Changing Demography and Your Future

I am active in town government because I believe all politics is local. It doesn’t seem to matter if the decision is made by Congress, President Obama or our town’s local Board of Selectmen; if it affects me it is local. I feel that I have a responsibility to do my part to insure that good decisions are made. I do believe that the good people in power out number the bad and that the system of federal, state and local government that our forefathers put in place, works. Our forefathers knew that there would always be bad people. However, from my perspective one of the biggest enemies to government is bad information. Good decisions made for the wrong reasons quickly become bad decisions.

Far and away the largest part of any local town budget is always education, schools. It often accounts for eighty-percent and more of the allocation of property tax and property tax is the principal source of funding. In our town of Haddam, Connecticut the Board of Finance holds the purse strings but the real power is wielded by the Board of Education because that’s where the money is spent. The Board of Education has tremendous power, but they don’t always have good information.

I recently attended a Board of Education meeting in our beautiful new $40 million dollar middle school (6th, 7th & 8^th grades). The chair of the meeting was reviewing some unexpected savings in the overall budget resulting from the drop in oil prices and the fact that two fewer kindergarten teachers would be needed for the 2009/2010 school year. I asked why we needed fewer kindergarten teachers and the chair explained that kindergarten enrollment had unexpectedly dropped by twenty-five percent under what had been budgeted. I asked him why there was a drop in enrollment and he stated that it might have something to do with the fact that new housing starts in our town had ground to a halt. That might have something to do with it, but it is not the real reason. I knew that this unexpected drop in enrollment would be played out in towns across the United States and that the inverse, unexpected increases in kindergarten enrollment would also catch thousands of towns by surprise. Why? Because the nation’s demography is shifting, really shifting. While I still had the floor I asked if this reduction in enrollment continues, would we need this new school in eight years? The answer was no. But, hey, it was only $40 million dollars.

Good decisions require good information. 2007 was a record year for live births (4,317,000) in the United States according to Census Data released in July 2008. In fact it broke a fifty year record set in 1957 (4,300,000) at the height of the Baby Boom. The United States is currently the only industrialized nation that has fertility above the 2.2 children per couple replacement level. 2007’s live birth numbers hold significant clues to our Nations future demography and our future overall. Twenty-five percent of the 4,317,000 births were Latino. Latinos make up about fourteen percent of our overall population so it is clear to see where our nation’s population growth is coming from. Let me be very clear here. This fact regarding Latino births bodes very well for our country. Without a replacement level fertility countries do not remain strong for very long. Our future is bright, but we have many challenges ahead. Latinos are not yet geographically diverse. The Nation’s Southern and Western states have high concentrations of Latinos while the Mid-West and Northeast states have relatively few. This translates into significantly fewer live births where you have fewer Latinos.

Both of the Latino families that live in Haddam, Connecticut cannot balance out the drop in live births in our region. Our town is going to need to rethink our school budget to allow for fewer students and fewer teachers. On the surface this may sound good because the amount of tax necessary to run things should be less. Below the surface this is a disaster waiting to happen because long term these kids that we didn’t have will translate into a workforce that we can not tap.

Life is complicated. Stay tuned.