Testimony to the Fairfax County School Board FY2021 Final Budget Hearing - 01/26/2021
-- by Arthur G. Purves, President of the President, Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance (fcta.org).
No Taxation Without Education
Mr. Chairman, Members of the Board, Mr. Superintendent:
My name is Arthur Purves. I address you as president of the Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance. We have three observations.
First, on September 3 last year, we emailed the Office of Communications to ask how many employees had gotten full pay while not working during the COVID lockdown and the cost. On September 11, we received a reply that the answer would cost us $87.50. On September 22, without our agreeing to the cost, we received another reply stating that our "questions do not fall within the scope of FOIA" along with some woefully incomplete data. Another email, on September 29, said we still owed the $87.50. Besides being asked to pay for an answer we did not get, we were surprised that the school board did not already have the answer. Therefore, we have to estimate the answer. Given that salaries cost $1.7 billion, a conservative estimate that a quarter of that was spent on non-working employees would result in a cost of $400 million or 20% of the school transfer. Also, we note that the proposed budget asks for a $43 million increase from the county even though enrollment has decreased by 9,000.
Second, this would not be an issue if schools were open. Fairfax County reports COVID deaths by age group. As of today, 82% of the county’s 776 COVID deaths (out of a population of 1.1 million) have been among ages 65 or older. For ages 50-64, mortality is five hundredths of a percent; for ages 18-49 it is six thousandths of a percent, and there have been no deaths for ages 17 and under. The county does not publish ICU availability, but statewide ICU utilization is 57%. Hospitals are not overcrowded. What is not reported are the hardships imposed, especially on low-income families, by the lockdown. It’s fair to assume that those hardships overwhelm the COVID risks for those under 65. Please open the schools.
Third, as we've been saying for a quarter of a century, it is within the power of the school board to dramatically reduce racial inequality by bringing back phonics-based reading instruction and arithmetic drill. "One Fairfax" is a stunning admission that the school curricula, especially in early elementary school, has failed to give equal opportunity to low-income Blacks and Hispanics. "Whole word" instruction has a century-long record of failure, while you haven’t even tried phonics-based reading instruction. Before the Civil War it was illegal to teach a Black to read for fear that the ability to read would enable them to become independent. To present words to children and expect them to memorize words without being able to sound them out is not teaching reading. The cost of not teaching reading is enormous, not only in terms of budgets for remediation, welfare, and law enforcement, but in the human cost of ruined lives. You can fix this!
We oppose taxation without education! Please open schools and really teach reading.
Thank you.