Last week, I wrote about the Washoe County School District’s perennial announcement, one that seemed to take virtually every stakeholder in the state by surprise, that they were once again struggling to balance their budget, this time to the tune of $30 - $40 million.

The District’s Chief Financial Officer, Tom Ciesynski, wrote a “set the record straight” response, where he pledged to provide “more accurate and timely information” about the situation than I did. Unfortunately, what followed was neither. Let’s take a look at a few of his contentions.

Shock and awe.  Mr. Ciesynski took issue with my characterization of WCSD as “shocked” by the deficit. But I knew they weren’t surprised, and I said so under a subheading enigmatically titled, “This was not a surprise.”  

My problem isn’t that I thought WCSD was surprised. It’s that they acted surprised when it was obvious they weren’t. It’s that they let the Governor be surprised. It’s that they let members of the community be surprised, including those who had supported major tax increases for education. Even if their budget problems are truly structural and the Chief Financial Officer bears no responsibility for nine straight years of deficits, they should have been screaming from the rooftops that the Governor’s Commerce Tax solution wasn’t the right one to address our problems. Instead, they sat mum and waited for the feel-good votes to come in for the taxes, and then came back cap-in-hand just a few months later. That’s an unacceptable way to do business, to establish credibility within your community, or to build trust sufficient to ask taxpayers for even more money – or to convince them that your district should have a monopoly on publicly funded education, by the way.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.  Like many, I think we have too many bureaucrats and not enough teachers. I’ve yet to talk to a classroom teacher who disagrees, but Mr. Ciesynski took issue, saying:

The most recent data from the National Center on Education Statistics shows that the national average ratio for students to administrative staff/support team members is 30.8 to 1. In Nevada, the ratio of students to administrative staff/support team members is a staggering 128.5 to 1, so the comparisons and data do not support these claims.

The only thing “staggering” is how obviously wrong this “statistic” is.  The table he got it from is here, and the data is from the 2010-11 school year.  Most states are somewhere between 20 and 40 pupils per staff member, but the definition of “staff” is fairly vague.  What is clear is that Nevada and South Carolina were reporting a vastly different data set than everyone else.  

WCSD has 63,919 students enrolled this year.  If we had 128.5 non-teacher employees per pupil, there would only be 497.4 such employees in the entire district, or roughly 5 non-teachers per school.  

The reality?  In 2015 WCSD reported it had 7,041 full time employees, 3,763 of whom were teachers. Our actual admin/staff to student ratio, then, is 19.5 staff members per pupil – far more “bloated” than the national average.

The CFO has to come up with the budget to pay all of these folks, and Mr. Ciesynski mis-estimated their numbers by almost a factor of 7? And why did he use the same Google machine that I did to find six year old stats? He has Washoe County’s actual and current numbers at his fingertips, so why would he not use those? Here’s another number: there are exactly zero ways to answer that question that inspires any sort of confidence whatsoever in the financial stewardship of the district (or their ability to teach math, but I digress).

Turns out money is fungible.  Because much of that new money they got in the last two years was earmarked for specific purposes (true), Mr. Ciesynski complains that new money won’t solve old problems (false). I agree that way too much budgeting is micro-managed at the state and federal level when those decisions should be local. But what he doesn’t acknowledge is that the new money frees up general fund dollars that would have had to have been used instead for some of those same programs (some are new, but not all of them).  

Since 2008, the District has reported “structural” deficits of between $9.8 million and $75 million. Revenue projections for WC1 (the “Save Our Schools” sales tax) are $86.8 million per year. The Commerce Tax raised $143.5 million in its first year (more than expected), and $45 million in new money came to Washoe separate and apart from the normal per-pupil general fund allotment from the State (which also increased). So how did our budget deficit increase $10 million from last year, when we anticipate (conservatively) over $130 million more in money for education in that same timeframe, a span during which student enrollment was essentially flat?  

Mr. Ciesynski focuses on the per-pupil allotment, as if none of the other money should count just because it’s been earmarked for a specific purpose. But this is absurd. Besides, earmarks can be changed – if only we had a superintendent who made a third of a million a year, or we had given her a government car so she could get to Carson City, maybe she could have adequately communicated those specific needs before they were codified in the Legislature’s last budget.

“Student support” ≠ “Teachers”. Finally, Mr. Ciesynski acknowledges only 45 percent of our budget goes to regular classroom instruction, but argues that it’s 70 percent if you add “student support” spending – a handily nebulous phrase indeed that designedly obfuscates far more than it elucidates. I would hope that every non-teacher working for the school is in some way supporting students, since students are the only reason for a school district to exist in the first place.  Does that mean 30 percent of our education budget is entirely extraneous to its mission? Things are worse than I thought.

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This is the sort of budget/language shell game bureaucrats use to hide what they’re doing, or justify poor spending habits when they’re called on the carpet.

But it also helps illustrate the systemic problem (take note, legislators), which is that government budgeting is almost always done backwards. What we should do is identify the mission needs first (and re-identify them on a regular basis), and then discipline ourselves to fund only that which is necessary to accomplish that mission. Instead, we spend every dollar we spent last year with too little questioning what we’re spending it on, throw more money on the heap regardless of previous success rates, and then wonder why people are frustrated with the outcomes. And because regurgitating cliché talking points is more fun than doing math problems, very few elected officials ever critically examine the budgets they ultimately approve.

I think public schools are critically important. I have two kids enrolled with WCSD. My community and I have shown we’re willing to open our pocketbooks to meet the educational needs of our children, in spite of a school district notorious for mismanagement, lack of focus, and lurching from crisis to crisis. But we will no longer accept vague, false, or suspiciously defensive answers when the numbers don’t seem to be adding up, and will ride herd as long as we have to in order to ensure our resources aren’t squandered at the expense of our kids.

Orrin Johnson has been writing and commenting on Nevada and national politics since 2007.  He started with an independent blog, First Principles, and was a regular columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal from 2015-2016.  By day, he is a deputy district attorney for Carson City.  His opinions here are his own.  Follow him on Twitter @orrinjohnson, or contact him at [email protected].