“I would think that the qualified parents with the most kids (more little Catholics!) would get first crack at the teaching positions that come open.”
As I pointed out, even if EVERY teaching position were given to a parent of a student, typically, that would only take care of perhaps 6% of the families in a school. There are more families than that with more than three or four children.
However, the strength of many of the Catholic schools in this area is that a significant percentage of their faculty have been there for a long time. Thus, for a school to maintain this strength, even fewer families could be accommodated by hiring one of the parents. Perhaps 2% - 3%. The rest are out of luck.
“And tuition is ALWAYS a burden, especially with paying all the inflated public school taxes too. That's why we moved to a county with lower school tax millage rates (and a very favorable sliding scale on taxes for older citizens, a category we are approaching more rapidly than we like).”
That's nice. My county is a “low-tax” county in Maryland, comparatively speaking. I still pay $5,000 in property taxes (if I owned a house of similar value one county over, my property taxes would be $10,000 - $16,000), and the top income tax rate is over 8%. And, of course, we also now have a 6% sales tax. And our real estate recordation fees and transfer taxes are among the highest in the nation.
Until you get out to the far exurbs of Pennsylania or West Virginia, or southern Virginia, Washington, DC is a very expensive place to live.
“If your employees showed you how they could have the work covered and have the necessary staff on call without hiring more folks (or maybe with having the ladies with children at home job-share) you might go for it.”
If they could square a circle, I'd go for that, too. The difficulty for us is that we see clients every day and do work on their sites, and clients like to be seen between 9 am (8 am at the earliest) and 5 pm. Many of our clients won't have us in before 8 am or 9 am, and many won't let us stay after 5 pm or 6 pm.
Thus, it's really tough to get 10-billable-hour days out of our work.
As well, it's a lot tougher to respond to emergency calls when we have fewer staff available each day of the week.
Although no one formally "telecommutes," many tasks can be done remotely, and thus, staff members are free to work from home when they can. But it is tough to schedule an entire day at home, and it's even tougher to create schedules and routines around remotely-performed tasks.
sitetest
We are a nest of paper-shufflers over here, and you can shuffle paper pretty much anywhere.
Sounds like they are taxing you pretty much to the limit. I thought City of Atlanta was bad, but clearly they are amateurs in this area! (You have a COUNTY income tax??!!?)