A School Budget Symptom

Here is one problem with school budgets--stupid expenditures. The price tag for a six weekend, intensive training course for "potential parent leaders" in Baltimore is $110,306. This may seem a trivial amount for a school system with a budget of $1.2 billion, but the spending is indicative of some rather skewed priorities.

The $110,306 contract - approved Tuesday night by a 5-3 vote, with one board member absent - is designed to increase parental involvement in city schools by providing 25 potential parent leaders with three weekends of intense training.

The parents, as well as seven conference facilitators and one city school administrator, will stay at the Radisson Hotel at Cross Keys during each of the weekends. The system will pay $149 a night for each of 17 rooms, with two people in most rooms. Meals for 33 people will cost $18,309, or $555 apiece.

No board member disputed the need to get parents more involved in city schools. Also, the federal funds that will pay for the training must be spent by the end of the fiscal year in June, or the school system will lose the money. How the funds should be spent, though, was a matter of dispute.

A dispute indeed.

Surely these funds could be better spent by having a larger group of parents not staying in hotels and not using at one of the more expensive downtown hotels.

LaVerne Sykes, the system's director of parent and community involvement, said parents will participate in events from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. The parents will be selected from the city's Title 1 schools, which serve low-income populations.

Baltimore is not that big geographcially and has a pretty good public transit system (not as extensive as New York, but it does allow people to get around pretty well). The travel time involved might be 30 minutes or less in most cases. Why do these parents need to stay the night?

Add to the fact that the Baltimore schools has 83,000 students and only 25 parents are going to be involved in this training, although it is expected that these 25 will train other parents, the scope of this program seems just a tad small. While most of the money will go to the vendor providing the training, the cost just shows how poorly schools manage budgets.