The California Education Budget – One Parent’s Perspective

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Carol Millar

It’s a rare and entirely frightening, anxiety- producing feeling that has recently come over me. During the day I feel it alternately as a heavy, helpless, immune-compromising depression, or as a goad to flailing, manic, spin your wheels, do anything, something action. At night it wakes me for a sleepless hour of thinking that bounces me from one extreme idea to another – move to Europe (Sweden perhaps?), home-school the children, figure out how to make some serious money -- and finally exhausts me enough to catch a few more hours of sleep.

You’ll probably laugh, although if you do, it simply shows you have no idea of the stresses public schools have borne lately, when I tell you that it was the cuts to the education budget and their effects on my children’s school that have produced my recent anxiety. Since my ten-year old started school, I have been an active, involved parent; I have served on committees, done special projects with both daughters’ classes, worked with individual students on the math, spelling, writing, spoken at School Board meetings on behalf of my children’s school, created gardens so that their schoolmates, most of whom qualify for free lunch and live in apartments, could feel the soil between their fingers and watch one of nature’s cycles unfold before them. Recently, I have been going into my second grader’s classroom two Fridays a month to grade and record math and spelling quizzes and do other minor classroom tasks. I do this so that her teacher (underpaid as it is) can eat lunch without a pen in his hand or a laptop in front of him. In short, I’ve given the state hundreds of hours of free labor over the last six years, all because the schools were already under-funded, never mind the cuts we will have to digest in the future.

I enjoy being with my children and their friends and teachers, but, in a more sensible system, one in which the sword of Damocles is not perpetually hanging over the education budget, I would have volunteered half the time. Most of my time volunteering does not translate into a feel-good activity like one might think from Maria Shriver’s website touting the virtues of service; for me and for many other parents I know, volunteering at our children’s schools feels like a part-time job, a job we take on to keep the ship from sinking. We’ve been bailing water for years now and to think of bailing faster and harder is enough to demoralize the hardiest, most-service oriented parent. Our volunteer time is not a way to fill excess leisure hours; it is painfully carved from our day by choosing the necessity of a good education for our children over other necessities and over fulfilling our own hopes, dreams, and aspirations.