Today's troubles will bring lasting changes to public schools. You can blame the troubles on past and present school boards. They have no forethought when negotiating union contracts as to costs in the future. They put our schools in the present poor financial situations.
Salaries and pensions were put in an unsustainable position. Unions threaten to go on strike, closing schools, parents protest and school board members are afraid they will not get reelected, so they are pressured into ridiculous demands, by unions and parents. This, in turn, forces local school boards and administrators to run roughshod on local property tax payers. Now they try to shift the blame onto the state government, which finally is standing up to them. They are responsible for the situation in which they find themselves.
After all, who decided to build the Taj Mahal schools we have? Who decided to build the expensive sport complexes we have? Who decided to give the elaborate pension-benefit and salary packages the employees have? Surely it was not the average tax payer.
One thing to help schools with costs is they should be forced to get back to the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. This is not a bad thing as I remember it; this is what a high school education is all about.
Maybe the administrators and school boards need to look at where the average high school graduate in the united states ranks among the average high school graduates in other countries of the world. What kind of lesson does it teach our young people when the people responsible for getting us into this situation try to push the responsibility for it to somebody else? Maybe that no one needs to be accountable for what they do anymore.
William H. Baker
Trout Run
Submitted by Virtual Newsroom
