Public Schools: Starving? (Hardly.)
Teacher pay and other education spending are supposed to dominate the upcoming short session at the General Assembly. For months, we’ve been pounded by stories like this one – mainly generated by educrats and other lefties talking to mainstream media sycophants — alleging that North Carolina public schools are being “starved.”
Starved. Really? Seriously? I’d like to bounce those allegations off of language in documents possessed by educrats within our very own Moore County Public Schools bureaucracy:
[…] Total expenditures increased by $11.1 million when compared to the prior year with the increase being primarily attributable to increased personnel costs and program related expenditures due to the increased Federal and State funding. Further there was significant capital outlay expenditures for various school-wide projects for facility improvements. […]
Increased funding ???? But Bill Barber and his homies have been telling us …..
The comparison in the above quote is between FY 2012-2013 and FY 2013-2014. That $11.1 million spending increase — mind you — was for ONE out of North Carolina’s ONE HUNDRED counties.
Those “increased personnel costs” are likely tied to all of those new assistant superintendents — who seem to have been added on a monthly basis here in Moore County.
The Moore County school board, the educrats and their cronies in the community are getting ready to hit us with a bunch of boo-hoo sob stories about how there is not enough money for ‘tha chil’ren.’ They are going to be asking for yet another bond issue — permission from the taxpayers to take on more debt.
How responsible is it to give them even more money when so much of what they already have is being held hostage at the central office / bureaucracy level?
School central offices are the big sinkhole of education money. They need someone to take a meat ax to them, and send the money to the frontlines, out in the actual schools, instead. To do that you need courageous school board candidates who can stand up to school bureaucrats.
It’s not about money. I taught for several years in a Title 1 school and we had everything we needed. A resource room with boxes and boxes of unopened teaching materials and it got bigger every year. I think title one schools get extra money to spend so our curriculum coordinator would dutifully spend it. Also, the millions in free after school tutoring paid with tax money. As a teacher, I was hired by a tutoring company to teach my own students in my classroom after school. And the students received free snacks and a bus ride home. Also, we had mountains of donated supplies. Local churches etc. would donate truckload after truckload of every school supply imaginable. At Christmas the students would receive gifts donated by churches and salvation army. Most kids didn’t have to pay for field trips or lunch. Free breakfast was also provided and when I left teaching they were starting a new program that would send food home on the weekends. The Salvation Army also provided free afterschool daycare. And the millions we spend on testing. To what end? Why don’t we stop all this standardized testing and give raises to the teachers? If the schools are broke how can we afford to spend so much on testing and wasted testing materials?
The schools really are starving. All the schools in my district have to share the same basketball. That means that all games must be scheduled so that the ball will be available for that game. Then the ball is rushed to the next school for the game if fuel is available to run the activity bus. Some buses have to be pushed from school to school because there is no fuel. I went to one school where the second half was played in the dark because the school did not have enough money to pay the electric bill.
I wonder why when the schools are in such dire straits that they continue to fund high school athletics. That is the mystery.
So much BS in that story, I couldn’t even begin to start.
That’s nothing. Our school only had one intercom speaker. We would have to take the speaker from room to room during the morning announcements so by the time every homeroom heard them, it was time to go home. Never got to teach anything!
This school system also seems to have about a 14 million dollar fund balance. With that kind of cash laying around, Moore County Schools could hire at least 15 to 20 more Assistant Superintendents. You can never have enough of those.