Letter: Austerity, False Tradeoffs, And The Responsibilities Of The School Committee

The following letter was sent to the Amherst School Committee on July 12, 2021.

We are an Amherst family with one graduate (Ezekiel Ash, ARHS ’19) and one current student (Rafael Ash, ARHS ’22).  When our younger son graduates next year, both of our children will have had their entire K-12 education through the Amherst Public Schools, and we appreciate the efforts of teachers, staff, administrators, and the elected committees.

We are deeply disappointed in the recent public statement of the School Committee Chair in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, “School Committee chair on negotiations with union”  and in the choices the School Committee has made to date in the school budget for the coming year. 

The proposal that Amherst teachers sacrifice to provide a living wage for Amherst paraeducators is insulting to both teachers and paraeducators. The proposal perpetuates the myth of austerity in a town with high resources, and it tries to turn educators against each other by presenting a false trade off — as if the “fiscal reality” of the chair’s letter were a law of nature rather than, in fact, a poor public policy choice.

Most paraeducators in the Amherst Public Schools earn below a living wage . That shortfall represents a disgraceful neglect of workers who provide essential services to our children. The shortfall is exploitative, and it takes advantage of the loving and caring feelings that the paraeducators bring to their work. Part of the availability of workers at less than living wages is built on the feelings of the paraeducators that they are doing something valuable for our community and for the students in their charge.  The Amherst school system exploits those sentiments, taking advantage of the paraeducators and eroding humane prosocial motivations in the longer run.

Among the responsibilities of the School Committee are: to assess the resources the school system needs to provide a high-quality equitable education for all students with supportive, sustainable, and just conditions for the workforce; and to communicate and advocate for those needs before the Amherst public and the Town Council. The School Committee drafted or accepted an inadequate budget for the Amherst Schools. This budget imposes more than $1 million dollars in cuts, losing important educational services for students, including arts education and support for especially vulnerable students, and fails to address the inadequate pay of paraeducators.

By completing the budgeting process without accounting for the substantial support of the Biden stimulus and by failing to communicate needs to the public, the budget process failed to assess or to build resources. By choosing service cuts and sub-living wages instead of a robust supportive school system, the budget fails to address community needs. 

The good news is, it is not too late to change course. This year, thanks to the Biden stimulus, you may not even need to advocate hard for the needed resources. I urge you to reopen the budget now  and to adequately fund the schools to provide the high-quality equitable education for all students with supportive, sustainable, and just conditions for the workforce that our town needs and can afford.

Michael Ash

Michale Ash Is Professor of Economics At UMass Amherst