Budget time in Warwick, which means the head-butting between the Mayor/City Council and Warwick Schools is essentially the same as last year and will probably have the same results. Without re-hashing the same arguments, here's the quick version.
The schools and city disagree on the baseline number for maintaining the level of effort for school funding. (The "moe" is required by law and the situation is exacerbated by differing opinions from the Education Commissioner and the leaders of the General Assembly, each telling the respective sides what they want to hear...the city solicitor is looking into it). The Warwick Beacon provided a nice graphic to illustrate the difference:
Also still relevant to the conversation is last year's analysis from the Warwick Tea Party, which shows that the City side of the budget has seen the majority of growth--and new tax dollars--over the last few years. Here is an updated chart produced by former School Committee/City Council member Bob Cushman illustrating the budgeting trends in Warwick.
UPDATE: Bob Cushman passed along an updated analysis for this year. You can download the file here (MS Word).
I'm suprised that this website supports this individual. This is the same Mr. Cushman who cost Warwick taxpayers 17 million dollars to settle the teachers dispute so he could secure the teachers support for city council. Mr. Comtois... how is Mr. Cushman a fiscal conservative and a person that you and this website would want to promote? He is nothing more than an opportunist.
Posted by: Richard at June 3, 2011 8:13 PMI say give our third rate teachers whatever they want they deserve it if
they tried to get the same pay and benefits in the Private Sector they would all be standing in the unemployment lines