Fund revenue ballooned, growing from about $5 billion to $7 billion over the space of three or four years. The primary beneficiary of that revenue explosion was education.

I wrote a piece warning of likely problems with that scenario a couple of years ago. Given the history of energy booms and busts, I said the state could easily find itself a billion dollars short in a heartbeat. I have been proven right.

The new money should have been viewed as temporary at the time, and should have been appropriated for one-time expenditures such as infrastructure improvements. The state had a nearly endless supply of needed infrastructure projects from which to choose. But no, the politicians figured the money would best serve the state if it was dedicated to recurring annual expenses---like raises for educators. The political-educational complex just keeps rolling along.

Now the new money of past years is disappearing, and educators are whining like stuck pigs.

An Oklahoma Impact report last night said Governor Brad Henry had $105 million in “stimulus” money for dispersal at his discretion. Naturally, education got most of it. The political-educational complex just keeps rolling along.

I will be exceedingly glad when that education lackey we call a governor runs out the clock and takes a hike.

I will inject this point as a side note: You’re hearing about state funding cuts; you aren’t hearing about property tax revenue---which is a major source of funding for public schools. Maybe somebody in our esteemed local media would care to report on how much property tax revenue is up in the midst of the alleged grand funding crisis.

Last night, KOTV’s big story had to with Tulsa Public School’s announcement that it will eliminate paid substitutes for the rest of the year in response to state funding cuts. The district calls on parents to pick up the slack, asking them to sit on classrooms as uncompensated substitutes.

Tax, tax, tax the crap out of people in the name of education then ask them to come in and work for free. What an excellent display of brass ‘nads.

In the course of the story, anchor Terry Hood put forth a statistic that left me slack-jawed. She reported the district needs, on average, 200 substitutes a day. Two freakin’ hundred a day! Multiply that number by 180 instructional days and you come up with a staggering 36,000 instances over the course of a 9-month school year in which schoolteachers pick up the phone and say they aren’t coming to work.

Let’s have a little more fun with numbers. I don’t know how many teachers TPS has on the payroll; I think it’s somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000. If there are 36,000 call-ins per school year and there are 2,000 teachers on the payroll, we’re talking an average of 18 no-show days per teacher per school year. If you want to go with 3,000 teachers on the payroll, we’re talking an average of 12 no-show days per teacher per school year. Even if you push the number of teachers on the payroll to 4,000, we’re still talking about an average of 9 no-show days per teacher per school year.

If students don’t show up for school, it’s a big deal. But, apparently, the district has less of a problem with teachers playing hooky.

The average annual pay figure for Oklahoma schoolteachers is several thousand dollars higher than the state’s average annual wage as a whole. If I’m not mistaken, starting pay for a teacher is higher than the state’s average wage. In other words, teachers get paid like they work an entire year. But they most certainly do not. A teacher is only required to show up for work about half the calendar days in a year.

Yet on the rare occasions when teachers are supposed to go to work during a 9-month period of the year---a 9-month period that is itself laced with time off---well, hell, they just can’t make it.

Allow me to offer a solution. If a teacher takes a day off, dock that teacher a day’s pay. If teachers have to pay substitutes out of their own pockets, they’ll start showing up.

I’ll not hold my breath waiting for my proposed solution to grow legs, because the political-educational complex just keeps rolling along---and rolling all over you in the process.

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