I am not an educator. I am a chief financial officer who has worked in both Texas and Oklahoma. I began my career working as an auditor.
I hope these facts help the readers understand my perspective. My thought processes are logical, linear, and my job in the Broken Arrow School District is to make fiscally responsible decisions for the 2,000-plus staff and nearly 18,000 students whom I serve.
So as I evaluate Superintendent Janet Barresi's plan to give every teacher a $2,000 raise, a few alarms are sounding in my financially wired brain.
First, the state superintendent's plan is based on projections that include only classroom teachers. What she has termed as "overhead" includes the salaries of counselors, nurses, speech therapists, media specialists, administrators, transportation workers, etc.
The professionals working in these positions are not classroom teachers, but the services they offer to students directly support the learning that takes place in the classroom. By considering these positions "overhead," excluding these employees from the proposed raise, and suggesting 2 percent cutbacks in these specific areas, Barresi proves once again that she does not understand the basic operations of a school district.
Second, if enacted as presented, Barresi's plan will cause a minimum of 10 districts to be in an immediate financial deficit. As her numbers are based on 2012 data, it's likely that many more districts would be added to that deficit list. If this is a veiled attempt at school consolidation, it will work for the simple fact that schools throughout the state will quickly go bankrupt.
Third, Barresi and I agree that educators in our state do need an increase in pay, but had she bothered to communicate with some of the districts she represents, she would be surprised to find districts have been doing this on their own for quite some time.
Our district already pays employees an average of $2,776 more than the state minimum. This is possible not because we have received additional funding from the state, but because we are fiscally responsible and use wise accounting practices.
Fourth, it is fiscally irresponsible to assign a recurring cost - such as salary increases - to a nonrecurring revenue stream - such as district fund balances. Apparently our state superintendent also fails to understand basic accounting.
Furthermore, her statement that district fund balances are "sitting in banks not benefitting students" is not only false, but proves she also does not understand the basics of school finance. This balance earns interest and funds district cash flow needs from July to December when tax collections begin, enabling the district to cover the costs of daily operations.
She is correct in that there is a pot of money "sitting in banks not benefitting students," but that money resides in the state's "rainy day" fund. I find it ironic that it is considered good fiscal policy for the state to have the rainy day fund with a cap of up to 15 percent, but it is somehow a bad practice for schools to have a fund balance with a cap of up to 14 percent, as in the case of Broken Arrow.
In addition to the many reasons I have outlined, I find Barresi's announcement to be offensive in the very matter of its timing. This is the first time in her two years of office that she has petitioned the Legislature for any salary increases or stipends, but now, six months before the primary election, teacher salaries are an urgent matter.
I do not have enough space to outline all the fiscal errors in Barresi's plan, so suffice it to say that while this plan may seem admirable on the surface, in reality it is just another example of the shell game that continues at the expense of Oklahoma's students.
Dwayne Thompson is chief financial officer of the Broken Arrow Public Schools.
Reader Forum
The incarceration rate in Oklahoma is among the highest in the nation with approximately 26,000 people behind bars at any given time.
The Nov. 28, 2008, Tulsa World published my Readers Forum piece, "Antietam," in which I reported on a visit my then-8-year-old grandson, Stevie, and I made to Antietam battlefield in rural Maryland.
