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Memo to Sacramento: hands off public education |
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Friday, 09 May 2008 |
The Mammoth Unified School District is playing out an all-too familiar scenario for public education in America today.
After the California legislature took away local funding for education, passing all the tax revenues through the state Capitol in the quest for equalized school funding, school district after school district found itself facing unsolvable financial issues.
The state — and if you look around you’ll realize it’s every state playing this shell game with public education — finds itself in a financial bind and slashes public education money.
They’ll cite the need for belt tightening across the board, but they take flat amounts of money from every department. This becomes a crisis in school districts with stable or declining enrollment — read "rural school districts."
The spinout of this downhill slide for public education is a meeting like the one last week where the school is forced to decide where $350,000 of cuts will occur.
The choices are torture for administration, staff and students.
Pink slips have been sent to teachers already. That’s required even if the positions are somehow retained at a later date.
Programs with smaller participation are studied, and all of the programs that are not subject to state and federal testing are put on the block.
If you hated public education you couldn’t devise a better situation. If you championed vouchers, you couldn’t set the table any smarter...
Like $3 a gallon gasoline, we adjust. Remember when you thought $3 an outrageous price for a gallon? Seems cheap now, doesn’t it?
Parents paying for their children to participate in extracurricular activities such as “minor” sports seemed outrageous just a few years ago, but last week that was one of the first alternatives to cutting sports programs.
How long will it be before your school is forced to tell the physics students that their parents will have to pay the teacher?
The movement to privatize what we have known as public education is well under way while study after study indicates that the United States is backsliding in terms of academic excellence compared to other industrialized nations.
The problem is not in Mammoth, but the solution has to start in all the Mammoths as we clearly let our representatives in Sacramento know that sabotaging public education is not acceptable budgetary behavior.
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the Mammoth Times Editorial Board.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 15 May 2008 )
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