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Jennifer if you study the Mayor's budget and attend the City Council budget hearing each year, over the past years you will understand how the political leaders in the city view the educational system in Warwick in two very different ways. Publically they will say how they value the school system and fully support it. You will see them attend open houses, special events, sporting events and graduation ceremonies so they will be noticed by the parents and the children as the elected leaders committed to the school system.

In reality most of them are hypercritics. When it comes to setting the budget for the city and the schools they take the easy way out by literally throwing schools under the proverbial bus. They don’t want to tackle the difficult issue in the city budget that are requiring more and more tax dollars each year because that would involve them having to do something about the unsustainable cost to fund employee retirement benefits and they do not want to anger the municipal unions that they count on to get re-elected.

It much easy to scrape goat the school department, publicly point fingers at the school budget and cut its budget. For example in 2012 the city cut almost $7 million from the school budget and also proposed new property and car taxes that increased local tax dollars to the city budget by an incredible $14.2 million. They literally took all the money cut from the school budget and transferred it to the city budget and took all the new property tax dollars and allocated it to the city budget.

Neither the general public or the parents of kids in the schools complained because most believed the Mayor and the City Council President when they stated that the School Committee’s budget was out of control and responsible of the new property taxes.

The only time those people will complain is if a proposal is made to cut school sports, then they will come out in masses to protest. Yet as the school building were neglected, they remained silence.

However the budget numbers do not lie. So if you really believe that the elected city leaders will actually come together with school leaders to develop a plan to support the schools, it’s not going to happen. That would require major reforms in the city budget.

Take a look at my analysis of the two budgets over the past ten years as proof of what I am stating.

Copy this link and paste it into your browser:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6P1sIPd4PTdTkI5WF9NM1pjVXM/edit?usp=sharing

From: Sometimes less is more

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