CCISD budget issues: The vote is partially in

Last week I posted a back-of-envelope financial analysis pertaining to one of the cost-cutting measures proposed by Clear Creek Independent School District (CCISD).

I also presented that same analysis at the "town hall" meeting held at Clear Springs High School on June 7, 2011, and directed interested parties to this blog for a copy of it.

CCISD has published some of the informational materials used in its two recent town hall meetings, including a video summarizing their current financial situation.  For people who are looking to gain a basic understanding of these budget issues without slogging through an unmanageable mountain of detail, this video is a reasonable resource and it demands only 7.5 minutes of our precious time:

Along with those information resources and video, CCISD also published an interactive survey through which interested parties could render feedback.

Look for this button at the bottom of the above-linked page.
Or, here is its direct URL.

While I think this was a great start, the survey was limited in that it did not explicitly associate line items with their actual costs.  This is important because if people don't have that kind of quantitative information right there in front of them, they can't possibly comprehend what exactly they're advocating or opposing.  Just I said in my post last week, in order to sensibly evaluate anything, we first need good numbers to be staring us in the face because, to the extent that they can be objectively generated, numbers speak a language that is nonpartisan, non-pandering, and non-idealistic.

On June 10, I emailed CCISD asking them to tighten their survey by presenting those associated financial numbers, but as of this blog entry, this had not been done.  That's unfortunate, but it does not totally negate the outreach efforts that they are making.  I noted to the Superintendent and will make the same observation here that precise delivery of relevant information in this fashion is likely to become more common (and more expected) in the future.  Last November, the New York Times did exactly what I'm talking about when they published their federal budget calculator:

Screengrab from here.

That thing was a game-changer:  all of a sudden, voters didn't need to sift through a million numbers and an equal number of partisan rants in order to understand the basics of what's happening at the federal level.  Instead they could fiddle around with a simple but powerful little puzzle and get a "feel" for the magnitude of the issues using nothing but their own brains (which is all they SHOULD be using).  I was shooting for a much smaller-scale but analogous intent when I published my spreadsheet of last week.

The CCISD survey appears to be still actively accepting submissions, but Bay Area Citizen (via local journalist Mary Alys Cherry, who was sitting in front of me last Monday) has already published some preliminary results.  This is clearly a non-scientific tabulation (Mary Alys notes as much) and not only that, the survey was loosely structured in such a way that the options were not mutually exclusive (i.e., not strictly "either/or") and therefore the whole thing gets a bit fuzzy when one tries to glean from it what people truly prefer.  Nevertheless, the interim results are worth looking at (percentages rounded):
 

• Tax rate increase - 79% of respondents in favor
• Lay off employees and increase class sizes - 29% in favor
• Eliminate Homestead Exemption - 57% in favor
• Allow out-of-district students to attend CCISD for a fee - 66% in favor
• Eliminate non-hazardous transportation - 57% in favor
• Eliminate special program transportation - 39% in favor
• Charge a $20 transportation fee for special events - 85% in favor
• Charge fees for extracurricular activities - 74% in favor
• Suspend funding for staff supplemental insurance - 44% in favor

There's an interesting bit highlighted above:  My argument to maintain special program transportation was based on the fact that I strongly suspect it would cost the community significantly more to do it severally than it costs CCISD to do it collectively using its present model.  Whereas eliminating this transportation would save CCISD $317,000 annually (per their analysis), I roughly estimate that it would cost the community as a whole in excess of $1 million to accomplish equivalent transportation.  Therefore adoption of that reduction on CCISD's part would be financially degenerative - penny wise for them, pound foolish for us.

The same argumentative principles probably also hold true for the "eliminate non-hazardous transportation" option, but I couldn't back-of-envelope those calculations because, unlike the special transportation case, I don't have personal observations upon which to base estimates.  But look at the disparate results of the polling:  a minority (39%) in favor of eliminating "special" transportation, but a majority (57%) in favor of eliminating "non-hazardous" transportation.  Never mind that it would be expected to take somewhere between 10 and 78 individual cars to replace each eliminated school bus in BOTH scenarios, eh?  What may be happening here is that we're seeing a partial effect of citizens being unequally informed.  I am not aware of anyone having made a strong explicit, quantitative argument in favor of keeping nonhazardous transportation, as I did with special transportation.  So some citizens may have understood one choice better than they understood the other choice, possibly contributing to disparate polling results (in postulating that, for brevity I'm eliminating details of discussion in last week's town hall).  Which, if true, would have something profound to say regarding the power of education.  Nothing that we didn't already know, but it's one thing to know that from theory and quite another to see it manifest in practice: votes based on partial information or incomplete information are a potential recipe for disaster.  Or at least degeneracy.

Anyway, I'll keep watching this issue and will post about interesting future developments.