I spent last weekend at the Kuna Days fair peddling a free country. My booth was adjacent to the Kuna School District who was peddling a $6,380,000 tax increase coming up for a vote August 28th.
I handed out brochures that I paid for. It isn’t hard to imagine who paid for all of the photocopied materials the school district handed out.
I set up and staffed my booth both days with occsionaly relief and company of friends. A long series of teams, primarily school district employees, staffed the adjacent booth.
As requested by the organizers, I stayed in my booth and talked to people who stopped by and showed interest in the information I had displayed on the Constitutional Sheriff, Oath Keepers and Fully Informed Jury. The 4-6 people next door spent most of their time in the walkway confronting every fair-goer who came down the lane between booths. This takes attention away from all the rest of booths in the area, which is of course why the organizers ask us to NOT do it.
The school district was collecting name and contact information for those who committed to voting YES on the $6,300,000 tax increase. You see, as they patiently explained to those inclined favorably, “THEY make it hard to know when and where your polling places are. We will send a reminder to you just before the election and include your polling place information in it.”
Did you catch that? They couldn’t run this poll concurrent with the November 6th election where the polling places are well known, well publicized and most everyone in the area is fully aware of the election. THAT might skew the election away from the “YES” conclusion they want. The district wants more money, and the district gets to run the election, and the district is in charge of marketing the event, too.
What threat are they holding over the parents who are their vote-yes target-market? “If we don’t get this money, we will lose 25 teachers and have too large classroom sizes.”
Why would an institution charged with teaching children cut staff delivering the product that is their reason for existence, but not consider cutting salaries or positions of pure-overhead administrators at the giant district office?
Cut out the District Superintendant salary and benefits, and you can afford four more teachers. Cut out eight district-level executives and afford to keep all of the teachers. I doubt the remaining admin staff would fall apart in the vacuum, but suspect they wouldn’t spend their time scheming on running an annual levy-by-secret-ballot.
Eliminate the district staff altogether, convert their shiny-new building to that vocational education program they’ve dreamed of and the schools would still have budget residual.
Remind me please: Why it is that credentialed teachers who dedicated their college educations to learning how to teach their favorite subjects need administrative overhead to direct them in doing that? How many supervisors does it take to mop the floors and mow the lawns?
And, most significantly, 42% of our state and local spending goes to training our 5-17 year-olds to move from room to room in age-segregated packs at the sounding of bells where they memorize and recite information that a handful of book publishers assemble into nationally-standardized text books.
Let’s put that another way, we spend 42% of our state and local money on government-run schools for 20% of our population. That takes money away from feeding, clothing, housing them as well as the rest of the 80%. It also takes away from private schools, tutoring and freeing up time and money so that 20% could pursue things they would rather learn and do .. in schools and real-world-experiences that they and their families choose freely.
But, our district administrators insist $4,200,000,000 is not enough. What is?
…
Idaho state and local spending X $1,000,000,000 !!!
. . . . . . . . . . . state . . . local . .total
human srvc . . 2.0 . . . . . . . . . 2.0 . . . . . 20%
education . . . . 2.1 . . . 2.1 . . . 4.2 . . . . 42%
protection . . . , 0.3 . . . 0.7 . . . 1.0 . . . . 10%
nat resourc . . . 0.24 . . . . . . . . 0.24 . . . . 2%
econ devel. . . . 0.66 . . . . . . . . 0.66 . . . . 7%
government . . 0.29 . . . . . . . . 0.29 . . . . 3%
health care . . . . . . . . . . 1.0 . . . 1.0 . . . . 10%
transportat . . . . . . . . . . 0.5 . . . 0.5 . . . . 5%