Preschool funding veto stands

PALMER — The Mat-Su Borough Assembly couldn’t muster enough votes to overturn a veto of preschool funding.

“If we have to scale it down, it is a scalable program, and we will do that,” Mat-Su Borough Schools Superintendent Deena Paramo said of the district’s preschool program before the assembly took up the discussion of what to do with the veto.

She said she disagreed with Mayor Larry DeVilbiss’ opinion of preschool programs.

“We choose to disagree without being disagreeable,” she said.

“I agree with you on that. You’ve been very pleasant to work with on this,” DeVilbiss said.

The story of the money starts with the state Legislature, which opted not to provide $350,000 it had given the district in previous years to fund preschool. At borough budget time, borough assemblyman Matthew Beck said at the May 20 assembly meeting, he went to Paramo and asked what wasn’t funded, but was needed. Paramo pointed to preschool. So Beck put in a $350,000 amendment to restore that money and it passed.

DeVilbiss vetoed the amendment, using language in his veto memo — including referring to preschool as “glorified daycare” — that, at least judging by the people who turned out to testify May 20, ruffled a lot of feathers in the borough.

“I am disappointed to hear you refer to pre-school as part of a left-wing agenda,” Kelly McBride, a teacher with the Mat-Su Borough School District, told DeVilbiss.

She pointed to statistics that show that kids who get preschool have lower rates of incarceration and that it takes $60,000 a year to house a prisoner.

“While $350,000 is a lot of money, it is a drop in the bucket compared to what we are paying on the other end,” she said.

Mat-Su Borough School Board member Sarah Welton, who teaches a class in lifespan development at Mat-Su College that includes material about what preschool does for children, pointed out that students without preschool start out behind in terms of social skills.

“I have seen children come to school and not know how to use a tissue,” Welton told the assembly. “I have seen children come to school and not know that they were supposed to eat off of their own plates.”

But while a majority of the assembly was swayed, three members were not. Darcie Salmon, Steve Colligan and Ron Arvin voted to uphold DeVilbiss’s veto.

Colligan said he values preschool, just like he values music and art and language programs that get cut when budgets are tight. He said it is up to the district to decide which programs to prioritize.

“It is not the responsibility of this body to make those priority decisions,” he said. “This, to me, is just a matter of I think it’s the school board’s priority. They can make it a priority.”

He also said that a continued 3 percent increase in school funding from borough taxes is not sustainable and warned that state budgets aren’t going to get any better. In fact, they’re projected to get worse.

The district asked the borough for a 3 percent increase over last year, and the borough came through with that money by allowing the district to hold on to funds leftover at the end of the current fiscal year. Usually the money would revert to the borough.

Ron Arvin said the issue was in the top three for most difficult in his years on the assembly. He said he got a lot of feedback from the community. Three calls dropped, he said, because his phone ran out of batteries while he discussed the issue. He said he wanted to see the process followed — if the school district needs this money it should build it into the budget it presents the borough.

“If the district comes back next year and adds it to their budget, then it’s their budget,” Arvin said.

DeVilbiss said he was happy the assembly upheld his veto, saying he thinks the district needs to stick to the education it’s mandated to provide rather than option schooling.