JLF sister blog Right Angles also took note of Gov. Bev Perdue’s interesting statement during yesterday’s speech at the N.C. School Boards Association meeting here in Greensboro:
“There are going to be some times over the next seven or eight months that you hate me,” Perdue told the crowd at the Koury Convention Center.
Rather than scaling back government with across the board percentage cuts, Perdue said, she wanted agencies – and schools – to find items outside their core mission and eliminate them.
Outside the session, Perdue said that it no longer made sense to do percentage cutbacks.
“Do you want to bleed away the system as we’ve done the past two years, where everybody takes an across-the-board 10 or 15 percent cut, and you do a fairly good amount of damage to every single piece of public services, or do you try to find the stuff that’s not essential?”
The only question is whether or not school systems will get the message. Guilford County Schools chief of staff Nora Carr is quoted in today’s N&R print edition as saying if the schools had non-core programs to eliminate, they would have been eliminated in previous rounds of budget cutting.
Carr added “you can’t get huge budget dollars out of the school system without looking at people…It’s a people intensive business, so that’s where the money goes.”
This is why 2011 is shaping up to be a very painful year, especially as the effects of austerity measures around the world are now being realized. I’m certainly not in favor of more people losing their jobs, but it’s no accident that we’ve gotten to this point, and there’s simply no more money.
