DN Editorial: Nightmare and fog

SINCE HE arrived in June 2012, school Superintendent William Hite has had to live through a nightmare not of his own making.

He came to Philadelphia to help the schools. Instead, he has been forced to oversee a slash-and-burn operation, shedding thousands of jobs and services in a poor district that genuinely needs all the help it can get.

It seems no one wants to listen to Hite's earnest - and increasingly frantic - calls for help, certainly not among the political class, which controls the purse strings.

For months, Hite has sought to make the case that the district needs a minimum of $216 million more for the next school year - just to maintain the bare-bones operation left after the previous year's cuts.

There is no reason to doubt his credibility. Hite is an honorable and truthful man.

Last year, he made exactly the cuts he said he would make if the state and city were not forthcoming with enough money.

This year, he says he'll have to lay off up to another 1,500 employees and turn schools into empty shells - his words, not ours - unless the district gets the money it needs to operate.

Still, no action has been taken.

To begin with, the district is counting on revenue from a local one-point add-on to the sales tax to provide $120 million, and it has included that line item in its proposed budget as a given.

But it is not a given.

Council President Darrell Clarke has a plan to divert that money away from the schools, using it instead to pay down the huge deficit in the city's pension fund.

For a while, Clarke refused even to introduce the legislation needed to dedicate the sales-tax money to the schools, a move approved by the state Legislature last year.

Last week, he introduced a bill that was labeled a compromise by the Council president. It would give the district $120 million in the first year, but begin to shift money over to the pension fund until the split was 50/50 a few years from now.

We've already made it clear what we think of Clarke's original idea - he's trying to use 25 gallons' worth of solution to solve 50 gallons' worth of problems. Both the district and the pension fund need money, but the district's needs are dire and immediate.

Hite and School Reform Commission chair Bill Green oppose the compromise split because the schools need a dependable, stable source of funding - not one-shot fixes or a sum that is guaranteed to decline each year.

We oppose Clarke's "compromise" for the same reason.

Clarke's plan is a diversion from what should be the topic of the moment: funding the public schools. Delaying the transfer only increases the odds that the district will have to, once again, start a round of layoffs, transfers and the trauma that accompanies those moves.

Council and the Legislature have a number of steps they could take to provide the district with the money it needs.

This is not a time for diversions and delays. This is a time for action.

This nightmare must end.