Feeling
like a political pawn: Cris Zaffuto, acting president of CSEA Local 828, which
represents all city school nurses and nurses’ aides.
Christine
Carrie Fien
Seventy-seven
pink slips
by
Christine Carrie Fien
It’s
about borrowing at a lower versus higher interest rate. It’s about pushing
expenses into the future. It’s about 77 pink slips.
And somewhere Mother Jones’ son
wonders who is going to bandage his boo-boo come April 1.
They sure made a lot of noise, but
in the end, county lawmakers were unable to keep the city school district
nursing program going. The nurses have traditionally been funded by the county.
First, former County Executive Jack Doyle fixed it so the funding ended at the
end of this school year. Then the Republican caucus in the county lej further
gutted the program, and pink slips for 77 nurses and nurses’ aides went out
last Friday.
“We zeroed it out,” says Republican
Majority Leader Bill Smith. “We had to plug a $42 million hole in the budget.”
Nearly everyone — politicians and
nurses included — believes that the nurses will be reinstated; that some form
of private funding will kick-in to re-establish the program by September. But
all the rallies, press conferences, personal pleas, and finger-pointing were
unable to stop the pink slips from flowing.
You could
almost see this
coming. A week before releasing his 2004 budget proposal last October, Doyle
held a “better-brace-for-the-bad-news” press conference. Doyle circulated a
sheet blaming lej Democrats for $4.8 million in cuts to various programs,
including school nursing. It was the Dems’ fault, he said, because they shot
down the county’s attempt to issue bonds to make state-mandated payments for
retirement and pension costs.
Democrats have rejected the bond
proposal three times.
“We believe that it is not fiscally
prudent to take a county that’s broke and borrow another [$21 million],” says
Minority Leader Stephanie Aldersley. “You have to pay it back. It’s not found
money.”
“It’s really a ‘spin’ kind of
situation to tell people that this was about nurses and the Democrats are
against nurses,” she adds. “We very much want to see the nurses funded… But we
believe that the money is there in the budget without doing this borrowing.”
Democrats wanted the county to take
$500,000 from its contingency fund to extend the nursing program to the end of
the school year. The fund has been used in the past to study algae bed patterns
in Lake Ontario and to pay for a portrait of Doyle.
“Have there been expenditures from
the contingency fund in past years for things that don’t seem terribly
important? Yeah,” Smith says. “But, first of all, we’re talking about
relatively small amounts. We’re not talking about $21 million.”
The county needs the $1.5 million in
the contingency fund this year, says Lej President Wayne Zyra, to offset
projected state revenue hits estimated so far at $7 million.
“Secondly, we’re still in the
process of closing out last year’s books. Even though you could say there is
$1.5 million, in reality, we don’t know it’s there. You could have additional
costs coming through from last year that could totally wipe that contingency
out.”
There are two
ways to
make the pension payments: borrow the money from the state comptroller or issue
bonds. The latter solution would save the county, Republicans say, $2.8 million
this year and about $858,000 over the five-year life of the bond. Everything
else, Smith says, is just a smokescreen.
“Stephanie is dancing all over the
place trying to avoid one central fact: the choice is between borrowing at a
high interest rate from the comptroller or borrowing at a lower interest rate,”
he says. “It’s not a choice between borrowing or not borrowing.”
Why should the county shell out
$500,000 to fund the nurses, Smith asks, when it can use savings achieved by
the bonding to fund the program?
“We could do [$500,000] for the
nurses and still be over $2 million ahead of the game for this year,” he says.
Caught in the
middle are
the nurses and nurses’ aides, and the city school kids themselves.
“We really feel like we’re the
political pawns in all this. We’re in the middle of this tug-o-war,” says Cris
Zaffuto, acting president of CSEA Local 828, which represents all city school
nurses and nurses’ aides. “The worst part is that this is so stressful on the
employees.”
There is an unspoken belief in the
community, Zaffuto says, that somebody will do something and nurses will remain
in city schools. If that doesn’t happen, she says, watch out.
“That’s when you’re really going to
see the public go bananas,” she says. “Don’t you think it’s time?”
In some cases, school nurses are
city school students’ primary health-care providers. Rochester, according to
the state ed. department, is the neediest of New York’s Big Five school
districts.
“There’s a lot of kids with a lot of
problems in the schools. We deal with the whole child: mind, body, and spirit,”
Zaffuto says. “It’s difficult to think that these kids are going to go
without.”
This is for
that guy in Fairport who asked Zaffuto why his taxes should pay for city school
nurses: The nurses and aides were public health employees working for the
county health department, not the city school district.
“If we had an ice storm tonight and
there was a need for shelters, we were the first people that they would call to
open shelters,” Zaffuto says. “They did last year [during the ice storm], as a
matter of fact. People do not realize that.”
“The school health program makes up
two-thirds of the health department employees.”
And it’s not only city school nurses
who lose. Once the pink slips went out, a “bumping” process started within the
county health department. If the school nurses and aides have seniority, under
Civil Service law, they may “bump out” less senior nurses and aides in other
divisions, such as the foster clinic, disease control, and immunizations.
“They would… see how many positions
are left and who has the most seniority to stay as an employee in the county,”
Zaffuto says. “They look at the big picture, the whole thing.”
This article appears in Feb 25 – Mar 2, 2004.
