Munch’ster Onion Breeder

Well, the heck with “fair and balanced” - when the mayor’s idea of “leadership” is to gut the school budget, it’s time to take a stand.

 There’s a hearing on the budget at Memorial High, Monday th 28th, at 6 PM.  Get there early (5 PM?) to sign up to speak.

 Here are a couple of flyers that folks may want to print up and distribute to get folks to the budget hearing.

This one’s a call for folks to come to the hearing on Monday: Budget Hearing Flyer

This one’s a piece pointing out that, while the mayor may not consider ketchup a vegetable, he does consider it an “administrative expense”:  “Forty-percent Frank”

Each year’s school budget has to be provided, in some detail, to the State of New Hampshire at the end of the school year, in a standard report called a DOE-25.  Since (unlike the school district) the state believes in public access to public records, they’ll provide the old budgets to just about anyone - even me.  I didn’t ask if I could share it, but “better to ask for forgiveness than for permission”.

The data is in Excel format.  If you don’t have Excel, you can download a free viewer from Microsoft here.  If that still doesn’t work for you, or you don’t feel safe opening an Excel file over the web, drop a comment on this post and let me know what would work for you - Adobe Acrobat PDF, perhaps? 

This form is very complicated.  There are many ways to interpret it incorrectly.  Some items that you might think could be cut to save money are in fact “free”, from a city-property-tax perspective, because they are funded by federal grants.  If you post a question about some line item that looks weird here, maybe someone else with expertise will explain it.

If there are particular analyses of this data that you think would be helpful, please speak up.  If you can do the analysis yourself and want to share it here, all the better!

 Here are the budgets:

• 2001-2002 Manchester School District DOE-25
• 2002-2003 Manchester School District DOE-25
• 2003-2004 Manchester School District DOE-25
• 2004-2005 Manchester School District DOE-25
• 2005-2006 Manchester School District DOE-25
• 2006-2007 Manchester School District DOE-25

Why this blog?

About two years ago, I started to notice that there was a lot of “common knowledge” about Munchster schools that was just plain wrong. Some of it just evolved.  Some appears to be politically motivated.

After posting a few op-ed pieces, letters to the editor, and rants on the NH Insider Manchester discussion board, it became clear that these really don’t have much effect.  Anything in the newspapers is transient; the Union Leader charges for access to their old copies, and they aren’t in Google.  The Express has limited circulation, especially among folks who don’t work in town.  NH Insider has limited readership, and the discussion boards have little factual content.

This is the best idea I’ve come up with for challenging the common “wisdom”.

 While I am angry about some of the issues I’ll talk about here, I intend to try to stick to the facts, and to opinions that are well-grounded in publishable facts. 

Please comment, but if you are presenting an opinion, please, provide evidence, even if it’s only your personal experience.  I don’t want the comments to degenerate into cat-fights, as so often happens on the web.  Opinions that you form purely out of your own preconceptions, political affiliation, or ideological perspective have no place here.