Conservative group making robocalls on school funding

[Jeanfromfillmore]

Conservative group making robocalls on school funding
Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, a group that advocates for lower taxes and less government spending, has been making hundreds of thousands of calls to voters around the state in an effort to push back against school districts that say the state’s budget shortfall will force them to lay off thousands of teachers.
Michael Sullivan, the president of Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, said his group has called about 350,000 households around the state, with an emphasis on constituents of the lawmakers sitting on the budget-writing House Appropriations and Senate Finance committees.
“Right now, public education bureaucrats are threatening to scare parents and teachers by threatening the classroom,” Sullivan says on the call. “Superintendents and school board members say they’ll start making cuts by letting teachers go. That’s irresponsible. The classroom must be protected. … Tell your state legislators to stand firm on cutting the budget and tell them that cuts must be made outside the classroom.”
Sullivan also directs the listener to a website that his group recently established called Protecttheclassroom.com.
You can listen to the call here.
Sullivan has repeatedly proven himself to be an effective communicator with the conservative grass roots. Earlier this year, Texas Monthly named him one of the 25 most powerful people in Texas politics.
The argument from Sullivan and other conservatives is that cutting the budget won’t force schools to let teachers go, but rather that schools need to stop spending so much money on non-classroom expenses. An oft-cited number around the Capitol these days is that school districts employ as many non-teachers as teachers, but educators say most of those non-teachers are the people who, for instance, drive the buses, serve the food and clean the buildings.
For weeks now, there has been a steady stream of news stories about school districts laying off, or planning to lay off, hundreds or thousands of teachers. Many districts have started with layoffs to administrators and other non-teachers before hitting their teaching workforce.
School districts are making the cuts because they stand to lose significant state aid. Texas is about $27 billion short of the money it needs to continue current state services.
Landing on a solid number of how many school jobs could be lost in the wake of the budget cuts can be tough.
Early on, the school finance experts at Moak, Casey and & Associates estimated that 100,000 school jobs could be nixed over two years if school districts lost almost $10 billion in state aid owed to them under existing law.
A new analysis from the Center for Public Policy Priorities puts the number of affected school jobs during the first year of the 2012-13 budget at 79,161, which would have a ripple effect on private sector jobs of another 110,683 private sector jobs, using a pretty standard economic assumption that almost 1.5 private sector jobs would be lost for every public sector job.
The Center for Public Policy Priorities, which advocates for low- and moderate-income Texans, assumes a lower average salary than did the Moak, Casey analysis.
http://www.statesman.com/blogs/conte...king_robo.html