School board leaders across Alabama pushed back this week on proposals to delay the start of the school year until late August as a way to generate additional tourism revenue for education, arguing that the numbers behind the idea were unreliable, especially with the Gulf oil spill hammering the coast.
A study under fire
Sally Howell, executive director of the Alabama Association of School Boards, took direct aim at a 2009 study that claimed the state could reap millions of dollars by pushing the school calendar later so families and visitors could spend more of August at the beach.
“The 2009 study claiming Alabama could reap millions by starting school later reads a lot like BP’s disaster recovery plan,” Howell said. “It is full of gaps, guesses and errors, not to mention its assumptions were made before the economic downturn and largest environmental disaster in U.S. history. Those assumptions are as damaged as Alabama’s waters and coastlines. If we go down this path and budget phantom numbers, we’ll be in proration. That’s the last thing schools can afford.”
She urged legislative leaders to replace the outdated, tourism-sponsored study with a reliable, thorough and current cost-benefit analysis. “We need to look at all revenue options and the educational impact on students and families,” she said, “but the premise that we can get more people to our ravaged beaches than came when they were in optimal condition is faulty at best.”
The oil spill factor
The timing of the debate was impossible to separate from the crisis unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. Tourism officials were already reporting declines as the spill fouled beaches and scared off visitors, yet the tourism study claimed revenue gains premised on an increase in beachgoers.
Howell warned that schools were facing an economic crisis expected to intensify in 2011 and 2012, and that the disaster had only made matters worse. “The BP situation has served only to hasten and deepen that crisis,” she said. She added that she hoped and prayed the Gulf Coast would recover quickly and tourism would rebound.
The calendar math
Beyond the revenue questions, Howell pointed to a practical flaw in the logic of a later start: schools that begin later also end later. “What you gain in August, you lose in June,” she said, noting that regardless of start and stop dates, students are required to spend 180 days in school each year.
“We aren’t creating more time for more vacations,” Howell said. “Families fortunate to enjoy a beach vacation usually can only afford one per year. Most folks don’t take a second vacation just because school starts later in August.”
She characterized the renewed push as an old campaign dressed in new clothes. “It is unfortunate and ill-conceived that the tourism and summer camp industries are using the current crisis to repackage their age-old attempt to set the school calendar based on purported benefits to schools,” Howell remarked.
For South Alabama, the stakes were especially close to home. The region’s schools depended on the same state education budget that the calendar proposal claimed to bolster, and its beaches were the very shores the spill had put at risk. Howell’s argument, in essence, was that betting the school calendar on a tourism rebound that had not materialized, and might not for some time, risked leaving classrooms shortchanged. She called instead for a clear-eyed accounting of the costs and benefits before any change was written into law.