This has been a long gap between posts, and for that I apologize; in my day job, I had to build out a new web site this week. But I used my fragmentary downtime productively, reading both Portsmouth School and Town budgets carefully, and here's the first bizarre tidbit: we spend 7 times more educating our Police than we do our teachers.

In the Town budget for the upcoming year, as tentatively approved by the Town Council, the Police have $37,200 for continuing education. For a force of about 39, that works out to $953 per person.

The Portsmouth School Department, with 214 FTEs, is budgeted for 26K in tuition reimbursement and 3K for conference travel, or $29,000. That's $135 per teacher.

Now this is not truly apples-to-apples, because there are teacher in-service days, which are difficult to tease out of the budget numbers. Although the Police get an additional $12,000 for similar training not counted in the above numbers. And yes, I admit that the personnel costs of teacher in-service are likely to dwarf the continuing ed number. I'm making a point here, okay?

[Update: Please see the first comment below for why the following analysis is suspect-jm] And there's also this interesting statistic — for both the Police and Fire departments, benefit expenses represent a higher percentage of wages than teachers. Benefits for the Portsmouth School District represent 37% of wages for all employees; the budget doesn't break it out for teachers, but since their salaries are two-thirds of the budget, the percentage has to be in that ballpark.

Both Police and Fire have benefits that are around 70% of salaries. You can check the numbers yourself: Proposed Town Budget, PSD Budget (no link yet) available at Admin Building.

I'm clearly not saying this to question what we pay our police and firefighters. These people put their lives on the line every day, and as far as I'm concerned, we couldn't possibly pay them enough.

But when we get to the presentation of the School Budget next week, I want us to keep this in mind to balance some of the wild rhetoric about runaway pensions and medical benfits. Teachers are on the front line too; they are nurturing and creating our future, and I find the idea that we expect them to stay current on $150 a year — while we also ask them to buy their own classroom supplies and work unpaid overtime — unfair and insulting.