As much as some members of the Board of Education whine about the Lingle administration's request for budget cuts as high as 20 percent, the financial picture for the state — and the schools — keeps getting worse.

The Council on Revenues has again lowered its estimates for tax collections, and in addition to absorbing as much as $70 million in possible budget cuts next year, the Department of Education is worried that it may come up $24 million short of what's needed to pay its bills this year.

In the face of these numbers, it's inexplicable that school board chairwoman Donna Ikeda and other members continue to question whether deep cuts are necessary.

Equally puzzling is their rationale for accusing the Lingle administration of treating schools unfairly when the governor is only asking the DOE for the same percentage of spending reductions as other state departments.

A recent school board meeting suggested it's mainly about avoiding blame as members refused to offer the full 20 percent contingency cuts requested by Gov. Linda Lingle.

"If we resist ... the public will know we were not the ones who caused this to happen," said board member John Penebacker. Do they expect Lingle to print money on the fifth-floor copier if tax revenues don't come in?

Every penny spent by the DOE has a constituency, and cuts are always unpopular.

But it's a primary responsibility of the school board to decide how the department spends available funds, and if they're going to duck tough decisions by punting to the governor and Legislature to decide where to cut, what purpose do they serve?

Contrast this with the University of Hawai'i, where President David McClain, an economist by training, made the necessary cuts without the dramatics. Recognizing reality, he prepared campuses for the possibility that even deeper cuts may be on the way.

Fortunately, while the politicians politic, DOE Superintendent Patricia Hamamoto and her staff are going about the difficult — but necessary — business of identifying contingency cuts that will have the least impact on learning if revenues keep shrinking.

And it seems certain that further cuts beyond the $45 million the DOE has already offered will require getting into the two biggest and most most politically sensitive cost items — payroll and facilities.

Hamamoto has proposed saving $15 million to $25 million by closing schools and administrative offices extra days during which teachers and other DOE employees wouldn't be paid.

And the DOE is also working to speed up the process for permanently closing or consolidating underutilized schools. The Legislature passed a measure to study school closings, but Lingle vetoed it after affected communities protested.

Reducing employee compensation should be a last resort, but if it comes to that, Hamamoto makes a good argument that giving up days is better than giving up jobs by forcing the schools into layoffs.

Closing schools is inconvenient for students and parents, but funding is too scarce to keep carrying facilities that are expensive to maintain and don't get enough use.

Tight budgets are painful, but they provide a useful opportunity to scrutinize expenditures and decide which are vital to the goal of better education and which are not.

Hamamoto recognized this when she said, "At the end of all of this, what we want to be then is a much more focused, a much more streamlined, a much more efficient organization that continues to support teaching and learning in the classroom."

This can happen if money cut from less critical programs now is put back into those with high impact on the mission when the economy recovers.

David Shapiro, a veteran Hawai'i journalist, can be reached by e-mail at dave@volcanicash.net. His columns are archived at www.volcanicash.net. Read his daily blog at blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com.