You have to figure that Larry Slyck is a heck of an assistant principal at Highland Lakes Elementary, a public school in the community of Palm Harbor in north Pinellas County.
After all, between the private efforts of parents and the nimble budget work of the school's principal, they raised enough money to keep Slyck at the school.
There are 82 elementary schools across the county, but there are slots for only 55 assistant principals. Which schools get them? The schools are ranked according to need.
This year, Highland Lakes Elementary ranked 56th. Slyck, who had been at the school seven years, was told he would be transferred to a school that needed him more.
That's when some parents at Highland Lakes got involved. At first, they called in protests, but protests don't mean much to computer rankings.
They figured out what does matter: money. Between concerned parents, donors and the efforts of the school's principal, they came up with enough cash to keep Slyck for the rest of the year.
In theory, that means the other schools that deserved assistant principals will still get theirs, too.
Highland Lakes Elementary isn't the first place this has happened. Other local schools have raised money to save assistant principal slots, some by finding a local business "sponsor."
So, the parents in these schools cared enough to get involved.
They were unselfish enough to come up with some cash.
Therefore, they kept a popular and dedicated person on the faculty. They made their school better.
A happy ending.
Right?
Except ...
Except, there still is something wrong with this picture.
It's not with the parents' concern. Or with Larry Slyck. There is something wrong if we are going to start relying on citizens to come up with extra dough, beyond their taxes, under the threat of their school's budget being cut.
Putting faculty and staff resources up for "bid" in that way - pay extra, or else suffer - gives the School Board too much power. Just as an amoeba stretches itself toward food and light, the school bureaucracy absolutely will be drawn increasingly toward this source of "new" money.
This cannot help but be unfair, in one of two directions.
(A) Either parents in more affluent areas will be unfairly threatened with budget cuts,
(B) Or parents in poorer areas will not be able to "buy" the same assistant principals and amenities as their better-off cousins.
Not to be too cynical, but I am guessin' (B). That wouldn't just be a throwback to "separate but equal." It would be a time-machine trip back to deliberately unequal.
You know the most interesting thing?
Our Legislature is totally dominated by a "no new taxes" obsession based on the premise that it is better to cut assistant principals, and even teacher classroom aides, than to increase the schools' revenues by a penny.
Indulge me on a round number here, and say there are a million folks in Pinellas County. You know how much that $41,000 that was raised to save Larry Slyck's job would have meant to us in taxes, on a per-resident basis?
Four cents apiece.
Heck, even if you called it a dime apiece to employ the guy for the full school year, we could hire a whole new crop of assistant principals. For a couple bucks, we even could make sure all 82 elementary schools got one.
And if we had done that countywide - if the parents at Highland Lakes had thrown in a couple extra bucks like everybody else - later they wouldn't have had to raise $41,000. The rest of the community would have chipped in for them.
But that would be a tax increase, and therefore, an automatic wickedness.
Instead, we will pretend to be "conservative" with taxes, and then create a weird sort of government-by-subscription-service on the back end. I know we are not feeling especially communitarian these days, but that is still not how the joint is supposed to work.
