When the Madison School Board passed its budget this spring, there were none of the furrowed brows, exasperated sighs or economy-sized bottles of anti-depressants you would normally see at a budget hearing. There were only a few members of the public who exercised their right to speak at the board, and most of them were fairly low-key, as there weren’t really any notable programs or services on the chopping block.

Afterward, I spoke briefly with board member Marj Passman, a vivacious retired schoolteacher with a New York accent that flares up when she’s excited or angry. She described the budgeting process as a “dream” made possible by a 13-million dollar multi-year referendum passed overwhelmingly by voters to stave off further cuts on top of the 35-million slashed from the budget in five years. She kept saying it was surreal, and she expected someone to tell her it wasn’t going to be that easy at any moment.

Then last month, the state legislature told Passman and hundreds of school districts statewide, “Nope, it ain’t gonna be that easy.”

Facing an unprecedented 6.6-billion dollar budget shortfall courtesy of a recession that’s ruining everone’s friggin’ decade, state lawmakers carved their spending plan up like a Thanksgiving turkey, looking for the quickest, most painless ways to make the cuts. Doing much of their work behind closed doors so the concerned parties couldn’t get a clear picture of what was in store for them, they opted to cut drastically from what’s known as “shared revenue” funds, basically a big pot of state tax money that gets passed on to counties, cities and school districts to help them foot their bills.

School districts get money from the state in two main chunks — a flat per-student dollar amount, as well as a piece of general shared revenue that’s calculated based in part on the district’s expenditures and tax revenue. When districts got wise to the impending cuts to their already carefully constructed budgets, they were told the per student fee would be cut slightly, and they could expect up to a ten percent cut to their general shared revenue — dire news to be sure. They began to plan for the worst.

And then, when the governor finally signed the budget, they got worse than the worst as the state meted out 15 percent general shared revenue cuts to around 100 districts, according to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad, marking the second time in as many months many of those districts had the fiscal carpet yanked out from under them.

Nerad presented the Madison school board with a finely-calculated assessment of their financial predicament for the first time at a committee meeting tonight, and he made it apparent why most of his colleagues call him “Doctor Nerad.” Watching him deliver the news was like watching an oncologist give a patient his biopsy results. The district will be losing out on about 3-million dollars in per-student funding, and a colon-socking 9-million in general aid.

The biggest kicker of the evening was learning what prompted the 15 percent cut in general state aid when Madison and so many schools had been told not to expect any worse than 10. It turns out, the paper-pusher who calculated those estimates had been using data that was a year old. Since Madison tried last year to minimize the referendum’s impact on taxpayers by cashing in on several million dollars of TIF money (a complicated process that allowed them to infuse the money into the budget in a one-time deal), both their revenues and expenditures were bumped into a higher Department of Public Instruction bracket for the year, resulting in the aid cut.

With bombshells like that dropping, it’s not surprising the mood in the room tonight was 180-degrees different from last spring’s budgeting session.

“I know and I appreciate that you and (Superintendent) Dan (Nerad) have to be calm and deliberative and patient,” Passman told Assistant Superintendent Erik Kass with a pained grin, “but I’m angry. I’m very angry. Our government has once again helped to destroy education in this state. Our children are going to suffer. They’ve been suffering all along anyway, and I am just plain angry about this… it’s apalling, and coming from a Democratic legislature and a Democratic governor, it’s even more apalling.”

Passman’s outrage is nothing new or alien, as she and many of her colleagues have long been pushing for the state legislature to re-imagine the one-two death punch funding mechanisms of revenue caps and the qualified economic offer. But it was a little shocking to see her turn her guns on the state’s Democrats. Then again, I’d be a little miffed too if somebody handed me the fiscal equivalent of a donkey punch after I’d settled comfortably into a well-planned budget.

As Nerad, Passman, Arlene Silveira, Lucy Mathiak, Johnny Winston Junior, Beth Moss, Ed Hughes and Maya Cole see it, the state government is trying to get away with the biggest case of passing the buck this century. Faced with the unpopular choices of raising taxes or cutting services, lawmakers chose to cut a source of funding that many schools count on, knowing full well there are provisions in state law that allow schools to raise property taxes beyond their revenue caps when a state funding source is cut.

So now it’s up to the schools to be the bad guys. Nerad says his office is working on a plan to dig out of the hole, and with the options of fiscal finagling, furloughs, program cuts and tax increases in front of him, the only thing that isn’t on the table is firing staff. Apparently, while state lawmakers were taking their own sweet time with their budget, the contractual deadline for layoffs in the Madison School District elapsed.

In other words, like most budget plans, it’s sure to piss plenty of people off. So much for Marj Passman’s dream.