Cutting $600,000 from an already-trim budget will be a difficult operation, even for one as gifted with the financial scalpel as Darrel Bobe.
But that's the task before the good doctor, who announced this week that the state has again reduced the General Fund budget for the North Knox School Corp.
We caught up with the school superintendent on Thursday evening at the Knox County Fair, over by the livestock arena during the cattle portion of the Round Robin Showmanship competition.
In dawned us that, in order to make ends meet, North Knox may have to forgo its future football and soccer seasons and rent out those fields as pasture to generate a little extra money to soften the blow being struck by the state.
It seems that the school-funding formula has gotten more, not less, mysterious in the last 10 years or so, something a decade ago we never thought possible.
There's all this talk about the “money following the child,” but what does that really mean?
In application it is, as Alice said of trying to figure out jam to-day, a dreadfully confusing policy.
A corporation's enrollment could drop by 20 students, but unless all those children are in the same class — all of them fourth graders, say — it doesn't necessarily compute that there will be a need for fewer teachers throughout the district.
It might mean one less fourth-grade teacher, although we'd argue it would be better for the students to keep her and reduce the teacher-student ratios in all the fourth-grade classrooms instead.
A some point, we continue to believe before breakfast, a semblance of rationality will come to funding public education in Indiana, impossible as that seems.
Someday, someone in Indianapolis is actually going to read the state Constitution, Article 8, Section 1, in particular, and put a stop to all this nonsense.
But right now we're stumped.
Given the state surplus and that $2 billion plus cash reserve, we don't understand why the North Knox School Corp. — or any public school corporation in Indiana — should receive less money next year than it received this year.
We're not really stumped; it's all about politics, we know that.
Public education in Indiana is hostage to politics, and has been for years.
Politicians determine how much will be spent on public education as well as how that money is eventually going to be divvied up among school districts — and now how much is going to go to charter schools and transfer tuition and who knows what else in the future.
Politicians don't give particularly much thought to what impacts their decisions might have on a fourth-grader in the North Knox School Corp., how their determinations about funding will affect that student's future.
“When (legislators) make these cuts, they’re not looking at the face of 8-, 9- and 10-year-old kids,” Bobe told our Jess Cohen for a story in Friday's edition. “That’s who they’re punishing. These legislators that come up with the funding formula need to understand that.
“They’re making our kids pay.”
Public education is the biggest line item in the state budget, as it should be. The most important activity of state government is education, it being “essential to the preservation of a free government,” as the state Constitution so eloquently says.
The state Constitution also references the requirement of a “general and uniform system of Common Schools,” which strongly indicates that, in order for lawmakers to meet their obligations under the state Constitution (which they've sworn an oath the uphold), school funding should be equal throughout Indiana.
The last time we checked, the North Knox school district was in Indiana, but its funding was in no way "uniform" with the other districts in the state.