[RLM]

No surprises here. If you’ve ever had business dealings with school districts, you quickly learn that school administrators are not the brightest lights on the string. Most have been promoted from teaching positions in a K-12 classroom where they gained most of their business experience, and it shows. Board members typically don’t have any business experience either, and many are also school teachers or administrators. When we were actively involved in school construction 15 to 20 years ago, a very nice elementary school would typically cost $7 million. Now the cost for a similar size school costs three or four times that amount. There is no logic to what they do. One of the later schools where we shared in the construction even has a glassed-in elevator in a small atrium, something like a high end hotel. That school cost somewhere around $30 million. Clearly the cost of K-12 school has far outpaced the rate of inflation, partly attributable to state regulations, and partly attributable to school boards and administrators that lack basic business sense.

[SkyDancer]

That’s one heck of a vig. to pay.

[FlingWingFlyer]

“Help us Obama! Save us!”

[twister881]

One of the Poway Unified school board members who helped create the $1B mess had the hubris to run for city council. He tried to distance himself from the actions of the board...he was trounced in the election.

[CriticalJ]

Conservatives and education reformers have not done the voucher movement any favors by ignoring the financial impact of vouchers. They always want to concentrate on quality of education, which is important, but the fail to bring up the cost savings.

If it cost a state 10k per year to education a student, a 5k voucher nets the state 5k for every student who leaves. Fewer students in the system means fewer employees so fewer benefits and salary. Fewer students means fewer buildings and no need to build more facilities. Fewer students means less busing.

Finally, vouchers would be an economic boon for construction. As it gained momentum, schools would be built or existing buildings converted to schools (a potential good use for derelict shopping centers).

[BigBobber]

Big time investors and banks are in bed with the government. Nothing new here. The school district gets a new building, the banks get a huge profit, and we all get stuck holding the bill.

[CurlyDave]

Ramsey says it was a good deal, because his district is getting a brand-new $25 million school. "You'd take that any day," he says. "Why would you leave $25 million on the table? You would never leave $25 million on the table."

I used to get similar offers every month when the economy was better. Offers of credit card balance transfers, offers of second mortgages, all kinds of stuff like that. "Free" money now and repay through the nose later. The repay part was always in the fine print.

Unlike the school district, I knew that these were a trap and I shredded them.

[SkyPilot]

For the last few decades, the liberals in the Education mafia have complained:

"See! The military gets all this money, and education does not get enough government aid!"

What a lie. In truth, our government is heading toward collapse in part because of the education mafia. We guanantee those Trillions in student loan debt - that King Bath House Barry wants to "forgive" in whole or in part. Those Trillions have kept colleges and universities in clover. That's why they can afford to pay "Diversity Chairwomen" mid and high six figure salaries. Moreover, colleges and universities can just raise their tuition every year because that just means more government backed student loans, and more for the greedy education mafia.

Not to mention out of control property taxes at the state level that feed the school union Thugocracy. Here in New Jersey, a modest, but decent home now commands five figures in annual property taxes, which the schools immediately rip off the top to the tune of 68%.

Oh, and the Billions spent at the Federal level for the Dept of Education, which has seen its budget rise 400% since Reagan left office.

Communism didn't die. It flourishes in America's education establishment.

[vette6387]

“No surprises here.”

You’ve “broken the code!” The problem with “public education” is “public educators.” School superintendents are the country’s highest paid “migrant workers.” And as far as school boards are concerned, with them “it’s all for the children” never mind the costs involved.
We had “fiscal problems” here where I live ( in the same county as the West Contra Costa School District mentioned in the article). Our superintendent “resigned and was immediately hired by the City of Berkeley ( lets you know where he stood politically), and we had two (not one but two) immediately successive unexplained fires at our ed center which destroyed all the pertinent records surrounding the superintendent’s financial misdeeds.
My wife and I were PTC presidents during our kids sojourn though the PS system and were actually personally threatened by the then superintendent because we were proposing to provide noon duty supervision at the PTC’s expense and he didn’t like the idea. What I told him at the time cannot be printed here.

[RetiredTexasVet]

Why all the squawking? It’s the socialist way. Live it up now on your grandchildren’s dime.

[Logical me]

Schools = Unions. Unions are controlled by the worst corruption America has ever seen. Shadow government will destroy much of America.

[CodeToad]

The old MBA 3/5 plan: A plan doomed to fail in 5 years but the authors take a bow and are out in three to a hero’s farewell. Anyone that could do basic math knew the plan only kicked the can down the road and doomed the school district.

[ltc8k6]

Didn’t the citizens of California vote to approve these bonds?

[RightField]

If you’ve ever had business dealings with school districts, you quickly learn that school administrators are not the brightest lights on the string.

I have to relate again my observations of a principal, several years ago, at a high school not too far from Poway High, although in a different district. When his district was opening a new high school, which would relieve overcrowding in his high school, he made a fervent pitch to the parent "foundation" to raise even more money than they had in prior years. I was in a meeting where he said words to the effect that, "We will not get the state funding that we have had in previous years, so we are looking to The Foundation to make up as much of the short-fall as possible."

Now, his enrollment was going to drop by about 40% the following year because those students would be going to the new high school. Not one person in that meeting suggested to him that perhaps his school didn't need as much money as before, because they wouldn't have as many students the next year.

He has since been promoted to higher office within the district.

[SaraJohnson]

This debt episode in the US is a moral tale of the afterath of a people culturally cleansed of it’s history, morals, values and virtue by fly by night, worldly city slicker limo liberals.

We have devolved into a society in which American cultural common sense is denounced as mean spirited, greedy, unsophisticated and uneducated. Leftists denounced it as “acting white.” In addition, globalism has devolved America’s business ethics to that of a mob boss predator running a pay day loan shark operation in a Chicago ghetto.

Polticans fed both the voter’s mindless greed and envy for immediate gratification and the loan shark’s greed. They did it for power and money and politicans on both sides of the aisle served the insanity of both contigencies - voters with no moral intellegence and business interests with no ethics.

It has to collapse. The loan sharks are the ones who should be left holding the bag of the scams they invested in. If we want anything to change, the limo-liberal scam artists at the top of the lending institutions should be made to poney up their ill gotten gains to offset some of the losses they caused to their financial institutions and investors.

We need laws making it possible for people who can do math to sue to halt politicans and business interests who are making criminal loan deals. The penality of the government represenatives involved in losing law suit halting a loan scam should be removal from their offices and jobs. The States, towns and cities should be made bankrupt with terms that they pay back a reasonable amount for the loans their politicans took on.

[deadrock]

Every school district should get a 2 trillion dollar coin. Prob solved.