REALITY TELLS US PROPOSITION B OUR BEST HOPE

It is both appropriate and essential to note that many of Missouri's 541 school districts are financial basket cases, facing higher costs, declining revenues and increased pressure from the public to provide more services. Since education is not a product that can be manufactured, there are few realistic economies that can be made in this field except to trim teacher costs, cut textbook purchases and scale back programs that society now expects and takes for granted.

Missouri's tax-supported colleges and universities also find themselves facing the same financial dilemma: how to meet the public's demands on budgets that, when inflation is taken into account, are essentially smaller than a decade earlier. Indeed, the state's higher educational institutions began trimming salaries, enlarging class sizes and eliminating important academic programs even before local school districts.

With $80 million in planned spending for elementary and secondary schools now eliminated in the current fiscal year because of the recession's toll on the state's general revenue fund and desegregation costs, the real education crisis of Missouri is just in its initial stages. School officials are only now able to determine the extent of their districts' revenue shortfall from Jefferson City, so the traumatic budget cutting exercises in several hundred districts are actually just getting started. When this process is complete, the districts' financial stability will be even more precarious than it appears to be at this moment.

Missouri's Education Commissioner Robert Bartman noted the other day that at least 75 districts throughout the state have already handed pink slips to some 225 teachers since the school year began in September. Dr. Bartman said he was aware of other districts planning additional teacher reductions, as yet unreported, but estimating the number of districts making sizable cuts may double in the next few months.

If this is the case, and we have no reason to doubt it isn't, then Missouri's local schools are in far worse condition at this moment than anyone realizes.

At least 50 districts, and this number may also double within a brief time, could end the year with negative bank balances. This is a euphemism for bankruptcy, something Missouri has not witnessed since the Depression of the 1930s. An official in the state education department has expressed alarm over the remedy taken by some districts of borrowing money from local banks and commercial lending firms to meet operating costs. No school district can prudently extricate itself from revenue shortfalls by borrowing, even on a short term basis, against future receipts. Districts that feel they must resort to this extra-legal practice are playing roulette with the future of their schools and the academic quality available to students in later years.

The state education agency is aware of 16 districts that began the current school year with budget deficits. Again, this solution is not only illegal, it places schools in the extremely precarious position of defaulting anytime there is even a small reduction in county or state payments.

All 541 districts began this school year behind a financial 8-ball because the General Assembly was unable to find surplus revenue to increase the basic Foundation Fund by as much as $1. Following this spring's legislative session, Gov. Ashcroft was forced to trim $40.5 million from Foundation Program appropriations, and then an additional $34.5 million will be taken from the fund when Missouri forks over $69 million for court-ordered desegregation costs in the Kansas City School District.

In light of these negative statistics, it is not difficult for intelligent Missourians to understand the fiscal emergency now facing all 541 school districts. Those Missourians who have been embarrassed in the past over the state's miserable national standing in per capita school support, teachers' salaries and progressive education programs now stand in jeopardy of being completely mortified as this crisis is played out in the weeks and months ahead.

Surely no responsible Missourian wants to witness the bankruptcy of school districts, in urban and outstate areas alike. No Missourian wants to pickup a national news magazine to read a story of our state's failure to provide even minimal educational opportunities for some 822,000 young boys and girls. Yet this is the reality of the crisis, with no exaggeration allowed or permitted.

The school revenue deficits are real.

The worsening financial condition of 541 districts is real.

The tragedy of hundreds of school teachers being furloughed is real.

The reality is that no responsible Missourian can in good conscience vote against Proposition B on November 5.