By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org
    
DAYTON, Ohio – The snow may still be thick on the ground in many states, but a large number of America’s school leaders are already thinking about spring – and the new tax levies they’ll soon ask voters to approve.
    
But Americans are never really in the mood for tax increases, and that’s especially true during tough economic times.
    
The Dayton Daily News reports that a group of school leaders throughout southwestern Ohio understand taxpayers’ frustrations and are trying to convince residents that their school budgets have been cut so deeply that new taxes are the only way to stave off financial disaster.
    
However, many of those school leaders are playing fast and loose with how they define a budget cut, the paper reports.
    
“School districts (in Ohio) must file five-year forecasts with the state, projecting how much they’ll spend in the future,” the Dayton Daily News writes. “An Ohio Department of Education document admits this forecasting ‘is as much an art as it is a science.’”
     
If a district spends less than it previously projected, some school officials “will refer to that as a budget cut, even if it just meant a smaller spending increase rather than a larger one,” the paper reports. 
    
Such double-talk isn’t unique to The Buckeye State. Similar tactics are used by shady school leaders all across the nation.
    
The Dayton Daily News illustrates how pervasive this problem is.
    
The paper examined the “five-year forecasts for the 21 districts that originally approved levies for the May ballot” and found that “14 of them increased spending between 2010 and 2012, even though only four had enrollment increases.”
    
That contradicts the clever, pro-levy marketing campaigns some school officials use, in which they tout spending reductions in one part of the district’s budget, while ignoring big increases elsewhere.
    
For example, an unscrupulous superintendent might tell taxpayers that the local teachers’ union took a pay freeze to help the district get its budget under control. But that same superintendent won’t explain to taxpayers that union members are still receiving automatic pay increases for longevity and other criteria.
    
Such word games allow some school and teacher union leaders to bamboozle taxpayers into supporting higher school taxes. Average residents already find their district’s budgeting and spending practices to be nearly indecipherable, and are incapable of disentangling all the confusing rhetoric coming out of the administration building.  
    
Labor union contracts are at the heart of the nation’s K-12 spending problem. Union-friendly school boards lock taxpayers into contracts that promise employees all sorts of financial goodies – step raises, free or low-cost health insurance, payouts for unused sick days, retirement incentives, tuition reimbursement, etc. – regardless of how well the economy is doing.
    
The Dayton Daily News identifies one Ohio school district that eliminated more than 60 staff positions over the past four years, but still saw its “wage spending” increase by about $1 million over each of the last two school years, while employee benefit spending went up more than $1.5 million each year.
    
“Our expenses continue to go up over the years,” the district’s superintendent told the news site. “The bottom line is, we did spend more last year than we did in the 2010-11 school year in personnel.”
    
Voters appear to be wising up to all the double-talk. The newspaper reported last fall that about half of the area’s school levy proposals failed at the polls.
    
The typical American voter wants what’s best for kids and is willing to pay higher school taxes, if that’s what it takes. But Americans don’t like being played for fools, which is what too many school leaders are doing by heralding themselves as budget cutters, even as their school budgets continue to grow.