from staff
W.C. Gentry, a Jacksonville trial lawyer, chairs the Duval County School Board. He was elected to the board in 2008 and became chair this past November. He met with Daily Record reporters Thursday.
Proposed state budget cuts to public schools dominate the headlines. Where does Duval County stand?
Compared to other districts, Duval spends a much smaller percentage of its total Pre-K operating budget on central overhead. We’re spending 6 percent on overhead; Charlotte spends 8, Chicago 7, Philadelphia 8, St. Paul 6, Atlanta 12, Washington 15, Boston 11, Rochester 10. We’re spending less on administration than anyone else, and we’re allocating the least amount to students, because the amount we have, we’re putting into the classroom.
What’s your take on that?
The bottom line is we’re being extraordinarily efficient. We spend less on administration than virtually any other school district. We put more in the classroom of what we have than virtually any other district. As a consequence, when we now have budget cuts, the problem is that the only place you can go is instruction because there’s no other place to go. We’ve been trying to explain that to people, that there’s no fat. There’s no place to find millions and millions of dollars. Superintendent Ed Pratt-Dannals has cut about $20 million more out of overhead. We are actually too thin in administration. I’m very concerned about our administration.
Why is that?
Because we need people to oversee what’s going on. We’ve got a handful of people who’re wearing about a dozen hats. Because of that, sometimes things fall through the cracks. You need a certain number of people to do the job. You need management. Now we have done a great job fiscally. Every audit since I’ve come aboard has been a positive one. We’ve got a good core group of people who are watching the books.
In an organization this size, with 14,000 employees and a budget with capital of $1.5 billion, you expect your chief executive officer to at least have an assistant, which he doesn’t have. We’re really as thin as we can get. But at some point you can only stretch your human capital so far.
What’s the situation with the legislature and Gov. Rick Scott?
The House and Senate appear to be settling in at about a 6 to a 6.5 percent cut. That is assuming that they don’t accede to the governor and give tax breaks to corporations. If they ultimately start giving away tax breaks like the governor wants, then it will go up. Scott’s budget was a 10.5 percent cut. That’s what we first started looking at. Fortunately, we are very fiscally sound. The state requires you to keep a reserve of 3 percent, and we are above that. We’re trying to save money and we have at least $10 million above our reserves that we’ve thrown into the pot right off the bat. Between the reserves and additional cuts made to the administration, we’ve got cuts of $20 million to $30 million.
The board may not agree with all these cuts, because some of them are getting into art and music and areas where we don’t want to go. But with his cuts, that leaves us with probably about $60 million (more to cut).
Where do you find the $60 million?
That’s a good question. To put it into perspective, the district administrators themselves are only 2 percent of the budget. School-based administrators are 3 percent. We can get rid of all our administration and we’re nowhere close to getting there.
Where do we get it? I don’t know. If we were in business, when you have this sort of budget cut, you always look to your biggest items. But we can’t. The same 123,000 kids keep showing up.
We would consider cutting our employees – teachers – and have our existing employees take on more responsibilities, like business is doing today. But we can’t. Class size (an amendment requirement) dictates that we have to have X number of teachers. We’re trying to get some flexibility, but we’re likely to get penalized financially if we do.
You can’t cut the number of products you produce; you can’t cut the number of employees that you use to produce it. And every year they’re making higher demands.
Looking at the numbers, if you totally eliminated art, music and PE at the elementary level, which would be horrendous, that’s about an $18 million saving.
If we eliminate magnet transportation, which personally, I think that’s the first thing to go, because it doesn’t directly impact the classroom, that’s $10 million.
Candidly I would like to see us review the whole magnet program. If we could identify some specific magnet programs and eliminate 20 or 30, and put those back into neighborhood schools, I personally believe the school system would be better off. But to make that transition would take huge efforts to do it.
Wasn’t that part of the desegregation agreement?
Magnets were used as a vehicle to try to desegregate the community by primarily putting magnet programs in traditional urban, predominantly African-American schools to attract more white kids to those schools. We satisfied the desegregation guidelines.
But magnets are not helping us maintain an integrated school system because people who go to magnets are predominantly kids who have engaged parents. Those do not tend to be your poor kids. So if anything, in my opinion, it perpetuates more of a segregated system.
At Stanton and Paxon (nationally recognized college preparatory high schools), one is about 20 percent African-American, the other’s less than that.
If we eliminate magnet transportation, we will clearly create an equity problem. That is, the poorer kids won’t get to magnets.
We have to eliminate magnet transportation, financially. Once we do that, we’re going to have to look at the equity issue and that will cause us to have to review magnets across the board.
I recognize that it may have long-term consequences that will require us to do a lot of other things to ensure that every child has an opportunity to go to the magnet schools if we keep them in their present form.
What are some of the other potential cuts?
Art, music, PE is $18 million.
A four-day school week, which no one seems to like, would put a lot of pressure on parents, although I think they could work it out. There are other school districts in Florida where they are seriously looking to four-day school weeks.
That would save $7 million.
The problem is that in a community with so much poverty, and so many children who are basically latchkey kids, I worry about the idea of turning anybody loose for another day out on the streets when their parents are at work. It has a lot of community implications other than the cost to the parents. It’s obviously something we would prefer not to do.
Everybody goes nuts over sports. I’ve even been called by the Canadian Broadcasting Co., wanting to know what’s Duval going to do about sports, and again, it’s not just Duval. Everybody’s doing this. It’s just we’re the only ones talking about it.
You’re eliminating supplements. We pay supplements to coaches, and something for certain extracurricular activities. We also have a second bus, which is pretty expensive, so the kids who have to stay after school could get home. You eliminate all the stuff associated with that, you’d probably save about $7 million.
That’s not to keep coaches from coaching for free. Most of them won’t do it, but the problem with what we just discussed, if we cut everything, you’re talking about less than $45 million.
So how do you balance the budget?
We have to balance the budget, that’s what a lot of people don’t get. Now, what kind of a school system is it, without art and music for your little kids, which is so critical? I know this is heresy, but I see that as more critical than Friday night football.
Sports impacts instruction, because clearly a lot of these kids learn a lot about life, and they stay in school. They stay engaged.
So what we end up with is the last item, furloughing staff. Not just teachers. Everybody. If we furlough everybody in the system, that means they don’t get paid for the time that they’ve been contracted to be paid.
Then what happens?
That saves us about $2.5 million a day. If we cut everything, you’re probably looking at 10 to 15 days unpaid, of noncompensation, to our employees. There’s $21 million in flux.
The teachers are entitled to a step raise. It’s part of their ongoing contract. We’re negotiating insurance. Our insurance costs will not go up as much as last year. We put about $15 million of the insurance costs on the teachers’ backs. Previously the district paid for their insurance.
The fringe benefits of the pension and the insurance have always been things that allow you to justify the low salaries that we pay teachers. So now we’re taking away those things, as well as also keeping their low salaries. We will have to negotiate about the salaries for the teachers. On the table is no increase, obviously.
The Legislature is passing legislation where they will pick up anywhere from 3 percent to 5 percent of their pension. In addition, we’re talking about not paying them for 15 or 20 days. Now how long are you going to get a teacher doing that?
We’re going to give you a salary of $37,000, but between your pension and your health care contributions, it’s really only $32,000, and we’re not going to pay you for 15 days. So you’re going to make $28,000.
I don’t know the answer. We’re going to sit down once the ball quits rolling over there in Tallahassee, but we cannot make these cuts without doing real harm to our school system.
There’ll be some counties that will be worse off than we are and there are a few that are better. Some of these counties have passed a sales tax, for example.
What’s the possibility of that in Duval?
Sooner or later, if we want to have a quality education system in Duval, the community is going to have to pass some kind of a tax locally.
We either have to elect a different brand of legislator that is willing to comply with the Constitution, who will give education first priority, or we’ve got to have a local tax.
This is not due to the recession. This is due to priorities.
In the lottery, which people always ask about, in 1989, ‘90, Duval received $32 million. The lottery was supposed to be for K-12. The lottery was supposed to be for enhancement, not to take the place of the regular general revenue, but on top of it so the district could have additional money to do additional things.
Last year, we received from the lottery a little less than $6 million, of which only $300,000 was discretionary. They used the other money to plug into general revenue requirements.
So we went from $32 million to $300,000 at a time the lottery has actually gone up. Last year the lottery distributed $1.24 billion, and we get $300,000 in discretionary money. If we had a commensurate amount of money today from the lottery that we had in ‘89-90, we’d basically not have a problem.
Will that change?
It won’t change unless we have a change in our governance. This has been going on for years. Four budget cycles ago, in July of 2007, the amount budgeted per child was $7,200 for Duval. That’s the year the Census evaluated the state’s funding for education and determined that Duval was 50th per capita. That $7,200 put us dead last per capita.
What’s it looking like this year?
If you take the $7,200, which is last, and you go for it today at 3 percent inflation, which is actually low for schools because a big part of our cost is health care, transportation, gasoline and JEA, so our costs have gone up higher than the CPI. That $7,200 should be $8,200. To stay at 50th.
What they’re suggesting is $6,300. That kind of puts it in perspective. So to be last would be at $8,200, but instead we get $6,300.
I don’t know how you get last-er. We just go from laster to lastest to most lastest.
The reality is that the education in Florida has improved. The schools have done a good job with what they have. So when people say, ‘well, you just can’t just throw money at it and all,’ that’s crap.
You know, if we are going to do any better, we have to have funding. It’s just that simple.
Anyway, I swear to goodness, I don’t know what we’re going to do. I think we will cut and we’ll cut, and what’s going to end up happening is we’re going to have to effectively ask our employees to work for probably a couple of weeks without pay.
Can that be done?
That’s not sustainable. Well, you do have a little union contract bargaining problem. Can it be done? It probably can be done. We can breach the contract, and then we’ll be going to court.
I just wish people who keep writing and calling me, and telling me ‘how he could be so stupid as to talk about cutting sports and extracurricular activities, don’t you know anything, and how can you be punishing our kids’ and all that would come and sit in my seat for a few minutes and tell me how we’re supposed to get there.
I think what we’re going to end up having to do even more than what we have been doing, is go out to the community and say, ‘OK. We need you guys to step up.’
We’re going to look at privatization, you know, can we deal with Nike? Whatever it takes to try to figure out a way to fill the gaps.
Sports may be an easier sell for the public, as sad as it is to say that. But we may be able to backfill a lot of stuff by going to the community.
St. Johns County, as you know, is pay for play, but St. Johns County does not have 50 percent poverty. And we cannot be in a position of telling children that they can only play sports if they have the money to play. That will require schools to create scholarships, and even that is not very acceptable because you potentially stigmatize some kids.
Some schools won’t be able to do it. Now can Stanton and Paxon come up with the money for their extracurricular activities? I’m sure they can.
But can Raines? Or Ribault? Or Jackson? It’s a real problem, but I think that we’ll be out begging. Then we will have light bulb sales, and car washes. They sell candy. Buy a candy bar so your kid can have art once a month. I don’t know.
I’m sure the calls you receive say you’re just making that up, or you’re just using athletics as a lightning rod, and that’s not really going to happen. But it sounds as if it could really happen.
When a hurricane is coming, we tell people a hurricane’s coming, so you can try to do something about it to get prepared.
Now, when we tell people this hurricane is coming, it’s going to severely damage our school system, they’re saying, ‘Oh, you’re just trying to scare people.’
Well, this is real. The difference between this and a hurricane is, if people got off their butt and went out there and really started talking to their legislators, statewide, we might do something about this. We might reorder their priorities.
But no one has really done that except Duval County, and you know, I’m personally kind of tired of getting beat up. We’re the only ones that are really saying, ‘this is really not fair to our kids.’ Slowly but surely, some of the other school districts are starting to complain.
There have been years when there was all this gloom and doom, and then by the end of the session, it went away.
It ain’t going away.
How do you work into all of this the quality of the education?
I am so frustrated, because we are improving the quality of education. Our graduation rate has gone up 10 percent in the last four years. We are a B district. We have over a hundred schools that are A schools, over two-thirds of our schools are A or B. People focus on our half-dozen schools that are in trouble, but we’ve got 172 schools and as a district, we’re making huge progress.
We are ranked fourth in the state among school districts, graduating kids with a degree that prepares them for college. We are doing a lot of excellent things.
We’ve greatly increased the number of kids who’re taking the AP courses and we have a lot of kids passing AP.
We are expanding within our schools Pre-K, which I think is critical. We are looking at the Title I schools where the kids come in least prepared, and we’re putting high quality Pre-K programs in those schools so those kids are ready.
We’ve expanded Career Academies since I came on the board. We’ve got 32 now, 10 this year that have national certification, which is a great opportunity for many kids to walk out of school ready for work. Most of them go on to community college.
We’re doing a lot of great stuff.
Our biggest problem–the state of Florida’s biggest problem–is kids can’t read. In the state of Florida, only 45 percent of kids are proficient on the 10th grade FCAT reading–55 percent are not proficient. That’s probably because the FCAT reading exam is pegged too high, but it’s also because our kids can’t read.
A large part of that is we’ve been teaching to the test, and they can read to you these words, and not have a clue what they mean.
We are planning over the summer on coaching our K-3 teachers and teaching them how to identify kids with reading problems, teaching them differentiated instruction. We’re planning summer school for poor readers so that we can get all these kids reading on grade level all the time. If we do that, the war is over. That will cost about $6 million to do all the extra training.
More than 25 percent of our kids in the third grade can’t read. And if you cannot read in the third grade, most of these kids are doomed to failure. That 25 percent that come in unprepared don’t graduate. I am just really, really sad.
We know what the problems are and we’ve got the solution. Instead of trying to figure out how we’re going to eke $6 million out of this budget to do what we need to do to finally get over the hump, I’m adding an extra $6 million to a $60 million shortfall. In my opinion, we have to do it. I hope I can convince my fellow school board members of that.
You and Ed Pratt-Dannals are calling for advocacy. A lot of the superintendents in the surrounding counties also are saying to the business community and to anybody, we need your help to advocate for us with the Legislature. Are you seeing any results of that? Is it happening?
Not really. We’ve got Save Duval Schools, which was formed as an advocacy group, and they are working very hard, but we need the chamber. We need that sort of group. They seem to be preoccupied with other things.
The Jacksonville Regional Chamber of Commerce this year has placed education as one of its top priorities. But right now, we’re not hearing from them. I think they’re being preoccupied with other issues.
The state chamber is supporting tax cuts. That’s just so schizophrenic.
Everybody says we’ve got to change our economy. We have to attract high-quality jobs, technical jobs, white-collar jobs, so we say all the right things.
The only way to get there is to make a huge investment in K-12 and post-secondary education, and then we attract those businesses. And then we do have the work force.
Instead, we keep starving not just K-12, but also post-secondary. But if we can’t get kids out of K-12 ready to go to college, our post-secondary system’s not going to do us much good unless we’re just going to recruit out of state. So it is totally schizophrenic.
We’ve got to have leadership and we don’t have it. I would think that (Gov.) Scott, who if nothing else is a great marketer, would understand.
How do you market a state where you’re recognized as the cheapest state in the nation in terms of your support for education?
I’m waiting for the governor and Tallahassee to step up and finally start supporting things that are consistent with the rhetoric. But I don’t see it.
I don’t know where we go from here. Maybe it’s time for a revolution. I think where the school districts may be going, sadly, is to court, because we’re just about out of options.
If you go to court, what’s your action?
Clearly, the Legislature’s violated the class-size amendment, and not only do they violate it, by not having the money for class size, then they invoke penalties against the system for not carrying it out, because they didn’t fund it. So that’s real easy.
If we get funded at $6,300 (per student) a year, which is what it looks like we will be, (that brings into question) the provision requiring that the paramount responsibility is to provide adequate funding for quality education. I don’t think there’s any question.
I think it’s something you’ll see all the school districts around the state think.
Nobody wants to do it, but I think we’re about to the point where that may be our only option.