Once again the governor is threatening schools! According to the Bangor Daily News he has stated that if the legislature doesn’t enact his budget, including the Medicare cuts, DHHS will run out of funding by April 1st. and he will take the money out of the schools. While he can’t close the schools because he doesn’t have the power to do so, he can cut their funding. Should he do that, all of the towns will have to fund the rest of the school year because by law they need to have 175 days of school. I suppose the Commissioner of Education could try to waive that requirement for every district, but what does that say about the importance of education?
The governor may be just trying to bully the changes though the legislature, but the latest news on that front is that there is very little likelihood of there being any waiver of current federal requirements on maintenance of effort requirements. That would mean all of the work to try and bully this through would have been meaningless. The fact the administration hasn’t even requested a waiver also seems to be odd timing given the importance Lepage is attaching to it.
What I find even more interesting is that the governor talked about “students first” and the importance of education, and then threatens to cut education funding. However, he didn’t say anything about repealing the tax cut that was passed last year. Those cuts, which benefit the wealthiest the most, haven’t gone into effect yet. They could make up a big portion of the budget issue. Even more horrifying, the governor in his speech talked about the fact that he will be proposing another tax cut!!! If we have such a bad deficit, and are talking about cutting school funding, how can he even think that further tax cuts are going to find support in the legislature and in the state?
So, what should we do? From my standpoint, we need to not cave in to this absurd budget and get to work doing what we need to do. Convince all of the legislature that his plans are incompetent, ill advised, and a danger to the health of the state and our economy. Then we need to repeal the tax cuts that were passed last year and redo the budget as a whole (not just DHHS). For those of you reading this, I hope you will speak up! Call, mail, and email your state representative (including me), your state senators and the Appropriations Committee. The only way that the Republican majority is going to back away from supporting Lepage is if they realize that if they don’t they will end up out of office in November. Now is the time, when everyone is looking towards the fall elections, to really put the pressure on!
If you don’t know who to write to, drop me an email at steve.lovejoy@myfairpoint.net and I will be happy to help you get in touch with them!
Don’t accept “maybe” or “we’ll see how it comes out of committee” or any other evasion.