Schools struggling with fixed costs despite closure

‘It’s the economy, stupid!” was the epochal catch phrase for Bill Clinton’s 1992 United States presidential campaign against President George H.W. Bush. The expression was conceived by James Carville, one of Clinton’s campaign strategists and was hung up as a sign at the campaign headquarters as part of the key messages that the campaign team would harp against Bush’s performance in his first and only term as president, a term that had been marked by an economic recession.

The looming Covid-19-instigated global recession, with far-reaching implications for our own emerging Kenyan economy, provides a dastardly moral conundrum for governments today. From decisions about total versus partial lockdowns to decisions about which sectors of the economy should be opened by when are hard decisions to make as the consequences are debilitating to both human health as well as human economic well being concurrently.

Having sat on many discussions about how to force institutions to review academic fees, I have realised that we are now being forced to take into account what exactly it is we have been paying for all this time. In the time of our blissful pre-Covid existence, many of us paid school fees without ever trying to take cognisance of the inputs that went into arriving at the fees we were charged.

But in the current times where we are analysing our expenditure with a fine tooth comb, we are now forced to determine what is a must-have and what is a nice-to-have in our daily lives.

The costs of school fees include the critical component of staff salaries. By asking schools to shave off the costs in light of the current situation, largely due to the fact that parents are now taking over responsibility for the oversight of lessons, it can be viewed to be a justifiable ask. But looking at it from the schools’ point of view, the fixed cost of salaries still need to be paid. The uncommunicated representation from schools not reducing the fees is “Listen here, we need you to help us pay these salaries as these are human beings we are talking about.” Is that conscionable? Do we have to pay for people whose work has made the life of our children easier as we sit in our work places earning our daily bread?

As a silent observer on the multiple conversations taking place on fee reductions, I realise that many of us have taken a one-dimensional view of what we have been paying for. Why do we look at the school environment as only involving the teachers? There are multiple other players involved who ensure that the learning cogs are oiled for the smooth running of the institution. From cleaners to cooks and security guards to administrative staff.

The question we should be asking as parents is: are we responsible for the unseen background folks who are a critical part of the overall learning environment? An analogy can be drawn to a diner at a restaurant who orders a hamburger and only eats the meat patty, then when given the bill asks the waiter to remove the price of the hamburger bun because he didn’t eat it. But the hamburger was priced based on the total cost of the food inputs, as well as the staff who prepared it, the electricity, water, among others that are all required for the production of the meal. The sad fact of the current situation is that schools are now under fire for not reducing fees, but still have a significant fixed cost base to manage despite the fact that their principal product offering of academic learning has been greatly compromised. A number have taken loans to finance capital expenditure to build classrooms and other infrastructure to provide the very environment that attracts fee-paying parents and there are non-academic staff salaries to be paid.

So the current proposed legislation in Parliament to require employers not to terminate employee contracts and not to force employees to accept variations on the contracts with regard to salary reductions is something that should give every parent pause. These proposals, if they become law, will impact absolutely everyone not only in their personal capacity as employees at their work places, but also as fee-paying individuals for their beloved offspring.

At the end of the day what our legislators must keep in mind as they push their proposals is that taking a one-dimensional view of termination of employee contracts has significant ramifications for everyone including themselves. It is also imperative for parents to realise that what they have been paying for all this time is a wholesome learning environment rather than just teachers alone. Which makes the premise of home schooling even more attractive, assuming one has the luxury of time and patience to dedicate oneself to becoming the primary academic provider.