No new mandates |
On Board Online • June 10, 2013
By Thomas J. Nespeca
NYSSBA President
The month of June is famous for good things – the start of summer, graduations, cooking on the grill, and the end of the state legislative session in Albany.
As Mark Twain once said, “No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the Legislature is in session.” (I wonder if he was referring specifically to the New York State Legislature. After all, Twain and his wife Olivia, the daughter of a New York coal merchant, lived in Buffalo and Elmira.)
While NYSSBA member districts are grateful to the Legislature for many things, such as a recent record of on-time state budgets, the end of the session always produces anxiety in NYSSBA headquarters. Typically, we see a flurry of last-minute, out-of-the-blue, unfunded mandates that affect our schools and local governments. Some of these proposals may well be good public policy (others, not so much). The problem is, since they come after the state has adopted its budget for the following year, lawmakers end up passing on the cost for these new mandates to schools – even though they too have already passed their budgets for the coming year.
That puts us school board members in a difficult situation. With no money from the state earmarked for the new mandate, we have to determine how to pay for it using local resources. Often that means taking from other program areas in the budget, including initiatives supporting ongoing student achievement. In short, something else gets shortchanged. Our resources are stretched too thin.
A perfect example of this is the Race to the Top initiative. In 2010, the federal government awarded New York State $697 million in Race to the Top grant funds. About half of the funding goes to local school districts over four years to implement the state’s new teacher and principal evaluation system, among other initiatives. But a recent NYSSBA analysis found that the funding received by school districts in many cases is woefully inadequate to cover the actual implementation costs of the evaluation system. While this is not an “unfunded” mandate, it is a vastly underfunded one.
So, by now you’re asking, what is NYSSBA doing to prevent new mandates from going onto the books this year? I’m glad you asked. NYSSBA has teamed up with its partners in the Let NY Work Coalition to implement its “No New Mandates!” end-of-session advocacy campaign. The goal of the campaign is to prevent state lawmakers from shifting the costs of any new programs they adopt onto local communities and their taxpayers.
You have a very important role in this campaign. You will receive a couple of emails from NYSSBA offering quick and easy ways to add your voice to this advocacy effort.
Together, we can raise awareness among lawmakers that new unfunded mandates will detract from existing programs and services. With so many schools already having to make harmful cuts, further erosion of resources is something schools can ill-afford in this fiscal environment.
If you need examples of recent unfunded mandates, look no further than what happened at this time last year in Albany. Both houses of the Legislature approved new mandates requiring schools to make all non-instructional staff, including food service personnel, custodians and bus drivers, eligible for tenure. Another proposal required schools to consider the “cultural and religious home life” of a special education student when making educational placements. Fortunately, both of these proposals were vetoed by the governor; through the careful watchdog efforts of NYSSBA’s Government relations staff and vigorously supported by your advocacy efforts.
But proposals for new mandates still abound in Albany. They include plans to expand the prevailing wage requirements on construction projects to include services provided by municipal vendors such as lawn maintenance, computer and copier repair; require certain school staff members to be trained in the Heimlich maneuver; provide instruction in financial education to pupils in high school; operate full-day kindergarten programs; and establish and maintain peace/conflict resolution centers.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not opposed philosophically to a single one of these proposals. Many of them are great ideas – but none of them come with any funding attached. That means whatever they cost would come out of funding in our budgets already earmarked for something else. Moreover, it’s not just one mandate – it’s the cumulative effect of one mandate after another.
The point of using No New Mandates! as a rallying cry is to prevent that last-minute push in Albany for well-intentioned but costly new laws. If state lawmakers believe that a new proposal is important enough to pass into law, than it should also be important enough for the state to pay for it.
Recent increases in state aid to schools have come after years of frozen or reduced aid. At the very least, before we start adding new requirements to those already on the books, we need to let our localities and schools recover.
So follow us on Twitter, friend us on Facebook, and join the campaign. Your schools will be better for it.