DeKalb wisely avoids classroom cuts

“There are two things you don’t mess with,” a parent told DeKalb school Superintendent Crawford Lewis last week, “our babies and our money.”

Both are under siege as DeKalb — and every other school district in the state — confronts deep state budget cuts and sagging local revenues. DeKalb is considering eliminating all or part of the $5.7 million spent each year to bus several thousand students to magnet programs outside their home districts, a move that could force some families out of the programs.

That possibility led 125 passionate parents to attend a meeting Thursday at Avondale High School, the third in a series of four such hearings that concludes tonight with a

6:30 p.m. session at Chamblee Charter High School. The 30 parents allotted two minutes each at the microphone voiced a similar sentiment: Their children loved their magnet programs and were thriving. Couldn’t the county find other places to carve out the nearly $6 million in savings?

On another night, in another county, it may be parents of music students lining up to speak at the microphone about devastating budget cuts. Or it may be parents of art or foreign-language students. Or parents of any student asking why field trips and first grade paraprofessionals have been eliminated.

This is the sobering new reality in Georgia, where the economic downturn is assaulting classrooms already bruised by years of inexplicable state budget cuts. Every student in Georgia is going to get less of something. The only question is what that something will be.

DeKalb has made the right decision targeting budget reductions to areas outside of the classrooms. All systems should begin their slashing as far from classroom instruction as possible. (That means central office staff should be considered for cuts).

Warning parents that state funds have all but dried up, Lewis said, “Things in DeKalb at this point are dire. There are going to be cuts in transportation and in everything but the local schoolhouse.”

County officials described the financial storm for parents. Since 2002, DeKalb has lost more than $100 million because of state cuts. With foreclosures and a curdled real estate market, local property taxes are also faltering. Although the state is supposed to finance transportation, the outdated funding formula only sent back enough to pay for 320 of DeKalb’s 963 school buses. The state furnishes no money to bus students beyond their neighborhood campus, so the expense of the 100 buses required to deliver DeKalb students to magnet programs falls on county taxpayers.

In pioneering the magnet school concept, DeKalb stands nearly alone in its door-to-door transportation services. Out of 149 campuses, DeKalb operates 14 magnet programs; seven theme schools that focus on a specific field, such as technology; and four system-run charter schools. While many districts now offer magnets, most pass the burden of transportation on parents.

DeKalb parents at the hearing understood the crisis; many reflected on cutbacks in their own industries. Many offered their expertise, proffering an array of innovative ideas, from studying how UPS cut costs by eliminating left turns to replacing local bus stops with centralized ones.

Some parents expressed a willingness to pay a fee for transportation. Others urged the county to update ridership counts, reporting that school buses drove by their houses with only three passengers. A puzzling omission from parents — in view of the jammed parking lot at the hearing — was a comprehensive carpooling network.

DeKalb ought to embrace some immediate transportation cutbacks. It should consolidate the second-shift buses that cart kids home from after-school activities, space bus stops farther apart, and, where safety permits, adhere to the state recommendation that students who live within 1.5 miles walk rather than ride buses to school.

The parents fighting any changes to magnet school busing miss the point. Protecting the buses could lead to cuts in the classroom, and that’s a dead end for students.

— Maureen Downey, for the editorial board (mdowney@ajc.com)