Turmoil

Amazing.

What a cold, lots of work, an impending deadline and the second printer to go south on me in two months can do for one's blogging....

At any rate, town meeting is on once again (will they or won't they with the school budget?) with a special golf course edition planned for Wednesday for some local action and commentary. We have a dust up over casinos on the state level and can consider if the gov's municipal partnership act is in fact DOA. Nationally the Repubs look like they've found another pretender for prez (not that we don't have one now) and the Dems sorta think that it's Bush's war even though they keep enabling him.

The back cover of my copy of "The Black Swan" says that Nassim Taleb is temporarily the Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at UMass. If you haven't read his book "Fooled By Randomness" you should -- it's a mind expanding exploration of the impact of random events on our lives and how that planned purposeful success that turned someone into a millionaire may well be dumb luck. I'm not doing the book justice. Now I'll have to check the UMass web site to see if he's doing any public presentations, if he's still at the university (funny, they never mention things like this when the alumni fundraising letter arrives).

Sic transit gloria mundi

So long Wolfie. The BBC has the skinny.

Still not a Latin scholar but this sums it up.

Extricandae copiae

Imagine, sixteen years of catholic school while avoiding Latin classes. So I'll have to take The Reality-based Community at face value

Them disappearing bees...

This from Salon.com. I still think its the iPods.

"First things first. The Internet, as you know, loves a rumor. Are cellphones killing the bees?

JEFFREY PETTIS: All the explanations that bees became disoriented by cellphone radiation, or this, that and the other thing -- there is zero evidence for any of it. All we know is we lost the worker population and they died away from the hive. What's unusual is they died over a short time period. Are they flying off to Nirvana? Who knows where they are? They are just dying away from the hive, which is normal.

ERIC MUSSEN: It's important to look at what's normal. In the summer, bees go through a six-week life cycle: three inside the hive, three outside it as foragers. Then they die of old age. When bees are coming to the end of their life for whatever reason, they just fly off and don't come back. They fly out to die because flying out and dying is what they do. The question is, Why are we seeing bees with such a shortened life cycle? Well, now we're talking about winter bees. As you move into fall, the colony is supposed to be rearing bees that have a long life expectancy -- from about October to March of the next year. The problem is the winter bees aren't making it. Everything just sort of fell apart near the end of this summer and those bees that were supposed to live up to six months didn't come close.

JOHN McDONALD: That cellphone thing is a major source of irritation to me. If it were true, I suspect about 10,000 people at Penn State would be lying on the street dead now. And yet you see them walking around and talking on cellphones. My son explained to me that cellphone radiation puts out a wavelength of about three inches. A honeybee is three-quarters of an inch long and so the bee is going to create virtually no shadow in that wavelength. That's one reason why I look askance at that theory. The other is where I live, in the middle of Appalachia, the bees are disappearing and there are virtually no cellphones.

Alternative Funding Vote

I was at a Mark Abrams training Friday and during the break asked him about the town meeting vote necessary if an alternative to the statutory formula is used. Having taken a basic school spending workshop from him earlier, I came away with the understanding that a unanimous vote was required. Mark confirmed that a unanimous vote is needed, always has been.

He recalled that he was contacted by Andy Churchill three years ago about helping the schools develop an alternative assessment methodology -- he indicated he was willing but the school committee never got back to him. Apparently they chose to create their own.

FWIW, the school spending training was attended by an Amherst staff person.

Who's on First?

Now we're back to a majority vote for the regional school budget rather than a unanimous vote (which I understand to be needed if you're employing the DOE "alternative" assessment -- see the previous posting). True, the DOE regs changed this past January, after the alternative assessment method was developed, but someone should be tracking these things.

Who organizes Town Meeting? One hopes that each of the articles would have been reviewed by both counsel and the moderator and agreement reached on the wording and the action required.

As it stands, the meetings of the World's Second Greatest Deliberative Body have a funky quality to them. Warrant articles aren't necessarily in the sequence TM proceeds in, meetings start late, attendance varies and more. Information tends to be distributed asymmetrically and the meeting is no exception.

Open town meeting anyone? Counsel/manager government?

That Pesky Regional School Formula, the first of more than one part.

I think I know the policy wonk's definition of the seventh circle of hell: trying to develop an equitable school funding formula in Massachusetts.

Nonetheless, the folks over at the Department of Education (DOE) and the legislature have been laboring away to find a formula that will distribute assistance and assign costs, in an equitable manner. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that the result is a policy that is complicated, difficult to understand, probably flawed and inherently unsatisfying to those who don't get as much as they anticipated or end up paying more than they expected.

This past year, DOE required regional schools to either assess costs under its statutory method or to use an alternative method. The statutory method involves a calculation by DOE as to the community's ability to pay based on equalized property valuations (EQV's) and wealth, as measured by tax returns. The EQV and wealth calculations are developed by the Department of Revenue (DOR) and provided to the DOE.

The DOE formula is an attempt to introduce some progressivity into regional school funding. Essentially, the wealthier members of a district get to pay more of the costs.

The law also allows for an alternative assessment methodology, in accordance with the regional school agreement. This is also known as the "headcount" method, an apparent reference to dividing the net school spending up on a per student basis, without taking into account the differences in wealth among the district members.

In districts with three or more members, the statutory approach needs a two-thirds vote to pass; the alternative requires a unanimous vote of the members. So even though Amherst holds the majority of seats on the regional school committee, the other members can control the fate of the budget by action of their town meetings.

Amherst approaches the regional school budget with two votes: one to approve the formula for assessing costs and the second to actually appropriate a sum of money. The first, aka Article 16, got voted up on May 10^th, the latter (Article 17) is being fussed over as I write this.

The day of the vote on Article 16, the Hampshire Gazette chose to editorialize in favor of its passage and managed to reflect some of the confusion around the formula. The editorial maintains that the agreement was ratified "several years ago," takes into account all the revenue variables "including the amount of state aid received by Amherst," makes the school system affordable by small towns, and that it would be unfair to change the budget formula this late in the process. The editorial noted that if the state assessment model were used, Amherst's share of the budget would decrease by $154,000; Leverett's would increase by 11.2%, Shutesbury by 1.1% and Pelham's by 48.3% or $468,000.

Let's leave that last bit of innumeracy aside and ask why the three smaller towns budgets go up under the statutory formula? Because based on the data provided, DOE sees those towns with more ability to pay than Amherst. So, if one accepts the logic of the statutory formula, Amherst (Before you flame, note the qualifier at the start of the preceding sentence.) is subsidizing the educational costs of three smaller but more affluent communities.

Contrary to the Gazette, the headcount arrangement was put into effect last year (2006) and ended a series of ad hoc changes to school funding. But why not accept the state formula? More on that later, after we see how things played out at town meeting.

Coming up next...

That pesky regional school funding formula!
The Wampanoag's go for the gold!
and
Cinda Jones proposes a government regulation??

Stay tuned.

The 1% solution?

Jere Hochman accurately reads the election results and says: "We got the message. It was a 1 percent message." While the Superintendent is ready to stay with the 1% budget, it seems (according to Friday's Hampshire Gazette) he may be standing alone among the education faction. The School Committee Chair, having remarked about the lack of leadership when the override fails, may well be poised to reinforce the truth of that observation by not holding the line either.

Over on the Town side, the Selectboard's thrown the Schaffer/Musante budget plan under the bus after managing to ignore the document pretty much from its inception. The Board's budget recommendations start with a preamble indicating its duty to "make guidelines" for the manager in budget preparation, something that apparently wasn't recognized back in January. Well, better late than never.

(Ms. Brewer, having only recently joined the Board, gets a pass on the tardiness. Besides, it seems like she actually read the document.)

It appears both Hochman and Schaffer have counseled their respective employers to stay the course. Abandoning the 1% budget may well result in a financial food fight and end up in chaos. It's better to make the tough decisions and cut the budget than bet on another override or put off the problem for another year.

Good advice that should be taken but won't. (I also can rely on sorry personal experience, from long ago but not far away, as a selectman. Been there, done that, bought the tee shirt.)

Given the current state of affairs the Finance Committee's recommended 1% budget will not hold. In this lies a lesson as to why the "Amherst Plan" override failed. It wasn't a plan, it was a promise. It carried no legal weight, didn't obligate boards or town meeting to adhere to it. To work the "Plan" required a high level of discipline, communication and cooperation over several years – factors that aren't in evidence now, or in the past. The "Plan" would have been compelling if it reflected unanimity among the boards, emerged unscathed from town meeting and then went before the voters.

It didn't happen that way. One gets the feeling that the Amherst Plan backers wanted everything fairly well locked up before it got to town meeting because they, in their heart of hearts, agreed with James Madison: "In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason."

Reading the reports of the first couple of town meeting sessions, I'd say Madison was close to the mark. We can all hope that present trends don't continue.

Preamble

I have no particular inside information and rely on the local newspapers, a couple of blogs, and the town meeting listserv for my Amherst stuff. But I do have some small experience with local government, regulations and the law, so I'd thought I offer my opinion from time to time. While the Amherst budget it the hot topic of the moment, future postings will range further afield.

Note that the ability to comment is not enabled. Folks who want to express an opinion are free to email me and should know that I reserve the right to quote in whole or part from any correspondence received.

Rest assured that no electrons were harmed in the production of this blog.