Last night at the Evansville Finance Committee meeting, it was explained that the Evansville School District had asked if the City could contribute half of the crossing guard expense for the coming year. About $9,000.
The Finance committee voted unanimously not to make a contribution. The logic here was that many taxing authorities have children bussed to Evansville to school. Why should the city be the one municipality to contribute and not the others?
The Evansville school district explained that due to a state formula which does not fully reimburse the school for the increase of 60 students they have, but only 20, they do not have the funds to fully finance the school crossing expense.
What are your thoughts on this issue? You make the call.
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I think it is fair to ask the city to pay a portion of this. The police dept is at the high school everyday, some times several times a day handing out tickets. So take this money that they are basically getting from the school and apply. The only comment I have to make about them being at the school every day some times a couple times, is they don't pay for this service either. Being they don't pay taxes. They do not pay for police service, only fire. We got this information from Mr.Connors in terms of what the school does pay for and what they do not. Mr.Connors also made the comment to us that their concern is for the saftety of all children. So I would think that yes the city would pay a portion of this fee.
ReplyDeleteIt is fair to ask the city to pay for a portion of this. In considering this request, the F&L committee discussed a variety of angles, with the bussing being one of them.
ReplyDeleteWhile I only speak for myself, I can tell you my thoughts included the sacrifices our city staff has been making in terms of bypassing requested salary increases, for the past two years anyway, in order for us to keep our budget on track.
We were presented with information that the school had recently raised the rate of pay for crossing guards from $6 to $9 an hour. This represents a 50% raise. By asking the city to pay half of this wage, leaves the school paying $4.50 of this new hourly wage. In effect allowing the school to increase the wage and decrease their overall cost.
I simply could not justify subsidizing a 50% increase for the school's employees when I knew I was about to limit our municipal judges salary increase to 3.5% in a few minutes, and after having denied modest raise requests for 5% from other city staff areas earlier in the year. All because my hands are tied too by tight city budgets.
These are difficult decisions to make, and I am sorry we couldn't be of more help on this one.
Karen I think you made some very good points. Things that were not mentioned in the Observer's Post. I have been saying for MONTHS that the school spends money it does NOT have. This is proof. They need crossing guards, no doubt. But I think everyone knows that a crossing guard is not a high paying job and I shocked they get 9.00 a hr.
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