GOP legislators find piggy banks to break into

by David Safier
If you poke around looking into Arizona school district bank accounts, you can find that they have saved up something like $330 million, according to Republican Rep. Carl Seel. That's because districts are allowed to hold back up to 4% of their funding. Great! Seel says. Let's take it!

Put that together with $100 from accounts set aside for school repairs and maintenance, and you come up with $430 million of free money the budget cutters can use to balance out some of their hatchet work.

But Rich Crandall, also a Republican, disagrees. His term as president of the Mesa Public Schools board must have turned him into one of those soft-on-education types. He says this isn't a windfall that can be tapped whenever you want.

Ouch. For Republicans like Seel, though, the danger is in understanding. It makes things complicated. That makes their heads hurt.

I remember when schools and districts where I taught tried to cut corners and put a few dollars away so they could take care of unplanned emergencies — air conditioning systems don't tell you when they're planning to break down — or take advantage of an unplanned opportunity. When our school was told we had to return all the money we hadn't used at the end of the year — and there are always a few dollars left, because you don't dare end up broke — we'd scramble around making purchases we thought we might need. It wasn't the best way to spend, but it was better than losing the chance to get a few needed items.We spent it more wisely when we could roll it over to next year.

Crandall says there's even more to it than that.