Posted on 08/24/2009 6:14:34 AM PDT by Cheap_Hessian
HOUSTON (AP) - As a mother of two, Feleccia Moore-Davis is accustomed to the usual back-to-school swirl of new supplies, new clothes and new routines. But this year, that final flurry of summer is accompanied by an unusual worry.
Moore-Davis does not yet know how her children will get to school.
Last month, the financially pressed Houston-area school district her two daughters attend decided to end bus service for students living within two miles of schools. Now Moore-Davis is contemplating the bustling intersections and streets without sidewalks the girls would have to navigate if they walked to school, and wondering whether her own work schedule can be reconfigured for drop-offs and pickups.
It is a dilemma facing thousands of parents across the country, as cash-strapped school districts from California to Florida have cut bus routes to chip away at spending.
"I'm still trying to figure out how I will do this," said Moore-Davis, who has one daughter entering middle school and another entering high school. "My youngest is very concerned about who's going to pick her up. She keeps asking me about it."
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
What are screwell taxes for???? Heard sometime back if you cut out the middle administrative jobs in some of these screwell districts the savings would be more than enough to keep services going.
....it’s not safe for a child to walk to school now days...I feel sad for the kids and their worried parents.
Ohhhhh cry me a river. LOL
They should cut some administrators - the great and golden finale of the public school career track.
Houston ISD has 3.4 non-teaching employees for every classroom teacher. But they can't find the money for busses ?
How about firing some of those non-teaching parasites and hiring some bus drivers ? Oh, wait, can't do that. Those people are busy inventing new reports for teachers to fill out, conducting inservices on teaching techniques that have been proven worthless, like English as a second language, or "studying" new ways to make non-disciplinary methods functional.
And of course, even though they're not classroom teachers, they are members of the union, who fights to keep the parasites where they are.
Streets with no sidewalks, we had this problem.
To save money the county didn’t put in sidewalks when they widened or installed new roads. Now we have a ton of roads with no sidewalks.
If they had put in sidewalks, I wouldn’t have had a problem with my kids walking to shcool, but how the heck are they supposed to walk to shcool when there is noplace to walk.
Not putting in sidewalks is an area where they were penny wise and dollar foolish.
....and something else I forgot to mention....in our rural county the school system has had to cut the number of bus stops....so what happens is that the kids have to be car pooled down to the bus stop twice a day....I don’t know what some of these families would do if it weren’t for grandparents.
Isn’t Houston the school district that was making up social security numbers for foriegn teachers?
Try o get any bureaucracy to cut back. There are about as many general officers in the military today as back in WWII when we had 12 million people in uniform. But the public schools are much over-administered. The ratio of administrators to classroom teachers is about 1-10, which is about the same as officers to enlisted in the military. Yet all the teachers are college graduates. They shouldn’t require what amounts to close supervision. When he was education secretary, Bill Bennet dubbed school administration “the blob” because it ate up such a large proportion of federal funding. The trouble is that politicians are not likely to listen to such talk because school superintendents have lockers right next to them at the country club and next to them are the leaders of the teachers’ unions. The “Iron Triangle” has nothings on these guys, and we see the same things in state capitals. Even conservative Republicans mindlessly repeat the mantra, “our schools need more money.” That’s because school districts have cut all the kindergarten teachers and aides they can and want to hire a new asst. Superintendent.
And yet....
I’m sure they will find plenty of school buses to take football players and band members to 15 million dollar high school football stadiums every Friday night.
Just sayin’....
It seems every week Houston has some perv trying to get some poor little child going to or from school. Now with an even larger target rich environment..the pervs may be more successful. I wonder if there will be stories of parents having nervous breakdowns worrying about their children.
To be fair, the people who teach students how to play football are at least getting the job done.
Unlike the people who are supposed to teach the students how to read and write.
I’ve seen the income data on these school admin. folk.
It is likely similar to the military: about 5x to7x (or more) the income of a starting teacher.
The numbers used to astound me, until I saw some of their benefit plans. They are beyond anything offered by any government or company. They tag along with union bargained benefits for that district, even though admin is non-union.
Terrible, but terribly true!
What a mess.
Cry me a freaking river.
I question the utility of teaching kids how to play football in an era when they can't even teach them how to read. These districts are building stadiums when they can't even supply students with books.
They certainly have their priorities pretty whacked.
Screw up and take a lap.
Come in last in a test and take a lap.
Succeed or fail, and there's no excuse for failure.
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