Lessons from The Case of the Missing Dollar

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Original photo by didbygraham

Q: When is a Compromise not a Compromise?
A: When it’s a Red Herring

We talked about “red herrings” in the previous posts about “The Case of the Missing Dollar.”

I occasionally do after-school presentations of MathMagic for the C.R.O.P. program in rural upstate New York. I’ve been participating in the program for years, as a local artist (magician). The program pays a very small honorarium, and a travel budget (Monday I drove 120 miles round-trip for peanuts) Most of the artists do it out of love of bringing their art to children who otherwise may never get exposed to it. It is a labor of love to all concerned, but it is a great mission.

The Creating Rural Opportunities Partnership (CROP) After School and Summer Program is a program which does just what it is named.

In it’s mission statement:

The goal of CROP is to provide intellectual development and opportunities for academic achievement for students grades K-8 with a strong focus on middle school.  In addition, CROP provides enrichment, health, wellness, life skills, recreational and cultural opportunities for 1260 middle school and primary grade students, community members and parents through a 21st Century Community Learning Center Partnership.

Over the last few years, funding for this excellent program has dwindled. Sound familiar? Art and after-school programs are typically among the first to get their throats cut when the government feels it needs to cut costs.

Last year the C.R.O.P. program for many schools in our area got wiped out. This year it looks like more of them will be hobbled or totally destroyed.

My heart goes out to the children, their parents and also to the facilitators of this program (the local Arts Councils are usually the people that make the C.R.O.P programs possible).

I’ve talked to the CROP facilitators and aides recently about how they are getting their program decimated. I admit, I don’t know the details (the system of how things like this get funded are abysmally convoluted and hard to track down). But some patterns seem to evolve as the program dwindles, and I’ve noticed how the government goes about it in a devious way.

They pretend to like the program and support it, but complain about the budget. So they “compromise” and say we’ll make only a small budget cut (even though they’d love to cut it entirely). The gambit goes something like this: “We’ll fund the artists, the facilitators, administrators, the space, etc. but we’ll have to cut the transportation budget.”

Transportation is the “late bus” for the kids who stay for the program. They are generally the kids who’s parents either work two jobs and have one car, or both work, and can’t pick the kids up at 4:45 or later, because of late shifts, second shifts or otherwise. In other words, the less affluent parents. Not all, but most.

So if the late bus is cut from the budget, these kids can’t get home from school, except for the normal school bus at about 3:15.

What follows, is that a lot of those kids can no longer take advantage of the after-school program. So attendance goes down. The three facilitators I talked to so far said that it’s down in their programs by about 50%

That gives the bean-counting weasels who want to de-fund the program for next year this red-herring: “Well, since attendance is down, that shows that the kids don’t really want the program. It doesn’t make sense for us to fund a program that nobody wants. So we have to cut the program.”

What the weasels do is first look for the place they can place their fulcrum where it will be most effective (or destructive), so they can cut the least money in the first round. That makes them look like they are compromising, but in reality, even though they are cutting maybe 5% from the budget in the first year, they know that will enable them to gut the program entirely the next year, with less of a fight.

This is a classic case of disenfranchisement. It’s like when African-Americans got the right to vote, but certain southern states passed laws that required people to be able to read and write to vote, or demanded a poll-tax that many couldn’t afford. That effectively eliminated a large percentage of the African-American population, who had recently been slaves, and had been forbidden to learn how to read and write, and had never been paid anything for their work.

In essence, the weasels are offering something that they know no one can take advantage of, because of circumstances that the weasels caused in the first place.

And who gets screwed in all of this? Classically it is the less fortunate part of the population. What a tragic shame. Not just for for the less-fortunate, but for everyone.

One of the consequences of this problem, is that some parents will reconsider working a second job, or will otherwise have to suffer financially, which also hurts the economy in general. Also, the CROP program gives kids a structured environment to do their homework in, with adult supervision and help if they need it. Sometimes they don’t have that at home at all. So CROP gives the kids a chance to actually re-enforce what they’ve learned in school, and perhaps actually retain it. Imagine that!

If that portion of the population doesn’t get that extra chance, their prospects for growing up to be fully enfranchised citizens suffers, the potential for them becoming burdens on the state grows, the economy suffers, the crime-rate possibly goes up, ad infinitum. All because some selfish weasels want to cut the throat of a program they are not bright enough to see is helping their own.

This is pretty much the de facto way administrators and policy makers work. Especially in the public school sector. Why not? It’s only your children and the world’s future at stake.

Of course, the weasels responsible will probably forever remain nameless and faceless. That’s their nature. That’s one of the reasons the system is so convoluted, to protect the guilty. I wish I could truly pinpoint the weasels who are responsible so we could bring them to justice. Or maybe we could just egg their houses.

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