The cost of gas, electricity, water, heating and groceries is going up. Most of our wages are not going up. We have to live within our means, we have to learn financial responsibility. Why don’t other organizations do the same?
It’s not that we don’t care about students, it’s just that taxpayers are sick of more Band-Aid proposals and wanting more and more of our money to solve long-term budgeting problems! It’s time to rethink the structure of how public education money is spent and to realize that until the government school system breaks out of its over-centralized, bureaucratized monopoly, levy proposals ad nauseam (and believe me, there will be more) will do nothing.
Every public school teacher worth their salt knows that the number one factor in determining a student’s success is the parents. Where are all the proposals suggesting we give more say and control to parents over their children’s education? (The silence is certainly deafening from the teachers’ unions, while their financial interests are quite obvious.) Instead it’s more standards, more time wasting, more inefficiencies while competition from private, parochial, charter and home schools is denounced with a startling fury.
Schools receive money from property taxes, federal income taxes, state income taxes, foundation grants, corporations, endowments, PTA/PTO fundraisers, year book sales, sales to sporting events/dances/concerts, sales of school rings, jackets etc., cookie/candy/soda sales, student activity fees, cafeteria fees and investments. Now they want to dip deeper into our wallets and force us, upon pain of fine, prison or property confiscation, to give more of our hard-earned money to their inept system. They exploit your guilty feelings of “this is for the children” in order to make you vote yes. Well, if you feel so terrible about the state of our schools, by all means send them a check to appease your guilt. I, however, will be voting no on the upcoming levies because I think throwing more money at a broken system is not enabling anybody.
Ellie Peck
Oak Harbor
