The government has different priorities than its people, and it is hurting some of the most important professions in our country. It is hitting us hard in a time of vulnerability.
A friend of mine said the other day that a phrase to capture the year 2020 in a nutshell, so far, is “disappointed, but not surprised.” While this certainly rings true for a lot of difficulties we have faced thus far into the year, I would like to chime in as the token optimist and say that we have seen some good come from this year as well.
With the pandemic, we have seen positive stories of doctors and nurses being honored with tributes in the news. Young people across our nation are participating in a movement, and we are seeing change emerge from it. We also watched as teachers went above and beyond for their students in the transition to remote learning.
Change is on the horizon, but clouds seem to be getting in the way.
Last week, the school district I attended for most of my K-12 education announced a massive layoff of teachers and cuts to music programs. A dark change in tone, I know, but we need to face the facts too. The lack of funding resulted in 113 teachers losing their jobs, which in turn lead to teachers standing along main roads with signs to make sure the town is aware of these cuts to their children’s beloved educators and classes.
This is a new epidemic sweeping our nation’s schools, from K-12 education to colleges and universities. It is part of the lasting impact of the Great Recession of 2008, and experts predicted this hard hit to school districts at some point in 2020-2021. The pandemic just made it worse.
So, in addition to teachers already being underpaid (and expected to buy supplies out of pocket), the school districts are running out of money to even employ them. State and local governments across the country are hoping for a bail out bill to be passed by Congress, but the damage is already being done in districts like my own with the start of mass layoffs and cuts to music programs. In addition to the uncertainty of what the start of the 2020-2021 academic year will look like in the midst of a pandemic, this proves to be a recipe for disaster.
We saw similar uncertainty in the medical field, beginning back in March. If you can recall, nurses and doctors on the front lines of the pandemic were fighting the virus while wearing trash bags as scrubs and the same N-95 mask from the week prior with their names scrawled across them in ink. Ventilators were the subjects of bidding wars. Hospital workers said goodbye to families and to live in hotels and dorms. The CDC hesitated to recommend masks to the public to prevent the spread because of supply shortages.
Remember? This happened back when we weren’t pretending that the virus was a thing of the past.
Perhaps two of the most dedicated and important professions in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic - educators and medical professionals - were let down by funding issues. I am not arguing that funding is not deserved in other places and departments. However, I want to point out a source of frustration that I feel from the perspective of a humanitarian.
It's all too political, and lives are at stake.
We see a constant battle between political parties in Congress, trying to pass bills for their party and being blocked by the other. Rarely do we see bipartisan legislation in Congress, and even when the goal is the same, the details increase the length of time spent on the process. No matter your stance or political ideologies, you cannot argue the frustration of this - be it with the party you agree with or the opposing party. George Washington warned against political parties for this reason.
No matter who you blame for a lack of accomplishments by our government (from the perspective of the people who suffer from it) my point is this: it seems that members of our government currently struggle to prioritize, considering their positions as public servants.
It is a fact that Donald Trump charges members of the Secret Service to stay at his own hotels and resorts when he takes vacations to play golf. This means that taxpayer dollars are being spent on these vacations, and they are being spent in a way that Donald Trump gains financially. It is also true that there have been multiple attempts to investigate the spending of people close to the President. For instance, Donald Trump Jr. recently made headlines about costing taxpayers around $750,000 for a hunting trip in Mongolia. The list goes on, and there are still many trips for which the receipts have been released.
While I am well aware that Donald Trump is not the only President to have traveled with the Secret Service (which costs the people of the United States money) for recreational purposes, the number of vacations that the current First Family has taken in only 3 years is higher than average. In fact, it is about 12 times higher than that of the Obama family during Barack Obama’s time in office.
Why is any of this important?
Well, it seems to me that the spending of the current administration would likely cover the funding needed to prevent mass layoffs of teachers and provide hospitals with much needed PPE. All three of these jobs - President, teacher, and nurse/doctor - are considered service jobs. Their goal is to serve the people of the United States. However, it is baffling that the President is allowed to spend taxpayer dollars recklessly, while educators and medical professionals are barely making a paycheck to cover student loans while buying their own supplies for the benefit of the people they serve.
In addition to the President’s spending (not to mention other members of the administration), there seems to be a lack of priorities when it comes to funding other departments. Specifically, it is apparent that spending related to defense and law enforcement departments receive more funding.
For example, in the midst of teacher layoffs, an ongoing pandemic that has killed over 100,000 Americans, and protests against police brutality, Imigration and Customs Enforcement has been given the permission to spend $18 million on new tasers. While $18 million surely is not enough to prevent layoffs of educators entirely, it would be a first step. After all, it seems like the education of our nation’s children should be valued higher than tasers for ICE officers. However, the government’s priorities seem to fall on the side of violence - and the irony of asking protesters to do so peacefully while arming ICE officers and sending out police officers in riot gear seems backwards.
This brings me to my next point. Police departments are over-funded, especially in comparison to social services.
Let’s look at the New York Police Department as an example. In 2019, the budget for the NYPD was set at $6 billion (yes, billion with a “b”). In a comparison to other social services, we see that the budget for the NYPD is more than the budgets for the Department of Health, Homeless Services, Youth and Community Development, and Small Business Services combined. I want to acknowledge that Mayor De Blasio recently announced to cut the NYPD budget, but my point still stands because this was normal and acceptable to a majority of people in this country only a few weeks ago.
Compared to the $6 billion allocated to NYC’s Police Departments, the 2019-2020 budget for schools in New York City was only $34 million. It may seem like a large budget, but considering that there are more than 1,126,000 students, it ultimately breaks down to about $30 per student.
This is a prime example of the need to defund police departments.
Calls to defund police departments may seem startling for a lot of people, but when you view the facts through the perspective of priorities and responsibility, it doesn’t sound so aggressive.
Think of it this way: police officers are currently responsible for a wide variety of calls that may come into their department. On any given day, an officer may be required to respond to a motor vehicle accident, a medical emergency, a simple law violation, a domestic violence call, a lost child or pet, a traffic violation, or a suspicious person.
This means that, even though not every call is a reason to respond with a high level of caution, some calls - like a suspicious person or traffic violation - will still be responded to with a certain level of suspicion because of other calls an officer has already responded to. By adding in implicit bias based on skin color or dialect, this can be disastrous, just as we have seen over and over again in our country.
Instead of having one department respond to all of these calls, if we had various departments specialized in a given type of call to respond to, officers would have less of a risk in responding incorrectly to a call. In other words, instead of expecting a police officer with little-to-no de-escalation training to respond to a domestic violence call, a social worker who is trained to de-escalate the situation could respond instead - if backup is needed, they can call for it. Specialty departments allow for more specific training to each professional working to maintain public safety.
So, defunding police departments would actually provide support to some officers, particularly the “good cops” that people constantly defend as an argument against the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement. In terms of priorities, it would make the people in these communities feel safer and more valued, considering that funding would be redirected from police departments - that many people fear - to social services - that people and communities benefit from.
So, what should you take-away from all of this?
This issue is mostly in the spending. Between excessive funding for law enforcement and the President’s own spending, the country’s current crisis regarding a lack of funding for educators and medical resources could be healed (at least to an extent) in an ideal world.
My goal for this post is not to make a political statement (although I firmly believe we need to defund the police) but instead to bring to light some of the fundamental issues in the distribution of funding in the United States. As a future educator myself, I am biased, but I do believe that we need to prioritize the reallocation of funding for education to improve our country for generations. (Perhaps I will tackle that in a later blog post, though.)
I hope that my contribution to this ongoing dialogue about how to improve our nation and reassess its priorities was at least the slightest bit helpful. If anything, my goal is that, in offering my perspective, future conversations can open up about the ultimate goal of making the United States a better place for all people in the future.
The constitution was written to be improved, and it is time our nation lives up to the standards for progression set forth by the malleability of this document. It’s 2020.
Change is on the horizon.
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