An Ugly Tale of Immorality at the Davis Center of the Minneapolis Public Schools >>>>> Bureaucratic Bloat Has Resumed Since Autumn 2015 and Continues Even as the School District Faces a $28 Million Deficit

According to the figures that I have compiled, the bureaucracy at the Davis Center (central offices, 1250 West Broadway) of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) has expanded from 551 to 655 staff members since autumn 2015, with outlays for staff salaries ascending from $37,361,274 to $43,322,790 since that 2015 autumnal juncture.

 

Grasp these critical facts:

 

>>>>>     Outlays for staff salaries at the Davis Center have risen a total of $5,961,516 during autumn 2015 until the present juncture in spring 2017
 

>>>>>     To deal with the current $28 million deficit facing the school district, MPS officials are proposing 10% reduction in central office expenditures.  A cut of 10% from the current $43,324,790 yields $4,332,279 worth of cuts. 

>>>>>     Thus, the proposed cuts fall far short of the figure representing the rise in expenditures for staff salaries over an approximately 17-month period.  Even after the proposed cuts are made, there will still have been an increase of $1,629,234 from autumn 2015 to the present juncture in spring 2017.

This continuing bureaucratic bloat is further evidence of either incompetence or deception in the use of public dollars by officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools, with grave implications for the lives of our children:  The rise in outlays for the central MPS bureaucracy has occurred during a period in which student academic performance has remained essentially flat and has actually evidenced declines for some demographic groups.

 

All of this is very disappointing, given the much ballyhooed 16% in central office staffing cuts that occurred under the leadership of Michael Goar, who served as interim superintendent from February 2015 until May 2016. 


Since the figures show a rise during the autumn 2015 to spring 2017 period, this means that the additional spending was ostensibly the result of policy decisions that began during Goar’s tenure and have continued during the first seven months of Ed Graff’s period as superintendent.  Any hope that Goar’s bureaucratic paring represented a genuine effort to reduce either staffing or expenditures at the Davis Center has proven a chimera of the kind all too familiar to this longtime follower of the budgetary escapades of administrations at the level of the locally centralized school district.   

 

The situation described herein would mean that in a moral universe, officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools should reconfigure their cuts to fall entirely on the Davis Center, with any effort then to design a structurally balanced budget necessitating drawing from the reserve fund, as presently proposed.

 

Central office bloat at the Minneapolis Public Schools is evident.

 

Such bloat is immoral at a time when we actually need to inaugurate a well-articulated and cohesive tutoring program for students lagging below grade level and to expand greatly outreach programming to families struggling with dilemmas of poverty and dysfunction.

 

Officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools currently operate outside a moral universe.

 

Our duty as citizens is first to situate ourselves in that moral universe and then do everything in our power to draw central office bureaucrats into that ethical realm.