PASSING THE BUCK ON SPENDING THE BUCKS

Last week the story went out that the Grand Rapids Public School Superintendent Bert Bleke and the Board of Education were considering bankruptcy as one of three options for resolving the school district's severe funding shortfalls.  Technically, the school district as a public entity would not go into bankruptcy.  It would go into receivership, under which a state-appointed trustee manages the district's financial affairs.

Receivership is almost unprecedented for a school district in Michigan, especially one the size of the GRPS, the third-largest district in the state.  So this option would be an extraordinary one.  But you can see the attractions of it to Bleke and the Board.  Consider the other options:  Doing nothing until the checks start bouncing or making deep cuts in the district's costs.  While doing nothing is the default choice for bureaucrats in a crisis, it really isn't an option because the school district is nearly at the point of bouncing checks.  Sitting on their hands until the district collapsed really would be a rank dereliction of duty that even the hidebound public servant would avoid.

So that leaves cutting costs.  Bleke has started down that path and made all the easy cuts.  Once those were done he made the cuts that gave him and the least grief from the school district's constituencies:  The Board, parents, teachers, administrators, and support staff.  (Yes, I did leave out students.  Come on, folks, you don't think the students actually count -- well, other than the raw count of students which determines how much money Bleke gets to play with.)  So Bleke whacked the least noisy constituency, the support staff.  (And yes, dear readers, constituency is the right word for these factions.)  But going any further to balance the books means going up against those drawing the biggest benefit from the distict.  That's right, not the students -- the teachers and their powerful union.

In that light receivership looks attractive.  Bleke and the Board pass the buck on how to spend the bucks.  Instead of doing their jobs to manage the school district through good times and bad, they let a trustee make the tough decisions.  Meanwhile they retain their positions within the district to carp about or cry crocodile tears over the trustee's spending cuts -- you know, the same ones they would've made anyway.

Therefore, if Bleke and the Board do decide upon receivership, the only way we will know that was truly the best option of the GRPS is if they all resign upon appointment of the state trustee.  I, for one, will not be holding my breath.