It doesn’t come as much of a surprise.
Running this city’s public schools, or any city’s public schools, is a gargantuan task – not just with professional people needed to guide the school systems, but to provide the kids with facilities, with teachers, with paras, with specialists, with bussing, with early day care and after school care and on and on and on.
The cost for public schools as evidenced by this year’s $128 million budget has gone to places never imagined during a simpler less expensive time.
What we all must know about the cost for public schools is that in the years to come, the expenses to run them will go up substantially, as inflation is right now a bit of a reckoning we did not tend to think about until the inflation came.
There is also the fall-out from the pandemic which rocked our world and which closed the schools.
This was a set back quite unlike any other in modern public school history.
We have not recovered from that set back.
Public school education was turned upside down by the pandemic.
The time lost cannot be made up.
The educational disaster, the loss of in school education that was part and parcel of the pandemic cannot be recovered, either.
The money that was lost trying to survive must be paid back by the federal government.
The time is not too far away when the Everett school budget will be at $200 million or more.
There was an item on the agenda for the cancelled city council meeting about what the real costs for a new high school might be when it comes to pass.
We are told it could likely cost $500-$550 million!
The state is presently hedging on helping out the way it used to help out with new schools.
It is likely Everett will never be able to afford another new high school.
Mind you, it is not an impossible thing for Everett to pay for a new high school that will cost a half billion dollars.
It is just a very costly thing.
The new school budget should be a wake up call for all of us who worry about fiscal sanity.
No amount of fiscal sanity can pay such burgeoning costs without some a day of reckoning.
Let’s hope the money problem can be kicked down the road like a can for a good long time before we get to that point.