WASHINGTON, Aug 20: Amid all the hand-wringing in the US Congress over January 2 spending cuts that would wallop military and domestic programs, children of American soldiers already are feeling the pinch of a budget mess.
Feuding Republicans and Democrats in the US Congress may think that they have about four months to find a smarter alternative to the blunt trauma of 109 billion dollars in across-the-board spending cuts in January and 1.2 trillion dollars over 10 years.
What many lawmakers may not realize is that because of their inability to compromise on a replacement for this budget axe – and because of a quirk in the way the US Department of Education allocates funds to schools heavily populated by military kids – the pain already is palpable.
And that has the administrators of schools serving American bases reeling.
“My sense is the (federal) government is pretty much parked in the garage. It’s idling, at best,” said Billy Walker, superintendent of a school district 24 km northeast of San Antonio, Texas.
Calling the looming US budget cuts “the elephant in the room,” Walker said that when the 1,200 students in Randolph Field schools start classes on Aug. 27 they will have to contend with dwindling staff and other cuts.
Kids will have fewer reading specialists and math, English and science instructors, a smaller special education staff and other spending reductions sprinkled throughout his budget.
With Washington showing no signs of action, Walker said he simply had to bake into this academic year’s budget the January 2 spending cuts. “I don’t have a lot of confidence our federal legislators will do anything to help us,” Walker told Reuters.
The new cuts come atop earlier belt-tightening that hit the schools serving Randolph Air Force Base, Fort Sam Houston and Lackland Air Force Base because of an ongoing scale-back of federal and state aid. Already gone are baseball, swimming and cross-country running programs, as well as positions that went unfilled when some staffers retired, Walker said.
Districts like Walker’s, one of just seven public school districts in the United States whose boundaries are identical to the military bases they serve, are particularly hard-hit by budget cuts because they contain no private real estate upon which to draw property taxes – the local revenues that typically help finance education in the United States.
(AGENCIES)
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