A couple of decades ago, my wife and I were on vacation in Oregon after Easter.
As we checked in the motel, teachers and teacher supporters were picketing the hotel re a speaker that evening.
The speaker had been a top exec for one of the computer breakthrough companies in what became Silicon Valley.
He retired and was spending his time and own money to wake voters up to how schools were ripping the tax payers off.
I attend his detested program that evening.
After he introduced himself he handed out a simple one page sheet that asked how many students were in each class on an average.
Say there was 30 students, so you filled in that number and entered the cost or funding per student per year and multiplied that by the number of students.
At that time the cost/funding per student in that school district was $5,000 per year.
Then you multiplied 30 students x $5000 for a yearly minimum cost. $150,000 per year per Classroom.
Then, you subtracted the teacher’s average yearly salary, which was $30,000 subtracted from the gross funding.
The extra left over cost was $120,000. Then, he subtracted $20,000 for custodial cost and other costs, which left $100,000 of funding left over per school year for each class.
His closing moment was a simple question,”Where in the hell is that $100,000 left over per classroom going?”
That defeated the so called necessary increases in teacher salaries, which was really spent on bloat from the top down.
About a year later, we had the same so called, “Our Teachers are starving and we need to increase taxes to pay for our starving teachers. A friend at a local service club asked me to present the one page sheet at the weekly meeting.
I had left this club a few years before, but the school principals and superintendents remembered me during the prop 13 wars. I handed out a sheet of paper to everyone showing how the property taxes on our previous Cul de Sac home had basically tripled due to my company buying our previous home. That increase would have forced most retirees in our old neighbor to sell their homes and leave.
This newest work sheet was used in at all service clubs to beat back another raise for the poor teachers and students.
Of course the liberals never give up trying to raise our taxes to help the “Chilrun”.
Pretty sure it's closer to $15,000 in New York.
You wouldn’t be inclined to post a link to such a handout?
That sounds like a simple and lethal way to defeat such antics.
I live in the People’s Soviet of Washington, where the tax is as high as an elephant’s eye.
My town just got a new School Superintendent. She is going wild hiring personal friends from a nearby town where she used to work. Our school interviews a variety of job candidates (of course) but lately everyone who is hired for an administration post always comes from that one particular school system a few towns away. Weird, huh?
By the way, our School Superintendent has an assistant. I think that makes sense. But it’s interesting that the assistant has an assistant. And I’m not sure this is true, but someone told me that Superintendent’s assistant’s assistant has an assistant.
Oh, and we’re cutting teaching positions pretty drastically. No one can figure out where the heck the money is going, but the budget for actual education is completely dried up around here.