Throwing Money at a Problem Never Works – Buz Blog

“You keep throwing money at the problem, but any real solution will require a complete restructuring of the current system.” – The Free Dictionary

The template for the longevity in political life in our Constitutional Republic seems to be to throw money at any problem that has public interest. It gives the politician the opportunity to face his constituents and tell them that “I voted to invest money into finding a solution to poverty or housing shortages or poor student test scores,” or any other problem that has caught the attention of the voters. When this “investment” produces little or no results, it gives the elected representative the advantage of not being held accountable for the failure to come up with a solution to the problem.

Some pundits have suggested that this is a major reason that no problems are ever solved in Washington, DC. One could also logically surmise that this is a major cause of our $39 trillion dollar debt. This problem isn’t limited to the federal government. State and local governments are also addicted to the process of spending extravagant amounts of taxpayer money. They do this without demanding accountability for correcting the problems these dollars are directed to address. And what is the answer that government bureaucracies come up with to rectify the problem that still hasn’t been fixed? They almost always throw more money at the problem in question.

A good local example of this phenomenon is the Prescott Unified School District, (PUSD). The Governing Board of the PUSD is currently pursuing a process to put a new bond issue and a budget override on the November ballot. The bond issue will be in the area of $13 to $15 million dollars. If these measures pass, it will cost every property tax payer somewhere between 6 and 9 dollars a month. The override will cost about 1 million dollars a year. District officials have said that this is a minimal increase because a 2004 bond issue is scheduled to be fully paid off soon. What these officials from the PUSD don’t openly state is that taxpayers are still paying for $15 million on a bond issue that passed in 2015.

The big question then arises: Has the PUSD utilized the millions of dollars from the 2004 and 2015 bond issues in such a way that they have improved the test scores of our students? Have the buildings, transportation vehicles, facilities, technology improvements and safety upgrades for which this money is supposed to be utilized, improved the students’ safety and enabled them to learn more and become more technologically advanced?

During the last decade, the PUSD has sold two schools in the district. Has the money received from those sales been used to increase our students’ learning and test scores? What about the money the district received from the federal government intended for COVID relief? How was that money spent? Since 2012, student enrollment in the district has declined from 5,160 students to a current 3,705 students. One would think that a more than 1/5th reduction in students would mean a comparable reduction in school administrators, teachers and auxiliary staff. Has this occurred?

Where have these students gone? It appears that the parents of kids have chosen to send them to charter schools, private schools or have decided to homeschool them. Why would so many parents make this switch if they thought that PUSD provided their children with a quality education? In 2003, PUSD spent almost 63% of the budget on instruction. Now they only spend 55%. So, how are our students doing academically? Their proficiency in English is an average of 36%. Math proficiency is 33%.

So with a dwindling enrollment, with less than stellar proficiency scores, with little transparency on how the federal money, state money, school sales money and bond money has been spent, should the taxpayers be asked to throw more money at what looks like a failing school system?

A special thanks to former Governing Board member, Linda Conn, for providing much of the information in this column.