The Finance Subcommittee of the Portsmouth School Committee met with the principals of the three elementary schools tonight to hear firsthand the effect of the proposed elimination of school nurse, counselor, and librarian positions across Elmhurst, Hathaway, and Melville.

"It's critical that the voters know the impact," said Christina Martin of Hathaway. "Quite honestly, I don't want to talk about it," said Melville Principal Joan Olson. "It's cutting at the meat of what we do. It will directly impact what kids learn."

But they did talk about it, and spoke quite eloquently (as did the dozen-or-so members of the community and the school department who attended) about the risks (physical, mental, and educational) when you cut staff so deeply that key service delivery positions have to rotate among schools.

Bob Ettinger, principal of Elmhurst, reviewed the numbers being proposed, which for everything except staff at the three schools was a "level services" budget, meaning level funding plus a standard 3% cost-of-living increase.

Olson then delivered a detailed analysis of the impact of the proposed staffing cuts, which would mean sharing school nurses, counselors, and librarians among the three schools. The big picture: "I don't have a happy thing to say."

Without counseling, she warned, for those at risk, "You don't get TO the curriculum. It will mean more visits the principals, but not learning the appropriate skills for students to meet their needs." (Visits to busy principals who face a higher student ratio than, for example, Newport.) She looked at her colleagues. "Am I doing this okay?" "Get the incense and start swinging it," joked Dr. Martin. While we chuckled and maintained the polite fiction that the educators were preaching to the choir, (Finance chair Richard Carpender was quick to note that this wasn't a choice made willingly) the presence of Jaimey Heaney reminded some in the audience otherwise.

There has, indeed, been a paucity of HeaneyWatch™ opportunities recently. He's been quiet at meetings; tonight, he arrived late and left punctually, and the only thing he said (so I guess we have to award it HeaneyWatch™ status) was an admonition to the principals who wanted to get their message out: "I support doing the public access channel but not letters to the editor." TV good, print bad. Thank you Mr. Heaney. Dr. Postman will see you now.

Cutting a school nurse position poses even more dire, practical risks, Olson warned. "If you have only 2 nurses, you're always going to have a building uncovered." One potential solution would be to put all students with Individual Health Care Plans in one building, adding dislocation and potential stigma. But that still fails to address the scary scenarios: telling a benign fever from meningitis, as other RI communities faced this year. The risk of serious injury -- and, let's be clear, massive legal exposure -- is not something one would want to knowingly accept.

The librarian cut (or, as Dr. Martin said, we should "acknowledge what they do and call them media specialists") would "directly impact what kids learn,' said Olson, shuttering the libraries in each school 1 or 2 days per week. But more insidiously, removing a librarian means no computers: with previous cuts in IT positions, "we have no one in the building but the librarian" to support the laptop carts, train other teachers, and provide just-in-time coaching. In world where tech skillz are increasingly the only ticket to the high-stakes table, shortchanging our kids here seems like the stupidest possible choice we could make.

And not to put too fine a point on it, Olson argued that the proposed cuts would deny "Portsmouth students equal access to services which are provided in the poorest of communities."

Several parents and school staff spoke in support of retaining the positions. "Because we're not in classrooms," said one school nurse, "People don't understand what we do." I added a note of support for school librarians in particular. Okay, I'm a geek, but I cannot understand the wisdom of cutting technology education and support. I think it was Nick Negroponte who said that asking kids to share a computer in the classroom was like asking them to share a pencil. Forcing schools to share support for computers is like asking them to share a pencil sharpener.

Superintendent Lusi thanked the principals for their input and offered the larger context, these cuts, she said, pose serious risks to the skill and knowledge level demands imposed by No Child Left Behind and other mandates. Cutting counseling and nurse positions shift that burden to already fully loaded principals.

"Successful schools," said Lusi, "Have strong instructional leaders, and these cuts undermine our principals, their being visible, being in the classrooms, and having an ongoing dialog with teachers." While acknowledging the budget realities of next year's Paiva Weed tax caps, she pointed out that "Last year, we cut 12.3 positions. Now we face this tax cap with less to be reduced. The cap makes no allowance for where you start, whether you are first in per pupil expenditure, or where Portsmouth is, 35th out of 39 communities in the state."

Yay. A race to the bottom, courtesy of the PCC. Let's remember to thank them the next time we face the challenge of a troubled child, a meningitis outbreak, or our kids' jobs getting offshored to tech-savvy Malaysia.