Posted on: Monday, November 24, 2003

EDITORIAL
Once again, Lingle puts DOE in a bind

The Lingle administration has once again refused to provide all the money the Department of Education says it needs to run the public schools, which already are noticeably limping from previous funding disappointments.

Specifically, instead of adding $7.4 million to the DOE budget for promised pay raises, the administration wants the public school system to find that money somewhere in its existing budget. Never mind that, halfway through the fiscal year, the money in that budget was long ago penciled in for other purposes.

Lingle insists that she has never cut the DOE budget, and she's technically right. What she has cut consistently is DOE requests for additional money to cover legitimate cost increases.

It's obvious that the DOE has no control, for instance, over the pay raises negotiated by the state for teachers and blue-collar school staff. Other such needs are school buses, compliance with No Child Left Behind and the Felix consent decree.

As a candidate, Lingle made much of the "fat" to be found in the DOE. She promised to redirect 50 percent of the money spent on the DOE's centralized bureaucracy so it is actually spent in the classroom or at the school level.

Unfortunately, the governor has yet to assist in identifying the dispensable items in the DOE budget. As a result, her contention regarding "fat" remains unproven.

On the opposite side, however, Lingle has gone so far as to tell the DOE what items in its budget it cannot eliminate to comply with her spending limitations. She clashed with the DOE during the summer when she ordered a 20 percent restriction on DOE spending that was not to include sports programs. The DOE said it couldn't figure out how to cut that much without curtailing sports.

Fortunately, the economic outlook improved before those particular spending restrictions caused much harm.

We continue to urge Lingle to identify with great specificity what she feels is excessive central bureaucracy. We believe Superintendent of Schools Pat Hamamoto has argued convincingly that there's no great repository of "fat" in the DOE. Indeed, centralization gives it substantial economies that it would lose if, as Lingle urges, it were broken up.

Meanwhile, those pay raises should be paid, but not by shortchanging some other part of our school system.